P2P Wiki

What's a P2P wiki

A peer-to-peer wiki is a serverless decentralized wiki, hosted, edited, administrated and operated by its users. Imagine git (or another DCVS) but with asynchronous and realtime text editing, a p2p conflict management system, and a user-friendly interface. P2P wikis redefine how we publish, edit and administrate, text (among other potential things) on the internet.

Differences to similar software types

• Realtime or asynchronous
• Full revision history with playback
• Merging, forking, branching text (for offline or online work)
• True p2p architecture
• P2P conflict management; panarchical political structure.

Examining the differences in political economy

Blogs generally administer, edited and publish content autocratically--a blogger even controls the servers, largely. While bloggers do add minor p2p or democratic elements to a blog, like p2p comment administering, they largely don't adopt a more cooperative political structures.

Wikis are generally administer more democratically, and are funded and operated by foundations. But p2p wikis go further, it's total political structure is analogous to a [panarchy].

You can have private page on say, Abraham Lincoln, solely expressing your viewpoint. Share a public version of the page and edited with solely like-minded people. Branch, merge, or fork from other version of "Abraham Lincoln" that exist.

The blogosphere's enclosing of the knowledge commons

Crediting ideas and insights to one's name, accrues status or social recognition to oneself. Overtime one is seen as an expert, guru or authority. and can gain a mass following or personality cult. This is a form of enclosing the knowledge commons, political, economic and cultural to individuals, who often copyright the work.

Wiki's see knowledge differently. While a single individual can make large and unequal contributions relative to others, the work is ultimately credited and possessed (or owned) by all; copylefted.

Approaches to P2P Wiki

One approach to doing this is using a distributed revision control system as a backend of the wiki, in peer-to-peer style. With this approach, there is no central store of the wiki's content; instead, every user can keep a complete copy of the wiki locally, and the software handles merging and propagating of changes when they are made. This is the approach taken by the ikiwiki engine (which can use the distributed revision control system [1] as its back-end), and Code Co-op (a distributed revision control system that includes a wiki component).

There has also been research done on allowing Wikipedia to be run as a decentralized wiki, and on modifying the application XWiki to function in this way.. And there other approaches: modifying Apache (formerly Google Wave), web apps like Etherpad, or desktop text editing software like SubEthaEdit. None of these technologies integrate all the features of a p2p wiki, as of yet.

External Links

• Meatball on P2P wikis
• C2 wiki's article and discussion
• Research paper on decentralizing Wikipedia
• Updated paper decentralizing Wikipedia
• Mercurial extension enabling p2p-wiki functions
• Project Boullion, an Apache Wave like project
• A serverless wiki
• P2Ping Google (Apache Wave)