Hacker News Reader

Comment by beefman | Hacker News Reader

It does look like just another bloated SPA, but Federated Wiki was a geniune advance when Ward was developing it a decade ago. Still is. Shame it hasn't caught on.

I agree it was a mistake to move the existing c2 content into it. Maybe a better try was to start a new wiki of some kind. But the temptation to leverage the existing site to launch Federated Wiki is understandable.

View on HN

No offense, but how is it an advance? Who needs a wiki that can't be edited? (If I'm mistaken about this, maybe someone can educate me)

If you know git: a federated wiki works like that. To make a federated wiki work like a traditional wiki, you can think of there as being a "canonical copy" which you can clone, make edits, and then use a 'pull request' process for incorporating those edits back into the original. But you also don't need to have a single source of truth: you can, for example, have a group of people—say, students studying for a class—who are building their own wikis, and among each other they can copy in pages, make changes, copy changes back, and so forth, all building a web of things. In the same way that git can replicate a subversion-like workflow but also introduces the possibility of different workflows, a federated wiki can replicate a traditional wiki but also has a number of workflows it can accomplish.

Thanks! I'm aware of the abstract technical idea, but is there any evidence that Ward's wiki ever worked like that? Did he ever accept a "pull request" or are there any notable forks which do?

The federated wiki concept is that you run your own wiki, and replicate, or "fork" content from other federated wikis to yours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com