Wilber Wiki — Initial Plan

Status: draft, first pass. Written to capture scope and a brainstorm of what belongs in this wiki before we build a real site. Nothing here is committed to a tech stack yet.

What exists right now

bio.md — draft biography, sourced from Wikipedia + the Ken Wilber Fund.
works/index.md — works list by year (table with cover thumbnail, title/link, year, format), linking to a dedicated page per work.
works/<slug>.md — one file per work (39 so far), each with YAML frontmatter (title, subtitle, year, year_note, format, contributors, cover, core, status), a ## Description, and an empty ## Notes section reserved for future annotations. The 12 works flagged core: true — The Spectrum of Consciousness, Grace and Grit, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, A Brief History of Everything, One Taste, Integral Psychology, A Theory of Everything, Boomeritis, Integral Spirituality, Integral Life Practice, The Religion of Tomorrow, Finding Radical Wholeness — each additionally have a ## In-Depth Overview section (structure, key concepts, significance/reception), several paragraphs per book.
assets/covers/ — 28 of 39 works have a cached cover image (<slug>.jpg, ~150–650px on the long edge, "L" size from Open Library), with sourcing/provenance and the list of the 11 still missing a cover documented in assets/covers/SOURCES.md.

All content lives at the repo root, not under a content/ wrapper. These are content drafts, not a site — no framework, no styling, no build has been set up yet, deliberately: get the material right first, then decide how it's presented.

Publishing target is Flowershow (reads markdown + frontmatter directly, no separate build step needed). Added config.json at the repo root with "contentExclude": ["/docs"] so this planning folder never gets published as part of the site — contentExclude fully unpublishes a path (not just hidden from nav/search, as contentHide would leave it); docs/ is internal, not wiki content.

Decided: one markdown file per work (with frontmatter), not a single monolithic list or a separate YAML/JSON data file. Frontmatter carries the structured fields a future site would need for the "cover + year + blurb" grid layout (cover, year, format, core); the body carries the longer description and a ## Notes section that becomes the natural home for annotations once that feature is built — so book pages and note pages don't end up as two separate, driftable systems.

Immediate next steps (this phase)

Verify the tail of the bibliography (2013 onward) against a publisher catalog or Integral World's bibliography page (fetch 503'd during this pass, retry) — several status: draft pages under works/ need confirming, especially whether A Post-Truth World (2024) is a distinct title or a reissue of Trump and a Post-Truth World (2017), and whether Integral Politics (2018, ebook) is distinct content or an excerpt.
Source cover art — done for 28/39. Batch-fetched via the Open Library Covers API (title+author search, not ISBN — turned out not to need ISBNs at all) and cached under assets/covers/. The 11 remaining are genuinely thin on Open Library (mostly audio programs, ebook-only titles, and 2015+ releases); see assets/covers/SOURCES.md for the per-title breakdown and next options (publisher site, Amazon, manual scan) if we want to chase down the rest.
Pick a site approach for when we're ready to make it "nice" — static site generator (e.g. Astro/Eleventy) makes sense for a content-heavy wiki like this, and can read the frontmatter directly to generate the works grid from works/*.md with no separate data layer; decide once the annotation-feature requirements (below) are clearer, since that may push toward a framework with more interactivity built in.

Brainstorm: what else belongs in this wiki

Structured pass over what a good Ken-Wilber-and-Integral-Theory reference wiki could eventually contain, beyond the bio and works list.

Core reference pages

Concept glossary — AQAL, the Four Quadrants, Levels/Lines/States/Types/Stages, holons and holarchy, the pre/trans fallacy, Wilber–Combs Lattice, Integral Methodological Pluralism, integral post-metaphysics, "Kosmic address," the "mean green meme," Boomeritis, Integral Life Practice's "modules." Each term gets its own short page, cross-linked from wherever it's used.
Timeline of Wilber's intellectual development — several commentators (and Wilber himself, loosely) periodize his work into phases (sometimes called "Wilber-1" through "Wilber-5"); worth a page mapping which books/ideas belong to which phase, since it helps a reader place a given book in context.
People — influences on Wilber: Aurobindo, Plotinus, Piaget, Jean Gebser, Jürgen Habermas, Adi Da, Da Free John, Roger Walsh, Robert Kegan, Clare Graves/Spiral Dynamics, Abraham Maslow, and others whose frameworks Wilber explicitly synthesizes.
People — the integral movement: Terry Patten, Diane Musho Hamilton, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Roger Walsh, Corey deVos, Marc Gafni (see Controversies below), Don Beck (Spiral Dynamics Integral), and others who built on or worked alongside Wilber.
Organizations — Integral Institute, Integral Life, Integral Life Practice, Boulder Integral, the Ken Wilber Fund, and their relationships to each other over time (several have merged/rebranded — worth getting the institutional history straight).

