Aiki-wiki Data is the encyclopaedia part of Aiki-wiki: a structured record of the people, places and dojo of aikido.

Every entry is made of small, separate pieces of information — a date of birth, a teacher, a dojo, a photograph, a biography — and each of them can be added by a different person at a different time. Nothing here is written by a single author. That is the whole idea: anybody who knows one fact can add that one fact, and the page grows.

Anybody may read Aiki-wiki Data. Anybody with an account may add to it. You need no special permission, and you never go into the WordPress administration — everything is done on the page you are reading.

If you are not logged in, every Aiki-wiki Data page ends with an invitation and a way in; when you log in you come back to the same page you were reading.

A small group of editors looks after the rest: they can correct and remove what is already recorded, and they alone record dan grades.

Editing happens where you are reading. Once you are logged in, each part of the page grows small links — + add, edit, a fold-out form — beside the thing they change. Open one, fill it in, press the button. The page comes back at the same spot with your addition on it.

The first time you add anything in an hour you are asked to add two numbers together. That is all. For the rest of the hour you are not asked again, so several small additions in a row stay quick.

The table near the top is the record itself: date and place of birth and death, dan grade, titles, style, the dojo where they trained and taught, occupation, education, awards, websites and about twenty more.

Most of them hold several answers where several are true — a teacher may have taught at four dojo, and a birthplace has layers: Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. Every answer can carry the source you took it from.

Fields nobody has filled in are folded away; open the fold and they are there to fill. Nothing is ever required. An empty field never stops anything being saved.

Dates are chosen from three lists — year, month, day — never typed. Only the year is required, so a birth known only to the year is recorded as exactly that, rather than being forced into an invented 1 January. This is why the same date cannot end up in the database written four different ways.

A person may be known by many names: another surname, another given name, a different whole name, a nickname, and the name as it is written in each language. All of them belong here, and each can carry its own form in the original script — kanji, cyrillic, whatever it is.

Separately, a one-line description can be written in each language: the line under the name that says in a few words who this was.

The biography is the long prose part, and there is one per language.

Any logged-in reader may write a language nobody has written yet — and may also improve one that somebody already has. Prose gets better by being rewritten, so this is the one place in Aiki-wiki Data where correcting somebody else’s work is allowed. Nothing is lost by it: every version is kept with the name of whoever wrote it, and an editor can put the previous one back in a single click.

Every language is offered — more than sixty of them. Plain paragraphs are exactly right; leave a blank line between them. Removing a biography outright stays with the editors.

Biographies in other languages sit folded under the one you are reading, so anybody can open the one they can read.

Relationships are said in ordinary words: Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Brother, Sister, Grandfather, Grandmother, Grandson, Granddaughter, Uncle, Aunt, Nephew, Niece, Cousin, Husband, Wife, Father-in-law, Mother-in-law, Son-in-law, Daughter-in-law, Brother-in-law, Sister-in-law, Stepfather, Stepmother — and, for the art, Teacher and Student.

Choose the word, type the name — the box suggests names as you type — and press Add.

Two things are worth knowing.

• It holds both ways. Put a father here and this page appears on his page as a son or a daughter, automatically, out of the same single record. There is nothing to enter twice and nothing that can disagree.
• The word follows the other person. What is shown afterwards is worked out from their recorded gender, so two sons read as “Sons” and a son and a daughter read as “Children”.

For Teacher and Student you can also say of what — aikido, judo, kendo. Any relationship can carry a short note as well: “uchideshi 1955–1961”, “they met in Iwama”.

If the person is not in Aiki-wiki Data at all, open they are not in Aiki-wiki Data yet and tick the box. They are created along with the relationship, with a page of their own, so a relationship never leads nowhere.

Relationships can be added by any logged-in reader. Removing one is the editors’ job.

Photographs are assigned from the site’s media library and appear in the gallery with their caption and title underneath.

