Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham develops federated wiki

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/

by dctoedt • 14 years ago

148 70 14 years ago

derleth3• 14 years ago

I don't see how this is anti-Wikipedia. But I suppose conflict sells, so linkbait (to be clear, linkbait on the part of Wired, not the submitter) titles like these are inevitable.

Also, for a lot of people, 'wiki' is simply short for 'Wikipedia'. That's unlikely to change at this point. I don't know what Ward can do to make a Federated Wiki (great name, BTW) achieve any kind of success with that kind of barrier.

klint4• 14 years ago

I'm the author of the article, and I can see why people got confused. I don't think Max Ogden was implying that it's a bad thing that you have to give up your view point on Wikipedia - and Ward Cunngingham definitely didn't imply that in my conversation with him. I regret that readers thought that. I don't think either Ogden or Cunningham are expecting this to replace Wikipedia, but they are hoping that it will be useful for other wikis.

mark_l_watson• 14 years ago

A little off topic, but a friend of mine had a dinner conversation with Ward Cunningham and refactoring expert Ralph Johnson a few months ago and posted it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqGYoKvekik The video could have used some editing (shorter!) but has some interesting parts.

J3L24044• 14 years ago

Forking does not lead to spooning. This sounds like it will quickly become an impenetrable rat's nest. Better to fight it out on the one true source, Wikipedia.

sp3327• 14 years ago

The Internet is already made of "rat's nests" like these. DNS records, BGP route tables, cross-domain embedding, all of these are pulling together information from lots of inconsistent sources to render a page in your browser, and it works pretty well.

J3L24044• 14 years ago

Google is a rats nest but you can eventually find what you want, I go to Wikipedia first.

p_sherman• 14 years ago

Holy mother of misleading titles.

kzrdude• 14 years ago

When I talked with Ward in 2005, he mentioned his vision of a Wiki had a continuum of pages where he said you could take a page and browse the different "directions" people had edited it to.

tokenizer• 14 years ago

That sounds interesting, but useless. I only want to see the most 'correct' version. It's almost as if saying when you use an app you can also use many of the apps versions, including its beta or alpha, regardless of how incorrect or useless they are with the current version.

I also think that information needs to be organized and many of his ideas make the collection or the organization of information almost impossible.

But nevertheless very interesting.

dchest• 14 years ago

Who decides which version is the most correct? Read the same Wikipedia article on history in different languages and you'll find out that there's no such thing as the 'correct version'.

bglusman• 14 years ago

I hear what you're saying about only wanting the most "correct" version, and no doubt that's how most people feel when looking for information, but about some things you have an ability and perhaps an obligation to contribute to deciding what is the most correct version...

This suggests to me that Ward is onto something here, but also that you may have a point about it's limitations in its current form. I hope the hypothes.is project (funded by kickstarter, http://hypothes.is) succeeds, and I wonder if some degree of integration between the two is possible so that reputation and correctness rating across wiki-nodes (or any such federated system) can naturally "bubble up" to top visibility with some citation/indication of the bubbling via the hypothes.is client, regardless of which specific fork of the wiki you happen to be looking at... I'd love to discuss this possibility further with Ward, hypothes.is, or anyone else interested since they'll both be open source projects any of us can try to make this happen in :-)

Leynos• 14 years ago

The article describes this as being like a fork. For example, choosing between OpenOffice and LibreOffice, or ffmpeg and libav. Both are the current version, but with different ideas and implementation.

If two groups are editing a book about Python (for example) on a wiki, they might have different ideas about how a particular concept should be explained. They fork that, and both versions can exist in parallel, even exchanging ideas when suitable.

rytis• 14 years ago

Did you notice that most articles on Wikipedia, although mostly 'correct', are very dry? And this is because they try to be as 'correct' as possible. But it brings to a point where some (most??) users can't use it comfortably anymore. Think children, who are trying to find some basic information about the subject they are interested in. My 8yo recently has gone through the 'dinosaurs' stage. Drawings, books, stories, films. You think she found this fascinating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur ?? Nope. Here comes in the federated version, with 'alternative' of the story. Tailored for the 4-10yo audience. Is it less 'correct'? Perhaps. But useful nonetheless.

morsch4• 14 years ago

Well, you're only getting the correct version in terms of Wikipedia's processes. This relates to both a horizontal axis of what narratives (for lack of a better abstraction) are being represented and a vertical axis relating to the depth to which a narrative is mentioned, if at all.

