
Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham develops federated wiki - dctoedt
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/
======
nicholassmith
I think this could lead to a lot of interesting possibilities but I'll focus
on one.

Lets say you're on Wikipedia and for example want to know about the
assassination of J.F.K, the Wiki article contains most of the stock facts and
so on, but lets say you want to know about the really crazy and out there
conspiracy theories of Hoover and aliens and so on, a federated system would
allow people to set their own page up and you can continue through to it. The
sort of content that sends most Wikipedia moderators into catatonic seizures
indexed and available.

There's plenty of other uses out there, I just think it's an interesting point
that it'll allow anyone with enough time on their hands to create an archive
of what they think is relevant as a counterpoint to what someone else thinks
is relevant. Don't like the standard descriptor? Normally you'd have to fit a
wiki mod, fork it off and have it as a counter point.

~~~
derleth
> The sort of content that sends most Wikipedia moderators into catatonic
> seizures indexed and available.

The reason it is anathema to the Wikipedia concept is because Wikipedia wants
its name on good content, not Alex Jones JOOZ-DID-IT (Oh, and Aliens-Big-
Pharma-Bilderberger-USPS-Did-9/11 Too) bullshit, unless such bullshit is
clearly marked as coming from a specific minority viewpoint.

I think that's a great reason to keep the crap on the current version of
Wikipedia to a minimum: The world is confusing, especially when there are
people like Alex Jones out there trying to make it more confusing to sell more
videos. Having something where you have a good chance of getting the Sane
People Version of controversial (or only-controversial-because-of-the-crazies)
topics is invaluable if you want somewhere to start. Especially if it's a
topic that books aren't really written about, like specific health scams.

So the Federated Wiki universe will need some way to mark specific forks of
articles as being from a given group of people, so people aren't mislead into
thinking that the sane editors approve of the version of reality Alex Jones is
selling the gullible.

~~~
klint
I agree that some way to remove links to forks that are spam or that you find
reprehensible is a good idea, but the whole point of forking instead of
editing is that the forks _aren't_ approved.

As I said elsewhere, I (nor the people I quoted) meant to represent this as an
alternative to Wikipedia itself. I'd see it more as some that a wiki farm like
Wikia could use to allow editors to put more of their own perspective into an
article (that's my opinion, not the Smallest Federated Wiki developers'
opinion).

~~~
derleth
> the forks aren't approved.

I get this. My whole point is that it needs to be very obvious where a fork
comes from and what else the people responsible for it are responsible for.

------
drone
... and then the spammers have a field day: on every page, a list of 10,000
forks, re-titled with names like "Luis Vitton CHEAP$!$" and "U 2 can aFf0rd
Rolex!"

Interesting idea when all players are playing by the same rules and with the
same intent. Not as appealing when the most active are there simply to
generate noise.

~~~
SwellJoe
This has been a problem for every Internet service everywhere ever. That
hasn't stopped email from being useful, forums from being useful, traditional
wikis (weird to say "traditional wikis", now that there's a new kind of wiki)
from being useful, websites from being useful, etc.

The spam problem _always_ has to be solved. That said, very active wikis have
shown themselves to be _more_ resistant to spammers than most online services.
Because anyone can remove the spam, there's a pretty high cost to keeping the
spam flowing, particularly if there are sufficient impediments to automation
in place.

~~~
drone
Of course every non-moderated service has spam, that was kinda the point of my
post... Maybe the part you missed was that they introduced a new way of
spamming via forking pages... I don't think I ever made any allusions to
something not happening because of it. Thanks for the pep talk though, I'll
keep it in mind as I do my nightly task of helping clean up spam on the sites
where I moderate.

~~~
SwellJoe
Spamming via forking seems, to me, to be very similar to trackback spam on
blogs. But, yes, it will probably require a bit of novelty in terms of how one
fights it.

------
roguecoder
It seems odd to me to focus on Wikipedia as the comparison point, but then
again I was on C2 back-in-the-day and have always seen the quintessential wiki
as a superior version of a forum rather than Wikipedia. If we are comparing to
currently-active technology, I would argue that the federated wiki concept has
the potential to bring tumblr or del.icio.us style contributions to a
different, longer-form audience.

