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Work · MindTouch Inc. · Mar 2005 – Jan 2007 · Co-Founder, Senior Architect
MindTouch — Wiki-in-a-Box
Co-Founder and Senior Architect at MindTouch. The load-bearing piece of architecture: take the MediaWiki PHP codebase — the engine that runs Wikipedia — and re-architect it into a C# generic document layer. The wiki engine, no longer hard-coded to encyclopedia pages, becomes the document substrate any kind of structured collaborative knowledge can be authored against. A "wiki in a box" any organisation could deploy and shape into their own knowledge ecosystem.
Era
MindTouch Inc. · March 2005 – January 2007 · 1 year 11 months · Co-Founder, Senior Architect
Substrate
C# / .NET (with Mono for cross-platform) · porting from PHP — language change carrying type-safety + LSP-style structural rigour
Source upstream
MediaWiki — the PHP engine powering Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and thousands of corporate wikis. The full feature surface (templates, parser, history, namespaces, permissions) had to land in the new substrate.
Generalisation
What MediaWiki encoded as "Wikipedia article" became, in the MindTouch port, an arbitrary document: a typed tree of content with versioned history, structured edits, and the wiki authoring conventions as one of many possible authoring modes.
Lineage forward
The "structured-document substrate any community can shape" conviction reappears in the vision-kb 's Karpathy LLM Wiki pattern (concept files at docs/vision-kb/concepts/{id}.md with INDEX hierarchy, cross-refs, and inline visuals) and in the Coherence-Network 's living relational graph, where every entity is editable through a Refine doorway.
Why a port and not a from-scratch rewrite
MediaWiki had earned its complexity. Years of wiki-community practice — templates, parser quirks, namespace conventions, permission models, history representation — were encoded in the PHP. A from-scratch C# wiki would have re-discovered most of it in the second year and still missed the subtleties wikipedians had quietly stabilised. The port preserved the knowledge baked into the PHP while letting the substrate around the engine become typed, modular, and composable. C# was the host; MediaWiki's design wisdom was the seed.
From Wikipedia engine to document platform
Wikipedia is one of MediaWiki's users, not its architecture. The engine knows how to render wiki text, track edits, manage namespaces, resolve templates, and store history; it doesn't care whether the content is encyclopedia articles, internal documentation, customer knowledge bases, or scientific protocols. The MindTouch port made that latent generalisation explicit by porting the engine into C# while collapsing the "encyclopedia-article" surface into one specialisation of a generic document primitive.
The architectural shape. MediaWiki's design wisdom is the
source upstream (left); the C# generic document layer is
the load-bearing middle; storage on the right is the
"in a box" deployable artifact.
What 'in a box' meant
A wiki any organisation could host
Wikipedia ran on Wikimedia infrastructure. Most other wikis in 2005 either ran on shared MediaWiki hosting or were artisanal one-off installs. The MindTouch product shape: a single deployable artifact — runtime, document layer, web UI, admin tools, all in one — that any organisation could install on a server they controlled and start authoring against. A wiki, in a box.
The deeper conviction the product encoded: knowledge sovereignty. An organisation's knowledge belongs in their own infrastructure, with their own permission models, their own retention policies, their own back-ups. The wiki engine generalised becomes the substrate any community uses to make its knowing visible to itself, on its own terms. That conviction lives now in the Coherence Network's "every cell tends its own flame" posture — the same shape, twenty years later, expressed in a different medium.
What carries forward to the vision-kb
The Coherence Network's vision-kb — "Living Collective Knowledge Base" with concept files at docs/vision-kb/concepts/{id}.md, INDEX hierarchy, cross-refs (→ lc-xxx, lc-yyy), inline visuals (), sync to graph DB — is structurally a wiki. Karpathy's "LLM Wiki" pattern named it as a fresh idea in 2024, but the shape is exactly what MindTouch's wiki-in-a-box port committed to in 2005:
Structured documents over free-form prose. Each concept file has frontmatter, cross-refs, schema. Each MindTouch document had typed fields, namespaces, templates.
Versioned, attributed history. Git tracks every concept-file change with commit verbs; MindTouch tracked every wiki edit with revision attribution. Different storage, same conviction.
Cross-link as first-class structure. Wiki [[link]] syntax expressed reference; vision-kb cross-refs do the same with → lc-xxx and the network paints them with their edge-type spectrum hue.
Sync into a queryable graph. MindTouch indexed structured metadata into a relational store; the vision-kb syncs concept content + analogous-to edges into Neo4j via scripts/sync_kb_to_db.py.
The 2005 port and the 2026 KB are the same architectural posture in different substrates. Once you've built one generic document layer, the conviction stays — it just finds new substrates to express itself through.
MindTouch Wiki-in-a-Box — MediaWiki PHP ported into a C# generic document layer — Coherence Network | Coherence Network