An instance of the Communipedia framework is contributory in the sense that any member of a self-selecting community will be able to submit articles. It will be possible for new articles and revisions of existing articles to be added to the Communipedia at any time. A complementary design goal has been to allow sophisticated authoring processes for articles and is at the same time easy to use. The Communipedia framework is extensible in that it is designed to allow any user to conveniently add features to its technical design. The basic element of any collection managed by a Communipedia is the document.
All documents exist as first class objects in the database server and have unique identity.
Various built-in semantic relationships between these document types are supported. A document of type article corresponds generally to what is thought of as an encyclopedia article, but also includes multimedia assets such as images, audio and video. Each article, unlike traditional encyclopedia articles, however, may be composite in the object-oriented sense, containing other articles. Allowing composite articles will allow authors to reuse existing articles in composing new ones. A document of type annotation is associated with a document of article type.