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arXiv · 2608.19433

Social.Wiki: A Web Held in Common

Theia Henderson·Carmel Schare·Ana Dodik·Clemens N. Klokmose·Ziv Epstein·David D. Clark·David R. Karger
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Abstract

Many of the websites people depend on have owners whose interests are not fully aligned with their users. We address the root of this problem by presenting a reimagining of the web where sites are not owned at all but are instead collaboratively produced like Wikipedia articles. We call the system Social$.$Wiki because it supports the co-creation of interactive social sites, such as those for microblogging, messaging, dating, gaming, ride sharing, and so on. With off-the-shelf AI tools, people with little or no programming experience can edit these sites to better reflect the needs and preferences of their communities. Social$.$Wiki builds on ideas from collaborative malleable software systems such as Webstrates, but is designed for public participation rather than use only within small, trusted groups. To this end, Social$.$Wiki includes governance to mitigate conflict. To accommodate diverse governance preferences, our model of "plural governance" lets people independently choose the policies that determine which edits to a site they see. Social$.$Wiki also implements a granular security model to protect personal data in a malleable environment. Complementing the decentralized design and governance of Social$.$Wiki sites, both site edits and within-site data are stored on Graffiti, a decentralized infrastructure, decoupling the ownership of underlying servers from the ownership of sites. We evaluate Social$.$Wiki through case studies that demonstrate the range of sociotechnical structures it supports, as well as through deployments at a hackathon and in the wild.

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Theia Henderson, Carmel Schare, Ana Dodik, Clemens N. Klokmose, Ziv Epstein, David D. Clark, David R. Karger. 2026-08-22. Social.Wiki: A Web Held in Common. https://doi.org/10.1145/3830398.3830639

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