The picture beside the data table is the main one. If none has been chosen, the first in the gallery is used. Choosing which photograph stands for a person is an administrator’s decision — it is the one thing on the page that everybody sees first.

Under the photographs there is room for videos: paste a link to YouTube, Facebook or anywhere else, and it appears as a tile you press to watch.

Anything the person is known to have said can be added as a quote, together with where it came from.

The source can be a book, an article or a video — or simply your own memory of a seminar. That is a real source and should be written as one: “heard at a seminar in Prague, 1998”.

Underneath, you can say whether it is a quote, a poem or a thesis. A poem keeps the lines you type; a thesis has a short headline and stands in a section of its own above the quotes. You can also say what language it is in.

“Sources and articles outside Aiki-wiki” is the readers’ own shelf: links to anything on the web worth reading about this person. You may change or withdraw what you added; anybody else’s stays as it is.

The “Articles and sources” list above it is the editors’ list and is not edited here.

Somebody or somewhere missing entirely is added from its own page — Add a person and Add a place, both reachable from the Aiki-wiki Data front page.

A name is all that is required, plus one of the three answers for gender — and “Not specified” is a real answer, so nobody is ever made to claim something they do not know. Everything else can be filled in later, by you or by anybody else.

There is a limit of a hundred new entries per account per day.

A place is an entry of its own, with a page like a person’s. It can be a dojo, a building, a village, a town, a city, a district, a prefecture, a state, a region or a country — you say which, and that choice decides only which boxes you are offered. Saying nothing is allowed; the place works either way.

Every place can also say what it is part of: Iwama is in Ibaraki, Ibaraki is in Japan. That one sentence, written once, does two things. The trail at the top of the page leads back up it, and the page of anything above shows everybody from anywhere below — so Japan lists the people from every town and dojo inside it, not only those who wrote “Japan” themselves.

A dojo is offered what a dojo has and a country is not: its address, its dojo-cho or head teacher, who founded it, the style practised, when they train, a telephone number, an e-mail, a map, a website and its social media. Naming a teacher means naming somebody who is already in Aiki-wiki Data — if they are not there yet, add them first on the Add a person page.

Changing the kind of a place never hides anything already written about it. It only changes what is suggested next.

Beside people and places there is a third sort of entry: a word, a saying, a principle, a weapon, a book — Masakatsu Agatsu, Kokoro, Zenji, bokken. Each has a page of its own, and each can say what sort of thing it is. Saying nothing is allowed, as everywhere else; the kind only decides which boxes you are offered, and nothing already written ever disappears because of it.

What matters most here are the names. The same idea is written 正勝吾勝, Masakatsu Agatsu and masakatsu-agatsu, and whoever goes looking will type one of the three. Every name recorded on an entry finds it, whichever one is typed — case, accents and punctuation are already set aside, so “masakatsu-agatsu” needs no entry of its own. A name marked “show it under the title” is printed under the heading, which is where the kanji belongs.

Below that, an entry carries what it means in one line, what it means word for word, who used it, where it comes from, and a longer explanation in whichever languages somebody writes one. The explanation follows the same rule as a biography: anybody logged in may write it or improve it, and only an editor may take it away.

A category says what somebody is in a way several people share: aikidoka, budoka, philosopher. Any logged-in reader can put somebody in one, on their page; only an editor takes them out again.

You pick from a list rather than typing, and that refusal is the point. Occupation and Field of work, higher up the same page, take anybody’s own words and always will. But free text cannot be a shelf — “Aikido teacher”, “aikido-teacher” and “učitel aikidó” are one idea typed three ways, and a list built out of them is never complete. The categories are kept short and chosen, so that “everybody who is an aikidoka” has a right answer. If something is missing from the list, tell the editors rather than working around it.

Some things are not a person, a place or a term: a federation, a book, a film, a magazine, a seminar, a film crew. They have an entry of their own, called simply an other entry, and it is the one sort in Aiki-wiki Data where nothing has been decided in advance.