Both of these are, famously, super disputed on Wikipedia itself: people fight about the contents of articles about controversial issues (→ NPOV), and people fight about the extent to which certain things are covered (→ notability).

I think there's room for multiple, equally "correct" versions of an article on both of these dimensions; but particularly regarding the notability criteria.

rocky1138• 14 years ago

Also: wikipedia offers its entire content available as a tarball. Fork and run with it as you wish. While not "federated" it's pretty damn open.

J3L24044• 14 years ago

Holy smokes, how big is it?

_delirium• 14 years ago

8 GB bzip2-compressed, for the English Wikipedia, if you download the dump that contains only the current revisions of article-space pages. Much bigger if you want the one with every historical revision.

piranha• 14 years ago

Depends on which language you'd like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

jsvaughan• 14 years ago

small enough to have offline on your phone, as several apps do.

morsch4• 14 years ago

The text, anyway, I don't think a dump including the images has been available for quite some time. And that's not just due to the size -- though that's also a concern, I imagine -- but mostly due to copyright concerns. Text submitted to Wikipedia is for the most part under a copyleft license, images often are not.

e12e2• 14 years ago

TFP: http://wardcunningham.github.com/

in the spirit of slashdot: the fucking project

e12e2• 14 years ago

TFC: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki

zimbatm2• 14 years ago

So where is the link to the actual project ?

zimbatm2• 14 years ago

http://wardcunningham.github.com/

emperorcezar3• 14 years ago

"To run The Simplest Federated Wiki, you’ll need your own web server, which Cunningham thinks is an important part of the project."

Sounded great till that point. He's putting his own nerd centric bias into it. If I'm a history guy, not a tech guy, and I want to "fork", asking me to run my own "server" or whatever is a non-starter.

nicholassmith5• 14 years ago

Smart money says if there's demand for it people will be able to buy custom instances with it for a variable amount of money.

clinth• 14 years ago

Agreed. Github is popular even though git itself is obtuse.

sp3327• 14 years ago

FTA: To make Federated Wiki easier to adopt, there’s a one-click installer to deploy a server to Amazon Web Services.

SudarshanP• 14 years ago

Since we have free accounts on app engine, heroku etc... and even gdrive or dropbox and so on... wont it be easy for someone to write a simple web app or ipad app or something like that allows the masses to run their own wiki's without being technically sophisticated. To an end user the process could be as easy as install app from chrome webstore... specify some minimal data... and you have an app engine account hosting your tiny wiki. If tomorrow you choose to move it heroku, it would as simple as a button click and registering on heroku.

sp3327• 14 years ago

I had the exact opposite reaction to that. "But is it too nerdy to catch on? To run The Simplest Federated Wiki, you’ll need your own web server" How is running a web server nerdy? Does this person not realize that wikipedia is also run on a web server, or that most people will be reading this very article online? The Web is one of the biggest things going on right now and certainly one of the fastest-growing. It concerns me that people aren't even taught the basics of running their own servers. How are you supposed to participate in the Web if you don't even have a web server?

klint4• 14 years ago

"Does this person not realize that wikipedia is also run on a web server."

The difference is that you don't have to run your own server to edit or otherwise participate in Wikipedia. You don't need your own server to have a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com.

And since Simplest Federated Wiki requires either Ruby/Sinatra or Node.js/Express, you need more than just a shared hosting account to run it, which raises the barrier to entry (though the one-click installer, or PaaS providers, help lower it again).

