Smallest Federated Wiki

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= a project by Ward Cunningham: "Our new wiki innovates three ways. It shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization". [1]

Description

Ward Cunningham:

"We imagine two components:

  • a server component managing page storage and collaboration between peer servers, and,
  • a client component presenting and modifying the server state in server specific ways.

This project should be judged by the degree that it can:

  • Demonstrate that wiki would have been better had it been effectively federated from the beginning.
  • Explore federation policies necessary to sustain an open creative community."

(https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki)

Characteristics

By Phil Jones:

"SFW separates into minimal back-end server and a rich client running in the browser. That means I can host personal wikis on my local machine and public copies in the cloud, while the client can run on desktop and mobile devices.

The client and one implementation of the server are written in CoffeeScript. A language I'm using and liking a lot.

SFW supports different content-types which can have their own rendering and editing interfaces. And you can extend it with plugins that add new types. That's something I need in order to reproduce the things I did in SdiDesk and for some further projects which have never been released.

The drag-and-drop refactoring looks like it will be very useful ...

The emphasis on making "federation" easy solves dilemmas like : I'd like to keep some personal information privately in my local wiki but also use a public wiki as a publishing medium. In a sense it seems that SFW is bringing git-like distributed thinking to wiki.

Federation helps resolve the tension between running my own wiki and contributing to a group production. It further resolves similar questions about throwing everything into one wiki or making special-purpose wikis around particular topics."
(https://github.com/interstar/ThoughtStorms)

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