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Comment by nchelluri | Hacker News Reader

> Smallest Federated Wiki is a software platform developed by Ward Cunningham which adds forking features found in software development tools like GitHub to wikis.[1] The project was launched at IndieWebCamp 2011.[2] The software allows its users to fork wiki pages, maintaining their own copies.

> Federation supports what Cunningham has described as "a chorus of voices" where users share content but maintain their individual perspectives.[3] This approach contrasts with the tendency of centralized wikis such as Wikipedia to function as consensus engines.[4]

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallest_Federated_Wiki

In short I guess if I disagree with a page instead of editing it and starting an edit-war I can fork it.

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> In short I guess if I disagree with a page instead of editing it and starting an edit-war I can fork it.

Which I'd expect to lead to less of a "chorus" and more of a cacophony of voices as every disputed change, every contentious rewrite, leads to another fork of the original.

Merging software branches can be hard enough. Merging "forks" of English text is horrendous, and gets worse the further the forks are from each other. There's a good reason why no commonly used wiki software has this functionality: it's completely impractical to use.

I was going originally going to post how happy I was with the Wikipedia way of one source of truth and how I really like that system, but the fact is I don't know enough about the subject to say it's the best way. I do agree with you, though.

Software doesn't stay forked all that long in practice, usually, because maintaining your fork is much more effort than creating it, and making your popular is more effort still.

I would expect the same dynamics to be true here - yes, there will be plenty of short-lived forks, but hardly anyone will actually notice them; and community will effectively "bless" one fork, or maybe a few major forks for particularly debated issues, as the official one, and that's what most people will see, and where most activity will take place.

Programmers love putting things into little boxes with labels on them. The cacophony you lament is inevitable because it mirrors the real world. Do it the way you want, or it'll be yet another Facebook or Google of the internet that gets done for you.

Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress. -- Vetinari

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