Ward Cunningham is into this kind of thing, and its partly why he semi-retired the original wiki (c2.com) in pursuit of a decentralized wiki. But I don't get his "federated" version.
It's hard enough coordinating centralized content. Forking giant balls of content and creating bunches of parallel versions just makes a messy problem messier. Decentralization won't solve the down-sides of his original wiki. I have various suggestions for dealing with the downsides of that wiki that would take a while to explain, but they include, among other things, easy clone-ability (mass export), and custom "favorites" and "dis-favorites" lists. One could comment on and rank pages/topics/sections on their own server, but otherwise leave the original content centralized. If you like a specific commentator/ranker, you "subscribe" to their particular filter.
It's hard enough coordinating centralized content. Forking giant balls of content and creating bunches of parallel versions just makes a messy problem messier. Decentralization won't solve the down-sides of his original wiki. I have various suggestions for dealing with the downsides of that wiki that would take a while to explain, but they include, among other things, easy clone-ability (mass export), and custom "favorites" and "dis-favorites" lists. One could comment on and rank pages/topics/sections on their own server, but otherwise leave the original content centralized. If you like a specific commentator/ranker, you "subscribe" to their particular filter.