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 Invalid interwiki: interwiki not set up for a similar approach.

And never forget what they did to wikiwikiweb. Slaughter.

Links

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

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.

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 — meaning that it is “born shareable” the moment someone publishes it, making it available to the federation of sites.

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

The Fedwiki recordkeeping “journal” 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]]

Fed Wiki

fedwiki

Links

FedWiki

Functionality

Criticism