Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Open-Calls:Global Architecture

Open Call Status
Wave	First Wave (Early Bird)
Status	Under construction
Commission	WikiDeal Global Architecture Commission: Thanasis Priftis, Théo Bondolfi
Chairpersonship	To be confirmed
Facilitator	Thanasis Priftis (Director, Ynternet.org Foundation)
Strategic assistance	Théo Bondolfi
Software strategic assistance	Ricardo Prudon (lead developer)

💡 In simple words: WikiDeal is like a giant library, and today's arrangement is only temporary. This open call invites you to help design how everything is organised: web addresses, menus, who is allowed to administrate the wiki, and whether WikiDeal needs sister projects around it. You can take part now via the Discussion tab, and the best ideas can win a reward.

🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): The main Open Call active right now (placeholder title, subject to change): propose the durable global architecture of WikiDeal. It gathers three families of questions — content and URL architecture and multilingual structure, administration rights, and the possible creation of sister projects — building on the existing temporary structure. Submit via the Discussion tab. Reward: up to CHF 10,000 in cash + up to 100,000 in utility tokens (no guarantee*), decided by Ynternet.org Foundation delegates.

💬 Submit a proposal: open to all. No email needed: just log in, then post your ideas and links in the Discussion tab of this page. You can then raise a Request for Comments (RFC) to draw attention to your proposal and get community comments.

The title of this open call is provisional (a placeholder title, subject to change): its scope now covers content and URL architecture, administration rights and sister projects, and a better name may be adopted during the design phase.

The roles mentioned in the infobox (Chairperson, Facilitator, and supporting roles such as strategic assistance) follow the role definitions of the Open Call governance and lifecycle and of the Open Call Commissions page; no separate role system is defined here.

Status	Under construction
Formal launch planning	2027
Deadline	None: closes once a first simple version is adopted
Reward	up to CHF 10,000 in cash + up to 100,000 in utility tokens (no guarantee*)
How to propose	Log in and post your ideas and links in the Discussion tab of this page
Decided by	Delegates of the Ynternet.org Foundation committee
Disclosure	AI transparency mandatory

Every visitor to WikiDeal experiences the architecture before anything else: the menus they click, the URLs they bookmark, the way a contract page relates to its amendments. Getting this right early saves years of confusion later. Rather than deciding behind closed doors, WikiDeal opens the question to everyone, in the spirit of citizen participation: the people who will use the structure are invited to shape it.

A multilingual call (exception)

As an exception to the current practice of the wiki, this open call is published in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) — the four languages mastered by the commission. It is an important call that aims at mobilising communities that are at least bilingual, well beyond the English-speaking world. The links towards the other parts of the site (the Open Call main page, the evaluation method, and so on) remain in English for now. This publication in four languages is meant to ease understanding for four target audiences, with whom we are open to possible discussions when a contribution brings high added value. Nevertheless, all contributions should be written in English for now: our current policy is to keep things simple and work in a single language.

Why this call

WikiDeal currently has a working URL architecture and a working content architecture, but they are temporary. They were put in place to migrate content and get the wiki running; they are not the final design. This call invites new proposals for the fundamental architecture, based on the existing one.

Because these foundations affect everything else, they should be refined first. It is therefore the main Open Call that is possible right now, and especially open to Wiki experts (experts in wiki design and use).

Context

Everything in this section is an initial hypothesis, open to question: proposals that challenge these starting points are welcome.

The initial hypothesis is that one single MediaWiki would host the governance of the platform, because the various languages are expected to have exactly the same policies on almost everything. The same reasoning applies to the policies, the governance and the funding: same texts, same rules of the game, same agreements. These shared texts would form one of the general agreements for using the platform as a whole.

Conversely, sister projects could each have their own URL, or even their own domain name. Examples of possible sister projects: the arbitration chamber, the incubator, the observatories, blogs. Several URL options remain open, for example a root subdomain such as observatory.wikideal.net, or a separate domain such as wikidealobservatory.net. A comparison point is the sister projects of the Wikimedia ecosystem (Wiktionary, Wikispecies and others): wikis that are important in their own right, living next to the main encyclopedia with their own names.

Another idea being explored is a split between wikideal.wiki for the wiki side and wikideal.net for the marketplace and funding side. This is an option under consideration, not a decision.

The scope: three families of questions

The objective of this call is the global (content and URL) architecture of WikiDeal and the answers to three families of questions, treated as the three strands of one single call. A good proposal may address one, two or all three strands, and aims at leading to a clear proposal, a clear plan: a justified architecture, the reasons for being of each choice, and an anticipation of needs, realities and flows.

The current working structure is documented on the Site structure page. That structure is a temporary decision: anyone can propose to do it differently through this call.

Each of the three strands below ends with a short state of the art: the main MediaWiki and Wikimedia references on the question. Proposals are expected to build on these references and to adapt them to the WikiDeal reality, rather than reinventing the wheel.

