The wiki embodies Ward Cunningham’s approach to solving complex, urgent problems (analogous to Doug Engelbart’s conceptual framework). With the Wikipedia adopting his technology, I think it’s fair to say that he achieved a great deal of it (1, 2), himself having been inspired by HyperCard. In contrast to the popular MediaWiki software package, Ward’s most recent wiki implementation is decentralized in acknowledgement of the sovereignity, independence and autonomy of participants on the network. Contributions to a collective effort and the many different perspectives need to be federated of course, hence the name “Federated Wiki”.

Ward’s Federated Wiki concept offers quite some unrealized potential when it comes to an Open Hyperdocument System and Ward is fully aware of it, which in itself is testament to the deep insights of his. The hypertext aspects don’t get mentioned too often in his talks, and why should they, work on (linked) data is equally important. Ward has some ideas for what we would call ViewSpecs (39:15), revision history (41:30) – although more thinking could go into this, federating (43:36), capability infrastructure (44:44) and the necessary libre-free licensing not only of the content, but also the corresponding software (45:46-47:39). Beyond the Federated Wiki project, it might be beneficial to closely study other wiki proposals too.

I guess it becomes pretty aparent that I need to start my own Federated Wiki instance as joining a wiki farm is probably not enough. I hate blogging because the way the text is stored and manipulated, but I keep doing it for now until I get a better system set up and because WordPress is libre-freely licensed software as well as providing APIs I can work with, so at some point in the future I’ll just export all of the posts and convert them to whatever the new platform/infrastructure will be. On the blog, capabilities like allowing others to correct/extend my texts directly are missing, similar to distributed source code management as popularized by git/GitHub (forking, pull requests). For now, I do some small experimentation on skreutzer.tries.fed.wiki.

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