Hacker News Reader

Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

I was afraid that they'd get taken in by this federated wiki nonsense; I fear we might have lost one of the greats to second system syndrome.

Federated wiki is a cool idea and all, but I don't want to have to build my own wiki of everything, or decide what concepts should be included in my own wiki. The whole strength of wiki to me is that it massively multiplayer user curated content, where the whole state is determined by everyone working together. I don't know what happens to that curation if there's no authoritative source -- it seems like federated wiki isn't really wiki at all, and is something else entirely.

View on HN

> I don't want to have to build my own wiki for everything

In the fedwiki model, you would join a neighborhood of people you trust to write good content. fedwiki has a chicken and egg problem right now - there are no good neighborhoods to join.

It's also pretty terrible UX-wise. I don't understand how to navigate it.

I don't know, I like the UX of it a lot.

C2 is Ward Cunningham's original wiki. Federated wiki is Ward Cunningham's project. There's no "getting taken in" happening here.

(Using this definition of "getting taken in": http://www.yourdictionary.com/get-taken-in )

So you don't think it's possible to fool oneself?

Has federated anything every really caught on?

Yes, email is federated.

DNS, BGP, IRC, and Usenet to name a few federated systems.

git

The USA.

There's a pretty pronounced trend in the US to be less federated. For example, "states' rights" is commonly viewed as a euphemism for "racism".

I don't necessarily mean the states -> USA relationship. One of the things I've come to understand, as a regular visitor to the US, is that there's a community for everybody. No matter how idiosyncratic (or even extreme) your political, social and economic preferences, you can find a community to take you in. And if you can't, you can create one and find others of like mind. And somehow it all still comes under a single umbrella notion of being "American". This exists practically nowhere else on earth. And I say that as a resident & citizen of another country that has a federated state structure.

And yes, I know it's a work in progress, and that this hasn't lead to equity of representation or systemic fairness. But still, in my view, establishing that framework and unifying je ne sais quoi in the face of such diversity is the single greatest political accomplishment of the last few hundred years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com