A. Content and URL architecture, and multilingualism

The first family of questions concerns the naming of URLs on wikideal.net (how page addresses are written, which prefixes and separators are used), the content structure of the pages, and the general structure of the site (how spaces, portals and pages are organized), with the multilingual dimension at the centre.

URL structure. Namespaces (Gov, Markets, Meta…), language segments (e.g. /en/), portal and sub-page patterns, contract URLs.

Where does the language live in the URL? As a subdomain (en.wikideal.net, fr.wikideal.net) or as a path segment (wikideal.net/en, wikideal.net/fr)?
One single MediaWiki, or several? One instance for all languages, one per language, or another arrangement? And how are User Groups managed within the chosen architecture?
Which contents must be rigorously identical in all languages, and which may differ? A proposed answer already exists, open to challenge: everything that belongs to the market side (marketplaces, compensatory measures, contract models) admits an initial copy, but forks are acceptable: different versions per language, country or region; one portal per language; an explicit mention on each page stating whether it is an exact translation or a fork; and the possibility to display the points of difference with respect to the main version, by default the English one. Conversely, governance, policies and funding texts are expected to stay rigorously identical across languages.
Which root URLs per language, and which root URLs per sister project? (One or several domain names; see also strand C below.)
The structure of URLs inside the marketplaces. How would the different marketplaces be distinguished from each other? Some current URLs are long, and some are very long. A real example is the address of an amendment page of the babysitting use case: Markets/en/Portal:Babysitting/Contract-Base-Amendment:Babysitting. Is that normal? Is the notion of portal and category well designed?

Article (content) structure. What should appear inside the articles, consistently: the statistical / data elements that must appear; standard templates and layout per content type; and, for each contract, everything around it: amendments, addenda (avenants), the contract URLs, the reference rules (legal references), validation status, and how these relate.

Markets structure (especially valued). How market segments and their portals are organised, and the standard content types per market. Proposals that pertinently lay out all sub-markets and all market categories, with a medium- and long-term vision that can last, are especially valued. This is not only technical architecture but conceptual architecture: how to structure the marketplaces, at a time when current markets are extremely siloed, while WikiDeal aims at moving out of silos.

Gov structure & meta. How the Gov namespace, Meta, menus and navigation tie everything together.

A concrete use case

This call advances through iterative action research: concrete cases feed the questions. An existing team says: "We have users for a service XYZ. We propose to migrate these users to WikiDeal, to associate our contract models, amendments and alerts, already deployed, to put them on the WikiDeal wiki, to adapt our smartphone application, and to constitute ourselves as a User Group." Then comes the question: "We would like our own URL for the MediaWiki. Is that acceptable?"

The probable answer is no. But a clear policy would need to formalize the rules of the game. Reformulated from the point of view of that team:

As a delegate of an existing user group that wants to migrate, what are my rights and obligations in terms of domain names? Can I keep my own domain name for the marketplace app? Also for the MediaWiki? Can I create my own MediaWiki? Can I simply be affiliated? Could it be white label?

The white label case is a deliberately extreme example, included to test the limits of the policy. Other specific naming questions that may be treated (or eliminated) during the call: white label; URLs and domain names; languages written in non-Latin scripts; HTTP and HTTPS; the URL nomenclature of programs (for example a pattern Programs/Name-of-the-program); and the creation of the categories used to classify contract models by portal.

State of the art. In MediaWiki, the page title is the URL: namespaces, subpages and separators in the title are reflected directly in the page address, so designing the content architecture and designing the URL architecture are one and the same exercise — a principle to be adapted deliberately to WikiDeal, not discovered by accident. Clean addresses are a configuration matter, and language prefixes between wikis are classically handled through the interwiki mechanism (or through subdomains and subpages, as in the Wikimedia ecosystem). Key references: MediaWiki Manual: Page title (how titles — and therefore URLs — are structured, including namespaces and subpages), MediaWiki Manual: Short URL (configuring clean, short page addresses), MediaWiki Manual: $wgArticlePath (the configuration variable that defines the URL pattern of articles), and MediaWiki Manual: Interwiki (linking between wikis and handling language prefixes across projects).

B. Administration rights

The second family of questions concerns the administration of the wiki itself.

Which administrators does WikiDeal need, and under which administration policy?
Which user groups should be created, with which rights attached to each group?
Which roles (administrator, bureaucrat, moderator, or others) should exist, and how do they relate to the community?
What is the policy for nominating an administrator, and for revoking one?

The current rights configuration of this wiki is public and can be inspected at any time: see the list of group rights on Special:ListGroupRights, the list of users on Special:ListUsers, and the current administrators on Special:ListUsers/sysop. Proposals are expected to start from this real, observable configuration, and to say what should change.

State of the art. MediaWiki ships with standard groups (user, autoconfirmed, sysop, bureaucrat) whose rights are fully configurable, and the Wikipedia tradition adds a governance principle worth adapting to WikiDeal: administrators are trusted members elected by the community through a public process, their tools are a mandate, not a privilege, and they can be revoked (desysopped) when the community's trust is lost. Key references: MediaWiki Manual: User rights (how rights, groups and permissions are defined in the software), MediaWiki Help: User rights and groups (the standard groups and their default rights), and Wikipedia: Administrators (how administrators are nominated, what they can do, and how they can be desysopped).

