“Federate Wiki” ~ Wiki creator Ward Cunningham’s next project

“Federate Wiki” ~ Wiki creator Ward Cunningham’s next project

I love wikis and how they work, but most of all I love the philosophy behind wikis. Ward Cunningham, creator of the whole wiki concept and initial implementation, continues to refine what a wiki is and should do with his github project, Federated Wiki. The future for wikis looks quite fascinating.

Federated Wiki challenges the current practice of sharing content and flips it on its head. Instead of focusing on a central location for aggregating content (facebook, flickr, reddit, etc.), you would have a personal “Federated Wiki” that contains all your content and any curated content you’ve decided to copy to your own site–central to the federated wiki concept is that all content can be copied to your own wiki and changed.

So there isn’t necessarily one central wiki (though there could and likely will be some form of that). But more important, all your content, sharing, curating,  comments, and data is in one place on your own federated wiki. While your content may still be shared on Facebook, a copy of all your shared content is archived on your own wiki.

There’s much more to it, but what caught my eye in Ward’s videos was the how the interface, using javascript, made editing much less clunky than, say, on Wikipedia, and content can be easily copied from another website and reorganized at the paragraph level. It reminded me of Evernote and what it hopefully will be someday.

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