Short Summary
Fed Wiki is the next generation wiki. It is a software that allows anyone to create individual wiki pages while circulating their content on a global, federated platform. FedWiki opens multiple paths for individual knowledge organization while demanding equal responsibility for contributing to a knowledge commons. This knowledge commons emerges out of many thousands of wiki sites to which participants contribute freely.Website address: fed.wiki.org/view/federated-wiki
Location: USA-based, but used worldwide
Creator: Ward Cunningham
"The philosophy that drives me forward is this notion that we can all be unique but we can still make wise choices together." (Ward Cunningham)
Profile
As Ward Cunningham, the "father" of the Fed Wiki, describes: “Federated Wiki sites share pages circulating within a creative commons.”
A single-page browser application reads from many sites at once and saves changes in that browser. Users can host their own sites, on which they edit and organize their knowledge. They can also share back to the federation.
The tools for refactoring and sharing are "hard to learn but easy to use.” "Drags 'n' drops" and "forks" are omnipresent. The software, published as a Node.js package, runs on a variety of platforms. It can be used on a personal laptop or an industrial server.
Fed Wiki invites "visitors" to explore the wiki pluriverse and take any point of view, without having to conform to the version presented on, say, a Wikipedia page.
Cunningham describes the aspirations of the project: "Just as the wiki changed how people write, Fed Wiki will change how people work." It aims to:
- Support communities in a digital environment
- Bring people & knowledge together in a common space while conserving their individual space
- Share data among people with different points of view, recognizing that there is no such thing as neutrality in data
"We work in the present using only a few of the best technologies likely to last a decade. Our most valued resource, the basis of replication, is kept simple as it must outlive the computers and networks we use to create and transport it." (Ward Cunningham)
Fed Wiki innovates (source):
- through federation, as opposed to plagiarism
- through composition by refactoring, rather than editing (which undoes previous work)
- by "[wrapping] data with visualization"
YOUTUBE 3nB8ml6UowE Keynote about Fed Wiki by Ward Cunningham in May 2015.
YOUTUBE BdwLczSgvcc Cunningham discusses Fed Wiki at TedxPortland in 2012.
Governance
A Creative Commons license protects Fed Wiki as a commons. The more people use Fed Wiki, the more valuable it becomes for everybody’s needs.Fed Wiki allows each individual user to consciously integrate other people's contributions into their own content. This integration only works one way: you can add other people's content to your Fed Wiki, but cannot add your content to others’ Fed Wikis (in contrast to traditional Wikis).
Fed Wiki users can claim individual ownership of the published version if they wish to do so. On these sites they are the only ones allowed to make changes and edit.
According to the main developers:
"We add flexibility with plugin modules and longevity with peer-to-peer hosting. We design for creative dissent where revision of the work of others is the norm and a sign of both respect and progress. We intend this to be a place where our culture solves its most pressing problems."
"We embrace proliferation and focus on mechanisms to make this seem natural. In this way we depart from computing tradition."
Friends & Partners
- Nike's Sustainable Business and Innovation group, which supported its data visualization and sharing. Cunningham wrote Fed Wiki while he was the Nike Open Data Fellow.
- Sustasis Foundation, for which Ward Cunningham is a board member. See their page on Fed Wiki.