Documenting the Unknown: Inside the PlayStation Dev Wiki

There’s an assumption about the internet. That once something is online, it stays there forever. In reality, the opposite is often true. Forums disappear. File hosts shut down. Guides vanish. And with them, decades of hard-earned knowledge quietly slip away. That’s the problem Derf has been working to solve.As the maintainer of the PlayStation Developer Wiki and the driving force behind the ConsoleMods Wiki, Derf sits at the centre of a sprawling, often invisible effort to preserve the technical knowledge behind some of gaming’s most iconic hardware. Alongside collaborators like CrunchBite, his work ensures that everything from low-level system documentation to practical repair guides doesn’t just survive, but remains accessible.In this interview, I talked to Derf about the reality of “link rot,” the challenges of maintaining community knowledge in the age of AI scraping, and why documenting how these systems work might be just as important as preserving the games themselves.An…