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 [1]) but with asynchronous and real-time text editing, a p2p conflict management system, and a user-friendly interface. P2P Wikis redefine how we publish, edit, host and administrate text document type pages (among other things). There's a long history of proposals for this type of technology. [2]

Differences to existing text collaboration systems

• Real-time or asynchronous (Online and offline editing).
• Granular revision history with playback.
• Merging, forking, branching of text/documents; allows a panarchical political meta-structure, like in the (FLOSS) software world.
• P2P conflict management.
• True P2P Architecture
• Hosting, administration, funding, computing power, and content created by and for user.

The Blogosphere and Political Economy

Blogs (and personal websites) generally administer, edited and publish content autocratically--a blogger often controls the servers too. While bloggers do add p2p or quasi-democratic elements to a blog, like p2p comment administering, they largely don't adopt an overall cooperative-type political structure.

Wikis are generally administered more democratically. And (large ones) are funded and operated by quasi-democratic non-profit charity foundations. Despite this, because of the centralized nature of current wiki technologies, large Wikis in particular, have somewhat autocratic political structure. [3] This is a consequence of the structure of the web and internet, other things, as it stands today. P2P Wikis change that. It's political meta-structure is analogous to a Panarchy.

Why P2P Wikis?

You can have a private page on say "Abraham Lincoln" solely expressing your viewpoint; analogous to a hermetic autocracy. You can publicly share the page and only give write access to a small group of known like-minded peers; that's like tribal band-sized anarchy. Branching, merging, or forking of content allows many types of social organization ecologies.

The Blogosphere's Enclosing of the Knowledge Commons

The conceptualization and crediting ideas and insights to one's name, accrues status, social recognition/reputational benefits to oneself. As this process accumulates, one is eventually regarded as an expert, guru or authority. A mass following or personality cult can develop around the individual. This encloses the knowledge commons. And it rearranges political, economic and cultural organization for the interests of individuals, who often copyright the work. This is a process that largely goes unnoticed.

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 with collectively possession.

Micro-Possession of Wiki Content

Decentralized revision controlled systems like the git have a deeper revision granularity than centralized systems. It stores the delta or diff and can be conceptualized as a filesystem. [4] [5] This opens up a potential for micro-ownership of the Wiki content, eventually down to a single text character.

Blogs and the Self-Help World: A Case Study of Political Enclosure

The personal development, self-help, new age and lifestyle design field is broadly organized around individuals' books and websites/blogs. That creates the grounds for a meta-structure of competing autocracies in that world. It commonly revolved around popular figures with mass following of highly emulative and adulative followers. Popular figures derive power primarily from perceived expertise and knowledge. But both followers and the leader can't see the socio-political-cultural implications of a personality cult type structure. In fact, it they believe their social relations are completely democratic. In reality it is part authoritarian. [6] [7] [8]

Approaches to creating a 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. [9] [10] [11] 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. [12] [13] This is the approach taken by the ikiwiki engine (which can use the distributed revision control system [14] as its back-end), and Code Co-op (a distributed revision control system that includes a wiki component).

There's research on decentralized hosting of Wikipedia. [15] [16] [17] And there are other angles to attack the problem: modifying Apache (formerly Google Wave) [18], through serverless XMPP, or web apps like EtherPad [19] [20], and desktop text editing software like SubEthaEdit. None of these technologies integrate all the features of a p2p wiki as of yet.

Projects/Software

• ikiwiki, a serverless wiki
• Federated Wiki (Ward Cunningham)
• Gollum, a git wiki
• Git-Wiki
• Project Bouillon, an Apache Wave like project
• Peer Net