Concepts relating to the Commons

Many concepts relating to the Commons are relatively easy to understand and uncontroversial, and if some definition or explanation is needed, it is easy to find one on Wikipedia, through web search, or with an AI tool. However, there are some terms and concepts, such as anarchism, consensus and market, where different people use the terms with different meanings. Different sources will either give different definitions and connotations, or may just set out the variety of meanings, as for example Wikipedia does in Portal:Anarchism.

To avoid confusion, and the need to spell out every time what we mean, we have a page for these less clear matters.

If you want to see the range of concepts for which we have pages, try clicking on the backlinks icon on the right (two interlinked links of a chain). Alternatively, use the sitemap, if that is available, under the spanner icon.

Topic pages are the main content in this knowledge commons wiki, and they are intended to offer knowledge that is useful, either practically, or to understanding all things around the commons. To write these topic pages, we need to use terms for concepts that may or may not be familiar, and may be open to interpretation in ways not intended by the writers and curators. So, we want to provide here a page that clarifies what we mean, if we reckon that it may not be clear.

Interesting concepts, particularly if they are relatively new, may have different significance and meaning to different people. While what we mean by, say, ducks is pretty clear, what different people mean by “market” may differ substantially. What we aim to do here is to have a consensus view on the concept, as closely related to “commons” as we can, but leave individual contributors and curators to add their own commentary to supplement the consensus view.

Hence, we maintain a template for concepts, as below.

• our definition, with reasons
• other definitions, with links
• how the concept relates to the Commons
• terms used for the concept

• links to other sources of information about the concept