Book-level deep-dive pages

First pass done: all 12 core: true works now carry an ## In-Depth Overview section on their own page (structure/parts, key concepts introduced, significance — a few paragraphs each, not chapter-by-chapter). Worth revisiting later with: key diagrams (the four-quadrant chart, developmental-line comparison tables — currently described in prose only, not reproduced visually), notable quotes, and — per the user's goal — an annotation layer (see below).

Reception, critique, and controversy

Academic and popular critique — a fair-minded page surveying serious criticism: Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition (book-length critique of SES's scholarship), critiques from academic philosophy and religious studies of Wilber's synthesis method and secondary-source reliance, and general "guru culture" critiques of Integral Institute. This belongs as its own page rather than a footnote in the bio, so it can be treated properly rather than either whitewashed or reduced to a hit piece.
The Marc Gafni controversy (2011–) — Wilber's public defense of Gafni amid sexual abuse allegations, and the fallout within the integral community. Also deserves its own page rather than a line in the bio.
Reception outside the "integral" niche — notable public readers (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, various tech/business figures), and how integral theory has been taken up (and criticized) in adjacent spaces like conscious-business/leadership circles and, more recently, some "meta-modern" discourse.

Browse/index views (once there's enough content)

By theme: psychology, spirituality/mysticism, science-and-religion, politics, business/leadership, fiction.
By format: books vs. ebooks vs. audio programs vs. edited anthologies vs. journal articles/forewords (not yet inventoried — see Gaps below).
By reading path: a suggested entry-point sequence for newcomers (e.g. A Brief History of Everything → The Integral Vision → Integral Psychology → SES), since Wilber's own back-catalog is not obviously ordered for a first-time reader.

Not yet inventoried — worth a pass later

Standalone forewords/introductions Wilber wrote for other authors' books.
Journal articles, especially in ReVision (which he co-founded).
The Collected Works of Ken Wilber multi-volume set (Shambhala) — repackages earlier material; worth a short explanatory note rather than treating volumes as new works.
Interviews and major public talks, if we want a "media appearances" page.

Annotation feature (later phase)

Superseded by two dedicated vision docs, written after a proper brainstorming pass: concept-wiki-vision.md (the priority — the concept-level index that makes this a wiki) and annotatable-reading-layer-vision.md (a related but distinct, deferred project: a web-viewable, personally-and-possibly-collaboratively annotated rendering of a work's text). The rest of this section is kept as historical context for the open questions that prompted those docs.

Goal per the user: make core books (starting with SES) annotatable by them personally. Not designed yet — flagging the open questions to resolve before building:

Single-user vs. multi-user? If it's just for the user's own reading, a much simpler approach (e.g. local-only notes, or a personal layer stored per-user) beats building shared/social annotation infrastructure.
Granularity — paragraph-level, sentence-level, or free-floating margin notes against a rendered page?
Build vs. embed — a custom annotation layer vs. embedding an existing tool (e.g. Hypothes.is) against rendered book pages. Embedding is far less work if the licensing/ text-availability situation allows displaying substantial book text at all (see Gaps below — we do not yet have rights-cleared full text for any book, only our own summaries).
Text availability — we don't have licensed full text of any Wilber book to annotate against. Early "annotatable" pages will likely be our own chapter summaries and key-quote excerpts (fair-use length) rather than full book text, unless the user has their own copies/PDFs they want to work from privately.

Each works/<slug>.md page already carries an empty ## Notes section as a placeholder for this — cheapest possible starting point (freeform markdown notes under the relevant book), well short of real inline/paragraph-level annotation, but enough to start capturing notes on SES without blocking on the design questions above.

This needs its own design pass once the bio/works foundation is solid — not blocking, but flagging now so it isn't a surprise later.

Open questions for the user

Tech stack / hosting for the eventual site — any preference, or defer until content is further along?
Should the works page group by year only, or also support a by-theme / by-phase view from the start?
For annotation: personal-use only, or something you'd want to eventually show others?
Do you have physical/PDF copies of the core books already, or should sourcing text excerpts be part of the plan?