C. Sister projects

The third family of questions, a very important one: should a set of sister projects be created around WikiDeal? And if so, which ones, with which URLs and which degree of independence? Candidate domains include, notably:

Generic terms and usage rights: everything that concerns the generic terms and rights of use for subscribing to a service, sharing one's data, and using common or pooled resources. Should this be carried by an independent group, as a project in its own right, rather than inside WikiDeal?
Arbitration: should the arbitration chamber be an independent movement, with its own identity and governance?
An observatory together with a whistleblower mechanism: a watchdog function over the ecosystem. Integrated into the central project, or a sister project?

For each candidate, the question is the same: is it integrated into the central project, or is it a sister project with its own URL, or even its own domain name (see the options in the Context section above)? The reference comparison point is the ecosystem of the Wikimedia sister projects (Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikiquote and others) and the rules by which new sister projects are proposed, examined and created there — see the state of the art just below.

State of the art. In the Wikimedia ecosystem, "sister projects" is the official term for the wikis living next to Wikipedia with their own identity — Wiktionary (dictionary), Wikidata (structured data), Wikispecies (directory of species), Wikiquote (quotations) — listed on Meta-Wiki: Wikimedia projects. New sister projects do not appear spontaneously: they are proposed and examined through a documented process (Meta-Wiki: Proposals for new projects), evaluated by the Sister Projects Committee; in parallel, User Groups and other affiliated entities (affiliates) are recognised by the Affiliations Committee, and new language versions by the Language committee. As a base position, WikiDeal would operate in the same way: sister projects would be handled much like affiliates, recognised through a single acceptance process that also covers User Groups and affiliates — a hypothesis to be refined through this very call. WikiDeal draws inspiration from the Wikimedia acceptance commissions, but will build its own culture and its own rules, adapting these governance policies to the reality of WikiDeal rather than reinventing the wheel.

How to participate

To take part, log in and post your ideas and links in the Discussion tab of this page, including external links to documents hosted elsewhere if needed. A good way to contribute: post a link to an architecture proposal copied in HTML (a snapshot of the content at a given moment; the content does not need to be final), showing the menus, the URLs, the Markets part, the Gov part, Meta, etc.

Proposals are public: everyone can see what others have proposed. The reward can be distributed across several contributors, based on an estimation of the impact and importance of each contribution. These calls are light and non administrative, in the spirit of micro calls for ideas: the goal is several winners, not a cold competition with one winner and many losers.

Every proposal must include a full AI transparency disclosure: state which AI tools, if any, were used to prepare the proposal, and how. The general rules of the Open Call apply, in particular the rules of the game, which apply to all current open calls. Frequent questions are answered on the Open Call FAQ.

Who does what

Contributors (anyone, including enlightened amateurs) post proposals in the Discussion tab.
Delegates of the Ynternet.org Foundation committee review proposals and attribute subscription tokens.
The community inherits and maintains the resulting architecture; this openness keeps the process transparent from proposal to decision.

Reward

This call offers up to CHF 10,000 in cash + up to 100,000 in utility tokens (no guarantee*). These are maximum envelopes, not fixed amounts: the actual attribution depends on the quality and impact of the contributions, and is especially valued for the Markets part (all sub-markets, all categories) with a lasting medium/long-term vision.

As for every open call, attribution follows the common rules: typically half of the attributed sum is paid once the first simple answers are obtained, and the remaining half later, depending on the actual implementation and durability of the ideas. See the rules of the game of the Open Call main page for the evaluation and attribution process, and utility tokens for how these tokens are intended to work.

What matters most: principle, quality & success criteria

Principle: a single, coherent, durable architecture, based on the existing one, that serves users and contributors and scales as markets and User Groups grow.
Quality criteria: consistency across URLs / articles / markets / contracts; clarity and predictability of naming; navigation and ergonomics; maintainability; compatibility with MediaWiki and decentralized data; clean multilingual handling.
Success criteria: replaces the temporary structure without content loss; reusable as markets and User Groups multiply; understandable and maintainable by the community; a Markets taxonomy that holds up over the medium and long term.

Status and timeline

This is an early bird open call, also called an open call for pioneers: it is prepared before the steering committee is formed, and it is especially open to Wiki experts. The call is currently under construction; its formal launch planning is 2027. There is no deadline: once launched, the call remains open until a first simple version of the structure has been adopted by the delegates of the Ynternet.org Foundation. The composition of the steering committee is described on the Steering Committee page; it has not met yet and intends to meet once the first donations have been received.

References

The following documents are working hypotheses, made to be questioned: everything in them is open to challenge through this call.

URL structure proposal, version 2 (July 2026): a working proposal on URL naming.
One Wiki, Many Apps (June 2026): an architecture hypothesis with one wiki and many applications around it.
Gov structure · Markets / Portal structure · Portal model · /en decision