Field Notes

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Naming the wiki

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Candidate names for this wiki and its repository, gathered from a naming session. This is a working shortlist, not a decision; no name has been chosen or checked for collisions with existing software.

The wiki has two naming surfaces worth reflecting: its architecture and its contents. The architecture is filesystem-first, wikilinked, source-grounded with immutable evidence under src/sources/, and lifecycle-tracked through seed, working, and stable. The contents cluster around privacy and security ventures, Swedish rättssäkerhet in criminal cases, EU age verification and Internet privacy, generations and democracy, and Swedish business tax, with a heavy Swedish center of gravity.

Architecture-grounded

Names that describe how the wiki is built rather than what it holds.

Name Rationale
Loomstead A woven link graph (loom) held in a durable place on disk (stead)
Provenance Advertises the distinguishing feature: immutable evidence plus claim-level citation
Palimpsest Layered notes revised over time, evidence preserved underneath
Substrate The durable layer research is built on; nods to src/
Marginalia Scholarly notes accreting around cited sources
Redlink Names the wiki’s redlink queue directly: unresolved wikilinks as a deliberate research frontier
Wayfinder The wikilink and backlink graph, just wanted, and just clusters as a discovery instrument
Seedbed The seed to working to stable lifecycle as the organizing metaphor

Content-grounded

Names drawn from the subject matter, especially the privacy and Swedish clusters.

Name Rationale
Skyddsrum Swedish for shelter or safe room; fits privacy and protected identities
Faraday A live tag on anti-surveillance gear, and a metaphor for a shielded enclosure
Enclave Confidential-computing term running through the TEE and PCC cluster
Utgivningsbevis The Swedish publishing certificate recurring in the press-freedom notes; insider
Rättssäkerhet The Swedish due-process concept already load-bearing in the criminal-cases cluster; narrow, but distinctive and diacritic-heavy
Skyddade Echoes skyddade personuppgifter (protected personal data); the privacy-through-law throughline
Confidant Nods to confidential computing and to the wiki’s role as a personal research advisor

Obsidian riffs

The vault is hosted in Obsidian, which is volcanic glass; the productive registers are volcanic rock, mineral, and knapping into blades.

Name Rationale
Basalt The rock obsidian is kin to; a solid bedrock-of-notes name
Tephra Volcanic fragments that settle into strata, echoing the lifecycle layering
Knapp Knapping obsidian into tools, and a real Swedish word (button; scarce); bridges both languages
Lodestone A magnetic stone that pulls things together, for the link graph
Flint Another knappable stone kin to obsidian; sharper and shorter, without a trademark collision

Avoid names too close to Obsidian itself, such as anything ending in -sidian, which reads as derivative rather than a riff.

Sovereign riffs

From Swedish suverän, sovereign, whose ä is inconvenient for a project name.

Name Rationale
Allodial Land held in absolute ownership under no overlord; fits a self-hosted, no-cloud-landlord vault
Suzerain The English cognate root, an overlord holding sovereignty; exotic, no diacritic
Rike Swedish for realm or kingdom; short, clean, no diacritic
Suveran Suverän with the umlaut dropped; Swedes may read the missing diacritic as a typo
Sovran Archaic English spelling of “sovereign” (Miltonic); a real word rather than a misspelling, and close to suverän in sound
Suvern A more compressed, brandable coinage; not a real word in either language

Element and Ytterby riffs

Obsidian is not an element, but this thread reframes the name as one. Ytterby gruva near Stockholm is the most element-rich site on Earth: four elements are named for the village itself and several more were first isolated from its ore. This register is simultaneously mineral, Swedish, and carries a conceptual rhyme: one small place turning out to be extraordinarily productive.

Named for Ytterby: yttrium (Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), ytterbium (Yb). Also discovered from Ytterby ore: scandium (Sc, for Scandia), holmium (Ho, for Stockholm), thulium (Tm, for the mythic far north Thule), gadolinium (Gd, for Johan Gadolin).

Name Rationale
Scandium Means Scandinavia; a real element, hard clean sound, tidy sc symbol; encodes the Swedish content and a sovereignty-of-place idea with no ä
Holmium Stockholm specifically; softer sound
Thulium Thule, the mythic north; most atmospheric, least literally Swedish
Gadolin Honors the founder; reads as a wordmark rather than an element

Frontrunners

  • Scandium satisfies the most threads at once: it is an element, it is mineral-adjacent to Obsidian, and Scandia encodes the Swedish content and the sovereignty-of-place idea without needing an ä.
  • Allodial is the strongest purely on meaning for a sovereign, self-hosted, filesystem-first vault.
  • Sovran is the cleanest sovereign-thread pick if a real, dictionary-attested word matters more than encoding Swedish specifically: no diacritic problem, and no risk of reading as a typo.
  • Loomstead or Provenance are the strongest architecture-first names if the name should describe how the wiki works.

Next steps

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