I do worry that the federated concept will make authorship too important. The
lack of permanent credit on C2 was part of what made it valuable: people more
often wrote things to contribute value when they didn't have the motivation of
scoring points, gaining karma or making a name for themselves.

------
e12e
TFP _:<http://wardcunningham.github.com/>

_ in the spirit of slashdot: the fucking project

~~~
e12e
TFC: <https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki>

------
mark_l_watson
A little off topic, but a friend of mine had a dinner conversation with Ward
Cunningham and refactoring expert Ralph Johnson a few months ago and posted it
on youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqGYoKvekik> The video could have
used some editing (shorter!) but has some interesting parts.

------
emperorcezar
"To run The Simplest Federated Wiki, you’ll need your own web server, which
Cunningham thinks is an important part of the project."

Sounded great till that point. He's putting his own nerd centric bias into it.
If I'm a history guy, not a tech guy, and I want to "fork", asking me to run
my own "server" or whatever is a non-starter.

~~~
nicholassmith
Smart money says if there's demand for it people will be able to buy custom
instances with it for a variable amount of money.

~~~
sp332
FTA: _To make Federated Wiki easier to adopt, there’s a one-click installer to
deploy a server to Amazon Web Services._

~~~
nicholassmith
Ah I missed that, saved the full thing for later.

~~~
klint
Here's the one-click installer if you're interested:
[https://stackhammer.cloudsmith.com/tools/quickdeploy.html#fe...](https://stackhammer.cloudsmith.com/tools/quickdeploy.html#federated-
wiki)

------
rocky1138
Also: wikipedia offers its entire content available as a tarball. Fork and run
with it as you wish. While not "federated" it's pretty damn open.

~~~
J3L2404
Holy smokes, how big is it?

~~~
_delirium
8 GB bzip2-compressed, for the English Wikipedia, if you download the dump
that contains only the current revisions of article-space pages. Much bigger
if you want the one with every historical revision.

~~~
J3L2404
Thanks. Important to mention that is text only.

------
duskwuff
As I see it, one of the biggest benefits of traditional wikis' linear history
was that it fostered quick back-and-forth collaboration between users. Unless
there's a strong mechanism for discovering changes made by other users, a
forking model seems like it'd rapidly result in a bunch of different (and
potentially non-mergeable) versions of any page.

------
pessimizer
Could this be layered on top of the current Wikipedia through browser plugins?
And how would discoverability work in the context of 10,000 current versions
of a wiki page? It's hard enough when there's 30 different forks on github.

edit: federated search, federated social? How would the system prevent search
gaming and social gaming?

~~~
morsch
It's a bit too early to worry about 10k forks for a single page, isn't it? The
typical use cases -- certainly the early ones, when it's not widespread --
might involve numbers of forks that aren't too different from GitHub.

------
irunbackwards
Much better headline than the one actually on Wired, "Wiki Inventor Sticks a
Fork in His Baby."

------
Jhonbxl
If the problem is having the knowledge hosted in one place only, controlled by
"one" person only, the solution should be to decentralize, not make everyone
able to copy it everywhere. Plus, this solution seems to add more work to the
contributors, since you'll need to review each fork/edit and choose which to
merge or not.

On the other hand, a wiki working like a P2P network, where everyone hosts the
same version and edits are automatically propagated accros the web would solve
the "problem" without adding more job on contributors.

------
Vitaly
Instead of plain EC2 installer t needs a Heroku Installe. Then anyone can have
it running for essentially free in no time

------
pella
see "In praise of cooperation without coordination: Clay Shirky at TEDGlobal
2012"

 _"The result is Git, distributed version control, which Shirky is here to
explain to us. It’s a distributed workflow that brings chaos back into the
system. Yet there’s a beautiful innovation to ensure that said chaos doesn’t
promptly override said system: a signature that creates a unique identifier
for every single exchange. This enables cooperation without coordination. “I
tell you this not because it is great that open-source programmers now have a
tool that supports their philosophical way of working,” Shirky says. “I tell
you all of this because of what it means for how communities come together.”"_

[http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/29/in-praise-of-cooperation-
with...](http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/29/in-praise-of-cooperation-without-
coordination-clay-shirky-at-tedglobal-2012/)

------
zimbatm
So where is the link to the actual project ?

