My upshot was: sci-hub/libgen is a civic database. It exists. Frankly, its current content is some of the most important content that could populate any database.
Given that, what are the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping it from burning down the way previous civic databases did?
Judging by the responses I got, there may not currently be enough public policy domain expertise on HN for such an effort to succeed. (And almost surely not enough time to organize before it burns down.) But I think it's still worth pursuing, if only to begin to generate that experience in the first place.
Whatever the case, if you're talking about which data fields ought to populate which structs, you're quite far afield from the effort I was trying to describe. That's why I started by asking: what would a cipherpunk not do? That was meant to be tongue in cheek, but let's take it seriously and call it plaintextpunk. :)