It has a name, the other names it answers to, one line saying what it is, a longer explanation — all exactly like a term. What is different is the middle: instead of a fixed set of boxes, you write both halves yourself. The name of the fact, and the fact. “Founded — 1940”. “Publisher — Kodansha”. “Held at — Iwama”. If the value is somebody who is already in Aiki-wiki Data, write their name in the other box and the fact becomes a link to them.

This is deliberate, and it is the only place in Aiki-wiki Data where you invent the label as well as the answer. The reason is simple: the whole purpose of this sort of entry is the things nobody thought of, and a list of allowed boxes would have to be written by somebody who has already thought of them.

The risk in that is obvious too — the same fact written as “Founded” on one entry and “Year founded” on the next, and then no list of everything founded before 1960 is ever complete. Three things hold it in check, and none of them forbids anything. Upper and lower case, accents and punctuation are ignored, so “Founded” and “founded” are always one field. The box offers the names already in use as you type — taking one of those is what makes the question answerable later. And an editor can rename one name on every entry at once, so a mess that did happen can be tidied afterwards rather than prevented beforehand.

Who may do what is the same as everywhere: anybody logged in adds; only an editor corrects or removes.

A federation, an association, a school — the Aikikai, the IAF, a national federation, a style organisation. These have an entry of their own, separate from places on purpose: the Aikikai Hombu Dojo is a building in Tokyo, the Aikikai Foundation is an organisation, and the two have almost nothing in common except a name.

An organisation carries when it was founded and when it ended, which martial arts and styles it is for (several, if several are true), who founded it and who its founding members were, who chairs it, who its chief instructor is, where it is seated, which dojo belong to it, a link to its grading syllabus and its statutes, and the usual website, e-mail and social media. Almost every one of those takes several answers, because almost every one of them can honestly have several.

An organisation can sit inside more than one other at once. A national federation may belong to an international body and to a style organisation, and both are true at the same time. This is the first entry in Aiki-wiki Data that is a network rather than a tree, and it is why an organisation has no single “parent”. Who sits inside whom is left to the editors: a wrong fact on a page is wrong on that page, but a wrong link changes what every organisation above it lists, quietly.

The people and the dojo are written on the organisation’s own page, and the person’s profile and the dojo’s page read them back from there. That is on purpose: one fact is kept in one place. Two copies is how a database starts disagreeing with itself — somebody corrects the chairman on the federation’s page, the profile goes on saying the old name, and nothing looks broken.

Sister organisations are a link of a different sort: two bodies that belong together without either being inside the other — two national federations of the same style, or a body and the one that succeeded it. Neither counts the other among what belongs to it, and neither appears under the other anywhere.

Three things are kept for the editors and administrators: correcting or removing what is already recorded, recording dan grades, and choosing the main photograph.

Everything else on these pages is open to every logged-in reader.

• Add, never overwrite. A reader can add what is missing. Nothing already recorded can be lost by a contribution.
• Everything is written down. Every change is logged with who made it, and an editor can undo it in one click.
• There are limits. On how much one account may add in an hour, and how many new entries it may start in a day.
• A page being read is never written to. Nothing in Aiki-wiki Data changes by itself while somebody is looking at it.

The search box in the Aiki-wiki Data header searches Aiki-wiki Data only — people and places — and the results say so above them, with each result marked PERSON or PLACE.

A link at the foot of the results offers the whole of Aiki-wiki instead, for when that was what you wanted.

The whole of Aiki-wiki Data can also be browsed the ordinary way, as a category of the site: /category/aiki-wikidata/. Every entry is in it.

Aiki-wiki Data is being built in stages, and this page is kept up to date as it grows. Still to come:

• Places as full entries: kinds (city, village, country, dojo) and a hierarchy, so everybody from Tokyo also appears under Japan.
• Categories, and new kinds of entry — terms and concepts such as masakatsu agatsu.
• Dan grades submitted by readers, going to the editors for approval.
• A proper visual family tree, and a tree of aikido lineage drawn from teacher and student.