An evolution of the Wiki, intended to support the dissemination of ideas across the web. While wikis encourage canonicalization—i.e. many editors working to converge on a single best version—the federated wiki attempts to create a fluid way for ideas to “start” on an individual basis, then to propagate through social networks to people who might build on them.
The primitives here are similar to those of a wiki: key actions include viewing a page, navigating via a link, editing, and viewing historical versions. The key difference is that versions of a page are associated with a particular user, and there’s a core “verb” to load another user’s wiki into one’s own workspace. When you do this, you can navigate to another user’s pages by viewing “recent changes” or by searching. Icons distinguish which pages are “from” which user’s workspace.
You can then “fork” an interesting page to your own workspace if you find it interesting and would like to build on it. Then the original author can see your changes and potentially build on them. This process can be extended across several federated wikis, e.g.:
Despite initially launching in 2011, the concept does not yet seem to have a great deal of traction. The official “Featured sites” guide is pretty dispiriting.
One central idea in Bush, V. (1945, July). As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, 176, 101–108. is that readers may create links between documents in the system (both theirs and others’). These links are stored separately from the documents themselves, in a special area at the bottom of the microfilm. The WWW does not have this property: only the author of a web page can add links to it.
But Mike Caulfield points out that federated wikis naturally produce and permit this sort of interaction—and in fact that in most situations it’s the more natural way for them to extend another author’s material. The key properties which enable this for linkers:
they have their own copies of the document
they can add supplementary documents very easily and link to them, and
they don’t have to rewrite the main document to add links
Q. How do federated wikis recover reader-authored links from the memex vision?
A. Readers often fork pages to append “see also”-style links to the bottom; this is possible because appending is easy and they don’t have to mutate the “original” to add links.
Mike Caulfield - Federated Education: New Directions in Digital Collaboration