On epistemics, economies, and didactics of encyclopedia, wiki, and digital gardens.

Yesterday, while visiting Turntide Islands, I mentioned my website as a type of encyclopedia.

Someone asked, fairly: where are the definitions? Right now, clicking links often leads either to missing pages or to more links, not neat explanations. I answered in the moment, but it made me want to think more carefully about what kind of knowledge site mine actually is.

Before the Web—and in the early days of the Internet—the model was the encyclopedia. These were institutional projects: formal collections of concepts, published in stable editions. Their genre is authoritative and static: the knowledge presented is complete, self-contained, final. Using an encyclopedia means consulting an entry and receiving stabilized truth. Its promise is stability: things mean what they mean, and you can learn them.

As that notion of settled meaning was being challenged in philosophy, the wiki appeared. In its early days, Wikipedia was just one of many experiments in collaborative knowledge, but institutional and corporate support allowed it to dominate. The wiki genre is participatory and processual: knowledge is never finished but always in revision. Using a wiki means joining a quasi-democratic dialectic that produces consensus. Its promise is improvement: through collaboration, entries will become more accurate.

Despite their differences, both encyclopedia and wiki share a positivist logic. Knowledge is accumulated, refined, made truer. That logic is not timeless—it is a modern ideology, stabilized only in the last few centuries.

My research is not positivist, and my website is neither static like an encyclopedia nor collaborative like a wiki.

That’s where the digital garden comes in. This form is older than the name: many professors and students in the 80s and 90s kept personal intranet sites that worked much the same way. The label “digital garden” only caught on in the 2000s, as a counterpoint to more hierarchical, industrial forms.

A digital garden is usually run by one person. It may look like a wiki in its rhizomatic links and overlapping categories, but nothing is ever finished. Pages are tended or neglected, revised or abandoned, as in a garden. Its genre of knowing is recursive and questioning: knowledge is always partial, provisional, and sometimes contradictory. Using a garden means cooperating not with consensus or stable authority, but with the consequences of incompleteness. Readers must decide how far to trust the author and how to dwell with the fragments.

The promise of a digital garden is not stability or productivity. It may not make a promise at all. At best, it offers gifts: opportunities for thinking, not finished lessons for learning.

This difference is economic as much as epistemic. Encyclopedia and wiki depend on the industrial knowledge complex: large institutions, committees, publishers, servers, corporations. Their genres of knowing reproduce industrial logics: standardization, productivity, accumulation. Knowledge is treated as raw material, refined into a finished product for consumption. Readers are disciplined into treating learning as consumption of those products.

Digital gardens, by contrast, do not rely on industrial scaffolding. They are closer to oral and ecological modes of sharing. They do not resolve into final products but unfold in relational acts: paths wandered, questions left open, fragments shared. They require only a gardener and whoever walks the paths.

So the contrast becomes clear:

• An encyclopedia is the genre of knowledge as commodity, producing readers as students or consumers, and naturalizing knowledge as product.
• A wiki is the genre of knowledge as factory, producing readers as worker-participants, and naturalizing knowledge as industrial process.
• A digital garden is the genre of knowledge as ecology, producing readers as co-thinkers, and naturalizing knowledge as living relation.

Notably, all three work to produce the reader into something, but it only the digital garden which produces the reader into a reader, not into a labor-role.

Yet, this lack of translation is often what gives readers the most difficulty. They often simply don't know what to do with my website or other digital gardens.

So the difference is didactic as much as economic or epistemic. Encyclopedia and wiki are structured around culturally familiar methods of teaching: you are given information to learn, or you are tasked with helping refine information so that others can learn. In both cases, the reader is directed toward outcomes (mastery, productivity, consensus) and the act of reading is translated into a recognizable form of labor within the industrial knowledge complex.

A digital garden resists that translation. It does not present information to be mastered, nor does it direct the reader to improve the text. Instead, it offers information to think with. Its didactic method is not the classroom or the factory floor, but something closer to, well, going on a walk through a garden. The garden does not teach in the sense of producing knowledge-workers or students; it teaches in the sense of offering experiences that may spark thought.

For this reason, many readers find gardens difficult. Accustomed to being disciplined into familiar learning roles, they often don’t know what to do when presented with fragments and questions that make no promises of resolution.

Yet that very difficulty is part of the form’s power. By refusing to translate the reader into student or worker, the digital garden allows them to remain what they are: a reader, thinking with what they find.