Continuing the discussion from Looking for seasonned front end developer - Startin'blox:
Great idea! As mentioned there is also Tiddlywiki
As I said (off-topic) in that thread:
1 Like
The Smallest Federated Wiki – Ward Cunningham’s offering – is certainly of great interest, but it paints itself into a very specific corner in terms of several interrelated design choices, and the result is notoriously hard for a beginner to get into, not to mention unsuitable for a common shared knowledge resource. What I would love to do would be to elaborate a set of requirements for a distributed / federated wiki, so that it could serve as the knowledge resource (or commons) for a community of practice. I made a start on this cryptpad (contact me if you want to edit) but I’d like to move that to a …… wiki, actually.
3 Likes
Thanks for sharing this @asimong
Could you share some more about what role you see for distribution/federation, and Solid? I may have missed it, but it wasn’t clear to me from the cryptpad.
My personal interest is in using federation to allow a network of interconnected personal wikis, i.e. one typically only visits another wiki to fork its content or subscribe to notification of changes.
Other efforts have focused more on seamless interwiki links or distributed hosting of a single set of content.
If a federated wiki was based on solid, it seems to me it would be RDF and rest-based, so the requirements would use (existing?) standards on the server side and specific shapes/ontologies to organise data. Versioning could be done directly in RDF or using Memento (e.g. used by Home · trellis-ldp/trellis Wiki · GitHub).
It’s less clear to me how something like automatic backlinks could be handled without further intervention by the server, but I suppose it’s always possible to develop a new standard as needed, and a federated wiki could use its own custom server.
Thanks for picking this up, @josephguillaume
I would be interested to know how much of your personal interest is met, or not, by fedwiki. Personally I’m more interested in small teams working together on their joint wiki rather than individuals alone.
Yes, I think I am more interested in interwiki links that are (close to) seamless, so that people can write on their own team wiki, and rather than needing to fork pages (as in fedwiki) they can comment or suggest across the federation (subject to permissions, I guess). Has anyone been exploring this line? Seems to me that owning one’s own comments and suggestions might fit into the Solid concept?
To me, using existing standards is a good idea, yes to RDF and REST-based; and also I’d like to see something that looks to the user like an evolution of existing wikis rather than a radical break.
I imagine (semi-)automatic backlinks done by the host server looking at the referring page and checking whether it it suitable to link back to, and either putting in a back link or submitting the back link for approval to the site owners.
Thanks for your comments, @anon36056958
One of the things I find very frustrating about most forums is the sheer number of comments whose value expires almost immediately, making it very hard to find the useful stuff. Surely a semantic approach would help here?
The ‘not wrecking your sandcastle’ is done perfectly with fedwiki, but no semantic links, and no provision for group ownership. Like you say, there must be ways of handling permissions that enable more to be done usefully.
1 Like
Honestly, I find fedwiki disorientating. To achieve its own specific use cases, the wiki ends up being an app that navigates disembodied pages from across domains distinguished by colored flags, whereas I am more interested in having clear boundaries that distinguish between the actor’s knowledge (deliberately part of their extended mind) vs new inputs from specific sources. I have to go to another person’s website to see their view on things, but their website might provide functionality to help send ideas back to mine. This is perhaps more similar to a fediverse paradigm than fedwiki?
As far as I can tell, fedwiki’s ability to subscribe to changes is also limited to lists of activity, whereas I’m interested in being able to merge in new content from other sources.
This idea can apply to organisations/projects managing their knowledge too, but I think the emphasis on ownership of knowledge might still be different to your interest?
Rather than commenting or suggesting across the federation, if I want someone else to include my view on their site, I would do the equivalent of a pull request. (I understand fedwiki now has suggestions too, but I haven’t yet been able to work out how that works)
In terms of comments and suggestions, there is at least https://dokie.li/
Two interesting links to check out are: