what docolin is
Documentation as a commons, not a product.
docolin is an open platform where every guide carries a signed record that it worked on a real system, every version is kept, and humans and AI agents read from the same source. AGPL-licensed, free forever, funded by sponsors instead of by selling you or your data.
the problem
Technical knowledge is fragmented, stale, and going invisible.
The working knowledge that used to live in forum threads, wikis, and blog posts is scattered, undated, and increasingly absorbed into AI answers with no link back and no way to tell whether it still works. The market has split in two, and both halves are failing the reader.
Machine-facing docs that disclaim accuracy
The tools that feed AI agents say outright that they can't guarantee what they serve is correct, and their pipelines are closed.
Human-facing docs that are dying or scraped
Forums decay, great wikis gatekeep, and the answers people wrote are licensed away or pulled into models with no credit.
docolin sits in the middle that neither half can occupy: current, verified, attributed, and open at the same time.
what makes it different
Built on things nothing else has.
Signed verification
Every guide carries signed records that it worked on a specific system and version, left by a real person or a named agent. Proof it works, not a popularity count.
An open commons
AGPL-licensed and un-acquirable. No private tier, no paywall: the same platform and the same content for everyone.
Attribution by construction
When an AI agent uses a guide, your name rides into the citation by design. Credit survives the machine.
The right version for your setup
Version is a retrieval key, not a guess: a Fedora 42 query never returns a Fedora 41 page, and one soft link sends an Ubuntu reader to UFW and a Fedora reader to firewalld.
owned by no one
Open by construction, so it can't be taken away.
docolin's platform code is AGPL-licensed. It can't be bought and locked down, it outlives its maintainer, and the license forces anyone who runs it to share their source. Content stays under attribution licenses; a company reading docolin through MCP doesn't inherit AGPL, it just has to keep your name on your work. This is the structural answer to what happened when a Q&A giant licensed its contributors' answers to an AI lab: docolin is constitutionally unable to do that to you.
Anyone can open a pull request or a discussion. Merges stay with the author and their invited maintainers, and abandoned guides can be forked. Admins, orgs, projects, docos: GitHub, but for documentation.
where we start
Launching with Linux. Built for everything.
Windows 10 reached end of life in October 2025, sending the biggest wave of mainstream Linux newcomers in over a decade toward help that either scares them off or can't be trusted. Linux is a focused audience whose pain the design answers directly: a structured taxonomy for the sprawl, per-setup filtering for distro and version fragmentation, and verified-working stamps that separate advice that works on your machine from advice that worked once for someone in 2019. None of the architecture is Linux-specific. It's where docolin starts, not where it ends.
what it isn't
What docolin is not.
- A replacement for Wikipedia, ArchWiki, or Stack Overflow. Their content is valuable; docolin is additive.
- A competitor to Mintlify, GitBook, or Docusaurus. Keep your docs site and mirror community content to docolin.
- An AI training company. docolin grounds AI; it doesn't sell training data.
Meet Pango.
docolin's mascot is a pangolin: overlapping scales like a structured knowledge tree, and it curls up to defend itself, like docs that actually protect the people reading them. Pango also rates your docos, a warm score from 0 to 1000 for how well a guide has held up on real systems.
pre-alpha
Built in the open. Come help.
docolin is pre-alpha and built in public under AGPL. The fastest ways to help: read a guide and stamp whether it worked, create an account and host your own, mirror your project's docs, or sponsor the infrastructure.