πŸ“š node [[ward cunningham]]

Ward Cunningham

[[social-knowledge-graphs-discussion]]

  • [[Wiki]]
    • Had experience with Smalltalk, amassed over several months of undirected exploration
    • People asked for the gist of Smalltalk to learn it over two days. How to condense months of learning in a format that makes that possible?
    • The initial pattern repository came from that (influenced by [[christopher alexander]]).
  • "Made this thing over a weekend because people were sending me things by email that didn't render right" -- called it wiki because it meant "fast".
    • "If I make this stupid simple" -- people won't think I tried hard, but they will have the tools to "fix it".
  • [[Tended]] to the wiki a few hours a day -- in the time between "proper work". But that tending paid off.
  • For long, people could have thrashed but didn't. Then someone did, and people just tended to it.
  • The environment that resulted was very [[creative]]. Lots of vocabulary was coined right there.
  • When Wikipedia came along, it did the right things:
    • They made it in every language
    • They were bold (paraphrase)
  • Spinning off wikis out of wikis
    • Wiki on wiki (meta)
    • Religion wiki
  • Taking pages and refactoring, cross-linking -- that's the core of federated wiki.
  • In a federated wiki, queries propagate -- pages include a history on which wikis have hosted the wiki previously. If a page vanishes, it can be found in a previous version.
  • "When you're talking about yourself, talk of yourself as we"
  • Google-like analytics were interesting
    • Tried not to pay attention.
    • Bone (sp?) dialog: you talk to the center of the room, not to any particular person. It's good for sharing, giving.
  • Some people wanted to put graphs in wiki
  • Federated wiki has a few thousand sites on it, 25-30 get daily updates and host vibrant communities and might be interested in your project.
    • Links are the title of the page
    • But if you retrieve a page from some other wiki, it fans out/ripples
    • The sites you pull from become part of your neighborhood
    • When you search, you can choose to "pull" pages into your sites
    • People might turn out to maintain several sites, specialized on topics
  • If you go to your unicycle page, it will mention there are N pages about unicycle in your neighborhood
  • http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/wiki-as-knowledge-graph.html

Ward Cunningham visiting Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, October 2011. Photo by Matthew Roth. [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ward_Cunningham_1.jpg wikipedia]

I'm enjoying reading more in [[The Federation]]. Here is a place that I can fork content without concern for the information architecture that results.

See my [[Active Journal]]

I'm inspired by Mike Caulfields willingness to make sites. I'll start by forking from his [[Journal for 2014]].

I've co-hosted Mike's December 2014 happening with many amazing educational technologists. Many of the pages here were written during this effort.

Wards Writing

Roster

ROSTER ward.bay.wiki.org/welcome-visitors

See also

I wrote [[Federated Wiki]] while I served as Nike's open-data fellow. I currently work for [[NewRelic]] in Portland, Oregon.

We share an interest in the continued growth in federated wiki as an important concept and in the open codebase that demonstrates its advantages.

Here we collect advice for operating wiki sites for others. Computers and networks vary so we stop short of step by step instructions. We report what has worked for us using the privileges available to system administrators.

These pages chronicle the Smallest Federated Wiki project and report its latest achievements with a series of short screencasts.

Catalog of federated wiki sites with domain names for page titles and brief descriptions tuned for search.

β₯… node [[c2]] pulled by user

C2

β₯… node [[fedwiki]] pulled by user

FedWiki is the project of a federated [[wiki]], or a federation of wikis, led by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the first wiki.

I generally dislike FedWiki for its JS-heavy unintuitive and non-robust UI, poor support of mobiles and bad UX. It was kinda easier to find content to read on a //classic wiki//. Not sure about editing, you can't edit someone's fedwiki, you gotta set up your own to publish your forks of pages.

The community is mostly puzzled with adding more and more plugins to the ecosystem. I sometimes visit their meetings. Great people, I like their company! Added in 2023: I no longer visit the meetings.

Another thing to dislike about FedWiki is their dialect of [[Markdown]] which is barely compatible with Markdown at all, it is actually closer to [[Gemtext]]. I hate that they have the audacity to call it Markdown. Just give it a name! You sure made markups before, Ward, don't be shy.

Despite my dislike, the project is still respectable. First of all, it is ten years old. This is impressive. Also, that paned interface is cute. See [[Cartographist]] for a similar approach.

And never forget what they did to wikiwikiweb. Slaughter.

= Links => http://about.fed.wiki/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federated-wiki | An attempt at explaining what it is

=> https://www.freefairandalive.org/read-it/#8

people using Fedwiki sites are like gardeners or farmers. They can plant as many fields or gardens as they want, and reap the harvest from their own Fedwiki, but anyone else can also use someone’s harvest to enhance their own fields and gardens. Instead of toiling under a regime of private, competitive exclusion, the system encourages cooperative gains through commoning

=> https://wiki.cafe FedWiki hosting.

FedWiki

– about federated wiki

Smallest Federated Wiki Goals

  • Demonstrate that wiki would have been better had it been effectively federated from the beginning.
  • Explore federation policies necessary to sustain an open creative community.

I very much like FedWiki and [[federated wikis]] as a principle.

However, a downside of FedWiki (as far as I understand it) is that it is one platform, one tool, that facilitates the federation. A monoculture.

I would prefer a more distributed, protcol-based approach. [[Agora]] works in this sense as each individual can write their garden whichever way they see fit, and just needs to fit in to some accepted formatting protocols to be aggregated.

See also the [[IndieWeb]] approach, where the onus is less on aggregation and more on a certain protocol of communication.

See [[Interlinking wikis]].

FedWiki does seem to offer much simpler actions for copying content from one wiki to another. Agora doesn't have this built in as such. IndieWeb maybe more so (retweets, quotes, likes, etc, are catered to through webmentions)

Functionality

All content posted on Fedwiki sites is automatically licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license upon publi- cation β€” meaning that it is β€œborn shareable” the moment someone publishes it, making it available to the federation of sites.

– [[A Platform Designed for Collaboration: Federated Wiki]]

The Fedwiki recordkeeping β€œjournal” tracks who has posted what, so authorship can be chronicled even if people make mashups of someone else’s content.

– [[A Platform Designed for Collaboration: Federated Wiki]]

The Fedwiki commons does have one vulnerability to outside control that it has not, as yet, been able to evade: the authentication of digital identity. Because of the complexities of providing a commons-friendly alternative, Cunningham and his colleagues have relied on the identity systems developed by Google and Facebook that function as a default for many sites on the internet.

– [[A Platform Designed for Collaboration: Federated Wiki]]

Criticism

πŸ“– stoas
β₯± context