Federated wiki (concept)



A federated wiki is , specifically one that is where individual users help to host the content of the  themselves. The fundamental is that a  can either mirror the entire site, or some portion of the pages they find relevant, or choose to fork part of it, and accept or reject certain edits that they find more or less constructive.

In 2012, Ward Cunningham decided to introduce the Smallest Federated Wiki on GitHub to allow users to help 'federate' Ward's Wiki, or any other projects. See here. Inspired by the communal ethos at GitHub, this federated wiki concept is similar to interwiki, and MeatballWiki's idea of 'OneBigWiki'. Specifically, individual wiki pages can be created within one wiki site, but crucially, be subsequently edited by different people with differing perspectives – with each edited version being stored locally on the editors own server, but also linked back to the original article. The original page creator can chose to integrate the new edit back into their own original, or to allow the diverging edits to co-exist separately, but still linked to each other. This is totally opposite to the conventional wiki way, as is evident by the Wikipedia model (and all other Wikimedia Foundation projects). A further feature of the federated wiki is that non-wiki pages can also be incorporated into a federated wiki site.

In February 2015, a sample implementation was originally found online at:  (via archive.is). It subsequently moved to.