Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham develops federated wiki
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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.
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).
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.
I am a Wikipedian. I edit sporadically these days, after being really active when I first started editing. Before I began editing, I read whole books about the history of Wikipedia and its internal processes. Because of the anarchy of how Wikipedia started out, with the typical Wikipedian having NIL research and editing experience (not even the research and editing experience implied by getting an undergraduate degree at a research university), you can find plenty of crazy on Wikipedia already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
And of course blatantly false assertions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have already stood on Wikipedia for a long time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04seelye.html...
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-11-wikipedia-apolo...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy...
The Deletionpedia experiment,
http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
which seems to have fizzled out, was an archive of pages deleted from Wikipedia, in an attempt to make volunteer Wikipedia editors ("Wikipedians") more accountable for deleting articles. The result of the Deletionpedia experiment was to show that most content that is deleted from Wikipedia well deserves to be deleted, and probably doesn't serve any reader in any useful way anywhere on the Internet.
The Internet is already flooded with counterpoints. It's bad enough that in important subjects (for example, medical research) most of the best published literature is not available on the Internet (it is still behind publisher paywalls), while a lot of scam artists flood the Internet with websites that exist only to sell something that cheats consumers.
I do look forward to seeing how Ward Cunningham's experiment develops. MeatballWiki introduced some thoughtful discussion of online communities to the broader online world,
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/OnlineCommunity
and that was enabled by the innovation of wiki sites, that any user could edit a webpage already posted on the site. There is a place for wikis, and some wikis are very helpful,
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Wiki/index.php/Main_Page
but the last thing the world needs is more content forks for crazy points of view that get edited off of Wikipedia.
Counterpoints seem to survive in ideological communities that have their own closed world view and their own knowledge databases which are considered to be definitive.
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.
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.
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.
in the spirit of slashdot: the fucking 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.
TL;DR good companies make life easy for people who want it without hassle.
The difference is that you don't have to run your own server to edit or otherwise participate in Wikipedia. You don't need your own server to have a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com.
And since Simplest Federated Wiki requires either Ruby/Sinatra or Node.js/Express, you need more than just a shared hosting account to run it, which raises the barrier to entry (though the one-click installer, or PaaS providers, help lower it again).
It may eventually be a non-issue if someone builds a "wordpress.com for federated wikis."
It's like saying I should have to know how to lay asphalt to drive on the highway.
Why? Sure, it lets you do some things that almost nothing else does, but you can usually work around them, and it imposes a great cost of both time and money. Why should one spend them?
And likewise, learning how to run a web server on the public Internet (as opposed to a toy server on your LAN) requires a huge amount of time and knowledge, in terms of learning how to use the software, secure it, keep it spam-free, keeping up with the updates and security vulnerabilities, configuring DNS, etc. And at the end of the day, it can still be taken down by the hosting/VPS provider or ISP, just like your Wordpress.com blog.
So, is it really worth it? I doubt it.
edit: federated search, federated social? How would the system prevent search gaming and social gaming?
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.
"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...
Data storage, and even computation may be centralized in the cloud... but why not distributed distribution?
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.
This suggests to me that Ward is onto something here, but also that you may have a point about it's limitations in its current form. I hope the hypothes.is project (funded by kickstarter, http://hypothes.is) succeeds, and I wonder if some degree of integration between the two is possible so that reputation and correctness rating across wiki-nodes (or any such federated system) can naturally "bubble up" to top visibility with some citation/indication of the bubbling via the hypothes.is client, regardless of which specific fork of the wiki you happen to be looking at... I'd love to discuss this possibility further with Ward, hypothes.is, or anyone else interested since they'll both be open source projects any of us can try to make this happen in :-)
If two groups are editing a book about Python (for example) on a wiki, they might have different ideas about how a particular concept should be explained. They fork that, and both versions can exist in parallel, even exchanging ideas when suitable.
Something similar could be done for various reading ages.
Both of these are, famously, super disputed on Wikipedia itself: people fight about the contents of articles about controversial issues (→ NPOV), and people fight about the extent to which certain things are covered (→ notability).
I think there's room for multiple, equally "correct" versions of an article on both of these dimensions; but particularly regarding the notability criteria.
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.