I’ve always liked the idea that as we go through life we of express all previous ‘revisions’ of life, starting from an egg and sperm, combining into a single symbiotic cell and then splitting into a multi-cell organism. The embryo then appears to take the form of all our ancestor species as it grows (although I’m not sure biologists would agree with this notion).

Geological strata are definitely a wiki – ice cores are another useful one.

Let’s stretch this to its logical conclusion – the universe is a wiki! Although due to the slight complication of light having a finite speed through space it takes bigger telescopes and longer exposures to see the earlier revisions.

I still have a few invites left. If you’re interested, shout on Twitter.

In the lossy stuff, do you mean so-called “junk DNA”? I’m not a geneticist but how do we know it’s redundant? Maybe it’s a pastebin of ancestor history? I don’t know.

On my walk I thought about a pizza as a document with layers of tomato, meat, pepper and finally cheese.

But mostly I thought again about chessboards as documents. Visually, graphically, each move is a board edit. So it’s like a graphical wiki. Obviously you could just store this as notation. You could generate the wiki purely from the list of moves.

Also the layers of a Photoshop (or whatever) graphic are like wiki edits, except instead of history in time it’s the z dimension perpendicular to the screen.

Then I thought about the Earth’s surface as a wiki, with geologically sedimentary layers. Dust, fossils and so on are the edits. I don’t have an analogy for polystrate trees though.

When I wrote this I realised everything can be seen as a document. EVERYTHING. Who, or rather what, is going to track all the edits? There’s one exception, the ever unedited document, which is of course God. I might need a walk now.

Surely your face is edited by things that cause your face to change over time?