History: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Pharmacopedia: A History}}

The Pharmacopedia Collective is a nonprofit effort to build open, trustworthy, community reference and connection tools, free to use, free of advertising, and built for permanence. It began as a single medical wiki and grew into a family of four projects that share one account and one set of values. This page is its history, kept by the project's own record-keeper and updated as the story continues.

It is written plainly and honestly, including the false starts. The Collective is built in the open, so its history is told in the open too.

== What the Collective is ==

Today the Pharmacopedia Collective is four projects under one roof, each independent in its day to day work but joined by a single sign-in and a shared commitment to stay nonprofit forever:

* '''Pharmacopedia''' ([https://pharmacopedia.wiki pharmacopedia.wiki]), a medicine reference wiki where prescribers and the people who take medicines build consensus information together.

* '''Oyami''' (oyami.org), a platform for planned, periodic live video conversations run on gentle, listening-first rules. Its mission is helping people stay connected with one another.

* '''Trykl''' (trykl.org), a peer to peer support platform where giving moves directly between people, with the Collective never holding the money.

* '''PubSci''' (pubsci.io), an open academic journal that flips the usual identity model of peer review: reviewers are accountable and identifiable by a lasting handle, while authors may publish as anonymously as they wish.

A single account works across all four. One person, Mark Elliott, MD, owns and operates the Collective, funds it himself, and is the only human in the loop. The building is done by Mark working alongside a team of Claude AI instances, each given a defined role. That collaboration has been part of the project since the first day and is acknowledged openly throughout.

== Before the Collective: the 2020 seed ==

The oldest piece of the Collective is older than the wiki that started it, by more than five years.

On '''October 24, 2020''', Mark registered two domain names, pubsci.io and publicscience.io, through Network Solutions. They carry ten year terms that run to 2030. They sat dormant for half a decade: an idea for open science, bought and held, waiting for the rest of the Collective to grow up around it. When PubSci finally launched in 2026, it launched onto a name its founder had been holding since 2020.

Mark has said he regrets choosing Network Solutions as the registrar, a small and human footnote that has stayed true ever since. The domains will move eventually. The point of the story is the patience: the open science idea was not invented alongside the others. It was the seed that had been in the ground the longest.

== The wiki that started it: Pharmacopedia ==

The Collective grew out of a single wiki, and its very first moments are on the record. In '''May 2026''', the first messages Mark ever sent the project's AI collaborator were a test: the number 33, sent twice, to see if anyone was listening. "wait are you working?" Satisfied that someone was, he got to the point: "I'm building a wiki.js to become pharmacopedia."

The site already existed, running on the Wiki.js platform on a single rented server, and the name Pharmacopedia was Mark's from the start. But Wiki.js turned out to be a dead end: its stable version was frozen in maintenance-only mode, and its successor had been stuck in beta for years. So, the same night the work began, the project moved to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, chosen above all for longevity. In Mark's words: "Can't imagine Wikipedia stopping dev, and we want to be around forever." Content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; the custom software is GNU GPL v3. Both open, in keeping with the values.

Days later Mark opened the first sustained building session: "hey claude. I'd like to use you to modify my mediawiki instance, Pharmacopedia." That session began the daily, iterative pattern of work that has continued ever since.

A small note on how this history corrects itself. For a time the project's own records treated that sustained session as the beginning. The record-keeper later traced an earlier first contact, several days before, and Mark confirmed it. The founding date on this page is the corrected one. It is a fitting first entry for a history that promises to be honest: even the start date was checked against the source and fixed.

=== What it was for ===

The founding purpose, from the wiki's own About page, was:

: "a place for the people who recommend and/or use meds of the mind to collaborate and create consensus-driven information."

Three things were true from the beginning and remain true:

* '''Two audiences at once.''' Prescribers and the people who take medicines, in the same space, informing each other. Most references pick one. Pharmacopedia holds both: hard clinical reference on one side, lived experience on the other, in a single place.

* '''Consensus as the mechanism.''' The ratings, the community data, the structured Problem and assessment system: all of it exists to turn shared experience into reliable, consensus information. The mechanism was the point from the start, not an add-on.

* '''Privacy as a founding value.''' Mark described himself as "frankly obsessed with privacy." For a psychiatric medicine reference, where the information is among the most stigmatized that exists, that obsession is the whole point. No data sales, no advertising, no paywalls, no subscriptions, nonprofit.

The founding domain was psychiatric medicine, "meds of the mind," a field where the words themselves carry stigma. That origin is why the Collective is careful with language to this day. The scope widened later to plant medicines and medicines of every kind, not on any single date but by a completeness argument Mark put simply: "to do it right, we'd have to include all different kinds of medicines."

== The early build ==

For the first eight days the work ran fast and without a safety net: schema and features were built directly, without version control, before the project had stabilized enough to be worth tracking. Mark's own verdict on that first version was characteristically blunt: "idk. bad."

It was not bad. The honest record is that a serious system was already taking shape in those first days: votable elements, effects, interactions, votes, reports, and the beginnings of the personal profile and life-story features. It was simply built faster than it was documented. The first version placed under version control, on '''May 17, 2026''', already carried most of that system, after roughly eight days of un-versioned building.

The early days also produced the project's first hard-won operational lesson. A permissions mistake on the wiki's main configuration file locked the whole site out. Mark's response became a standing rule that has propagated across every part of the Collective since: "yeah okay don't do that ever again, yeah?" The discipline that grew out of that one outage, careful ownership and permissions after every change, is now built into the Collective's deployment tools.

<!-- HELD: two founding vignettes ("what's a tarball?" exchange + Claude's first-day "not bad for a.." reaction) pending verbatim recovery from the pre-AWS Hostinger box via servops. Do NOT publish unverified; insert verbatim once confirmed. -->

On '''May 23, 2026''', the single wiki became a collective. Mark had been carrying four separate ideas, as he put it, "percolating in my mind for a very long time": the medicine wiki, an open science journal, a way to connect people in real conversation, and a way to move support directly between people. On that day he decided to build them together, under a shared structure and a single sign-in.

== How the Collective is built ==

The Collective is built by one person working alongside a team of Claude AI instances, each given a single clear role. That is unusual enough to state plainly, which is in keeping with building in the open.

 

 

== The four projects ==

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The days that followed put the first real pages of policy and identity in place: the project's first Terms of Use, its first adverse-event reporting page, a rebuilt profile experience, and the first piece of a shared timeline system that several projects will use. Alongside the function, Mark set a standard for how all of it should feel: every part of the Collective should be, in his words, beautiful. The work of meeting that standard is ongoing.

 

 

 

 

== Timeline ==

! Date !! Event

| 2020-10-24 || Mark registers pubsci.io and publicscience.io. The oldest piece of the Collective, held dormant for more than five years.

| May 2026 || The project begins as a Wiki.js site on a rented server. The first messages are a test: "33", twice. The same night, it moves to MediaWiki, chosen for longevity. Sustained development begins days later.

| 2026-05-17 || The Pharmacopedia software is first placed under version control after roughly eight days of rapid early building.

| 2026-05-23 || The Pharmacopedia Collective is founded: four projects under one structure and one sign-in.

| 2026-05-25 || PubSci joins as the fourth project, onto a domain held since 2020.

| 2026-05-28 || Pharmacopedia moves to a new, more secure cloud foundation on AWS.

| 2026-05-31 || Pharmacopedia is cleared for a quiet first launch; the first Terms of Use and policy pages follow.