Traditional knowledge
Refers to the knowledge, know-how, practices, and cultural expressions developed, sustained, and passed down within an Indigenous or local community, often across many generations and often bound up with cultural and spiritual identity. It can include ecological and medicinal knowledge, stories, songs, designs, ceremonies, and the language itself.
What makes TK matter for the tools on this wiki is that it usually does not fit the assumptions baked into Western intellectual-property law and mainstream technology. Copyright assumes a single author, a fixed work, a limited term, and an eventual public domain. Much traditional knowledge is instead collectively held, has no single "author," is meant to last indefinitely, and may be governed by community-specific protocols about who may know or share it, when, and how. Some of it not may not be intended for open circulation at all. Treating such material as ordinary "data" to be scraped, published, or fed to a model can violate those protocols even when nothing illegal has occurred.
This is why TK sits at the center of Data sovereignty and consent, and why frameworks like the CARE principles exist. It is also why tools like Mukurtu CMS build in fine-grained, culturally-grounded access control rather than a simple public/private switch, and why Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels (a way to attach community provenance and usage expectations to digital materials) were created.