~~~
zimbatm
<http://wardcunningham.github.com/>

------
6ren
With always-on, always-connected devices everywhere, we are not that far from
every device being a web-server by default, and every device being a router
for web traffic.

Data storage, and even computation may be centralized in the cloud... but why
not distributed distribution?

~~~
seiji
Ye olde, but still worth watching: Van Jacobson's Google Talk from 2006, "A
New Way to look at Networking": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg>

------
p_sherman
Holy mother of misleading titles.

------
kzrdude
When I talked with Ward in 2005, he mentioned his vision of a Wiki had a
continuum of pages where he said you could take a page and browse the
different "directions" people had edited it to.

~~~
tokenizer
That sounds interesting, but useless. I only want to see the most 'correct'
version. It's almost as if saying when you use an app you can also use many of
the apps versions, including its beta or alpha, regardless of how incorrect or
useless they are with the current version.

I also think that information needs to be organized and many of his ideas make
the collection or the organization of information almost impossible.

But nevertheless very interesting.

~~~
rytis
Did you notice that most articles on Wikipedia, although mostly 'correct', are
very dry? And this is because they try to be as 'correct' as possible. But it
brings to a point where some (most??) users can't use it comfortably anymore.
Think children, who are trying to find some basic information about the
subject they are interested in. My 8yo recently has gone through the
'dinosaurs' stage. Drawings, books, stories, films. You think she found this
fascinating: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur> ?? Nope. Here comes in
the federated version, with 'alternative' of the story. Tailored for the
4-10yo audience. Is it less 'correct'? Perhaps. But useful nonetheless.

~~~
iand
Wikipedia already has alternate versions of articles such as
<https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur>

Something similar could be done for various reading ages.

------
webwanderings
Didn't I see something from Dave Winer doing similar thing for Twitter,
personal stream?

------
Nux
"To make Federated Wiki easier to adopt, there’s a one-click installer to
deploy a server to Amazon Web Services." <\- oh yeah, super-federated.

~~~
sp332
What's not federated about that? And obviously you don't have to run it on
EC2, that's just the easiest way at the moment.

------
themonk
webring?

------
derleth
I don't see how this is anti-Wikipedia. But I suppose conflict sells, so
linkbait (to be clear, linkbait on the part of _Wired_ , not the submitter)
titles like these are inevitable.

Also, for a lot of people, 'wiki' is simply short for 'Wikipedia'. That's
unlikely to change at this point. I don't know what Ward can do to make a
Federated Wiki (great name, BTW) achieve any kind of success with that kind of
barrier.

~~~
klint
I'm the author of the article, and I can see why people got confused. I don't
think Max Ogden was implying that it's a bad thing that you have to give up
your view point on Wikipedia - and Ward Cunngingham definitely didn't imply
that in my conversation with him. I regret that readers thought that. I don't
think either Ogden or Cunningham are expecting this to replace Wikipedia, but
they are hoping that it will be useful for other wikis.

------
J3L2404
Forking does not lead to spooning. This sounds like it will quickly become an
impenetrable rat's nest. Better to fight it out on the one true source,
Wikipedia.

~~~
sp332
The Internet is already made of "rat's nests" like these. DNS records, BGP
route tables, cross-domain embedding, all of these are pulling together
information from lots of inconsistent sources to render a page in your
browser, and it works pretty well.

~~~
J3L2404
Google is a rats nest but you can eventually find what you want, I go to
Wikipedia first.

~~~
sp332
The problem Wikipedia is having at the moment is that some people have taken
over sections of it as their own "turf". And there will always be a holy war
between the completionists and the deletionists, etc. With a federated wiki,
you get to pick what kind of info you want to see, and who gets to curate it.

~~~
evangineer
If deletionists had been running the show when Wikipedia got started, it would
have failed.

------
sdfjkl
At last you can fork the truth and make your own version of it. I imagine this
will be a hit with governments everywhere.

