EncycloShare

The plugin (and its required digital identity plugin) does the following for you, after the required setup : 1. allows you to submit articles to Encyclosphere aggregators (see above), including all your text, images, and probably other data as well, preserving your basic formatting; 2. for each submitted article, creates a ZWI file (“zipped wiki”: the standard encyclopedia article file format), deposited in a directory that you can make public if you like DOUBLECHECK THIS ; 3. creates a digital identity associated with your blog (which you can use for many purposes), which follows the entirely self-owned digital identity standard did:psqr (see below); 4. digitally signs your article, using your did:psqr digital identity; 5. allows you to configure basic data about your encyclopedia collection (such as license and language); and 6. allows you to tag your submitted ZWI files with categories, by tying in with the WordPress category system.

NOTE: this requires the Virtual Public Square (VPS) plugin . Install the 100% free-and-OSS VPS plugin before attempting to use EncycloShare!

DISCLAIMERS

You are the sole determiner of what license you publish under.

While there is a default Creative Commons license selected, you do not have to use that license. There is a long list of licenses for you to choose a license from. If you do not want to permit any other websites to make use of your content, then do not use this plugin!

Aggregation of your article is not guaranteed.

Using this plugin does not guarantee your article will appear in any aggregator. Neither the plugin nor the Knowledge Standards Foundation (KSF) determines whether your content will be accepted for inclusion in any particular aggregator. The programmers that run the two KSF-affiliated aggregators, EncycloReader and EncycloSearch, make these determinations independently of the KSF Board. Other aggregators in the broader Encyclosphere network are entirely legally independent and separate, and make their own decisions.

Depending on your license, your article might be published in places you did not know about or explicitly agree to.

If you do not understand this, do not use this plugin. Anyone might set up an aggregator and, depending on your license, they might legally republish your content. It is your decision to permit them to do so. But open content projects like Wikipedia and MIT OpenCourseWare have wisely decided to make their content very widely available. The KSF commends this practice and hopes you decide to follow it.

Article publishing is not tracked (at present).

The plugin does not display information about whether your publishing has been accepted. You must click through yourself in order to make that determination.

Articles can not be removed/unpublished with this plugin.

There is no “unpublish” feature at present (we cannot say whether there ever will be one). But two notes on this. (1) You can contact individual aggregators and request that they remove your post. Whether they are legally obligated to do so depends on the license you have chosen; most permissions granted by open content licenses are permanent and irrevocable. (2) You can try replacing the text of an article with a blank page and then submit that. It is possible (not guaranteed) that the aggregator you have chosen will interpret this as an intention to remove your article.

In more detail

The standard file format for encyclopedia articles, the ZWI file format , has many requirements (specified by the Knowledge Standards Foundation ). The EncycloShare plugin makes your posts fit these requirements. The plugin takes your encyclopedia post, uses it to prepare all necessary files (such as images) and directories following the ZWI standard, and finally compresses the result in a single ZWI file. A ZWI file is a a kind of ZIP file, so you can use any ZIP reader to view the contents, if you like.

The plugin then posts the ZWI file to an aggregator or aggregators of your choosing, when you instruct it to do so. Depending on your license, the ZWI file might then (eventually) propagate to other aggregators. Each aggregator is responsible for maintaining its own database. Because Encyclosphere aggregators are developing a shared database standard as well, they can easily share articles, including yours. (We cannot guarantee that your work will be accepted by any given aggregator. Developers can set up their own aggregators, by installing the KSF’s free aggregator engine, EncycloEngine .)

All ZWI files are stored in a /zwifiles subdirectory of the standard WordPress /uploads directory. So an article might be found, for example, at https://YOURDOMAIN.COM/wp-content/uploads/zwifiles/YOUR-ARTICLE-12345.zwi .

Publishing , or submission to the Encyclosphere, happens when you press the “Publish to Encyclosphere” button at the bottom of every WordPress post and page. You cannot, at this time, “unsubmit” an article, so make sure you really want to submit it. If you want to make edits and resubmit, you can. Probably a good way to delete an article from the encyclosphere would be to simply make your page blank, and then submit the blank page. That is sure to be rejected, and the rejected ZWI will probably overwrite the old article, depending on circumstances.

The Dashboard Panel shows any ZWI files that have been created. For now, you will have to follow the links provided in the panel to determine whether your submission has been accepted. You can also follow links to download, edit, and view articles in your collection.

About Digital Signatures

Your ZWI files are digitally signed and therefore can be authenticated as yours, wherever they eventually can be found on the internet. These digital signatures follow the did:psqr “Virtual Public Square” digital identity standard. The KSF chose this standard because it allows you to declare and maintain your own identity on your own domain—so it is robustly self-owned. A digital signature is essential to maintaining your credit and claim to ownership in a wide-open network like the Encyclosphere. Aggregators will cryptographically validate your ZWI submissions (EncycloShare handles this for you automatically); such validation is required for acceptance by these network aggregators. All this is why you must install the (equally 100% free) Virtual Public Square plugin to utilize EncycloShare.

Your digital identity takes the form of a Decentalized Identifier (DID) file. DID files contain identifying information you wish to share with the public and public keys used to verify your content. Your DID, when it is created, will be accessible at https://YOURDOMAIN.COM/.well-known/psqr . The Virtual Public Square plugin uses the W3C’s DID standard, and particularly the did:psqr specification, to attach proof of provenance to your content for distribution; further information on this specification is available at https://vpsqr.com .

Users are required to generate or upload their keys before they can publish. The Virtual Public Square plugin automatically creates, uploads, and stores the relevant identity files according to the did:psqr digital identity standards. Instructions on how to do this (it is not hard) can be found under “Installation.”

Usage

Load a post or a page in edit mode. Some sett