It may eventually be a non-issue if someone builds a "wordpress.com for federated wikis."

emperorcezar3• 14 years ago

Not sure if you're serious?

It's like saying I should have to know how to lay asphalt to drive on the highway.

drone2• 14 years ago

... and then the spammers have a field day: on every page, a list of 10,000 forks, re-titled with names like "Luis Vitton CHEAP$!$" and "U 2 can aFf0rd Rolex!"

Interesting idea when all players are playing by the same rules and with the same intent. Not as appealing when the most active are there simply to generate noise.

SwellJoe2• 14 years ago

This has been a problem for every Internet service everywhere ever. That hasn't stopped email from being useful, forums from being useful, traditional wikis (weird to say "traditional wikis", now that there's a new kind of wiki) from being useful, websites from being useful, etc.

The spam problem always has to be solved. That said, very active wikis have shown themselves to be more resistant to spammers than most online services. Because anyone can remove the spam, there's a pretty high cost to keeping the spam flowing, particularly if there are sufficient impediments to automation in place.

drone2• 14 years ago

Of course every non-moderated service has spam, that was kinda the point of my post... Maybe the part you missed was that they introduced a new way of spamming via forking pages... I don't think I ever made any allusions to something not happening because of it. Thanks for the pep talk though, I'll keep it in mind as I do my nightly task of helping clean up spam on the sites where I moderate.

nicholassmith5• 14 years ago

I think this could lead to a lot of interesting possibilities but I'll focus on one.

Lets say you're on Wikipedia and for example want to know about the assassination of J.F.K, the Wiki article contains most of the stock facts and so on, but lets say you want to know about the really crazy and out there conspiracy theories of Hoover and aliens and so on, a federated system would allow people to set their own page up and you can continue through to it. The sort of content that sends most Wikipedia moderators into catatonic seizures indexed and available.

There's plenty of other uses out there, I just think it's an interesting point that it'll allow anyone with enough time on their hands to create an archive of what they think is relevant as a counterpoint to what someone else thinks is relevant. Don't like the standard descriptor? Normally you'd have to fit a wiki mod, fork it off and have it as a counter point.

derleth3• 14 years ago

> The sort of content that sends most Wikipedia moderators into catatonic seizures indexed and available.

The reason it is anathema to the Wikipedia concept is because Wikipedia wants its name on good content, not Alex Jones JOOZ-DID-IT (Oh, and Aliens-Big-Pharma-Bilderberger-USPS-Did-9/11 Too) bullshit, unless such bullshit is clearly marked as coming from a specific minority viewpoint.

I think that's a great reason to keep the crap on the current version of Wikipedia to a minimum: The world is confusing, especially when there are people like Alex Jones out there trying to make it more confusing to sell more videos. Having something where you have a good chance of getting the Sane People Version of controversial (or only-controversial-because-of-the-crazies) topics is invaluable if you want somewhere to start. Especially if it's a topic that books aren't really written about, like specific health scams.

So the Federated Wiki universe will need some way to mark specific forks of articles as being from a given group of people, so people aren't mislead into thinking that the sane editors approve of the version of reality Alex Jones is selling the gullible.

nicholassmith5• 14 years ago

Exactly, the mods are there to keep the crazy out but occasionally you need to reference some of the more outlandish things for various reasons and letting people for things off into tinfoilhatswiki.net would be good for the mods sanity and useful for people who need to reference the over the top stuff. Not sure how the link direction would work, but I'm sure there's a way.

klint4• 14 years ago

I agree that some way to remove links to forks that are spam or that you find reprehensible is a good idea, but the whole point of forking instead of editing is that the forks aren't approved.

As I said elsewhere, I (nor the people I quoted) meant to represent this as an alternative to Wikipedia itself. I'd see it more as some that a wiki farm like Wikia could use to allow editors to put more of their own perspective into an article (that's my opinion, not the Smallest Federated Wiki developers' opinion).

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Lets say you're on Wikipedia and . . . you want to know about the really crazy

I am a Wikipedian. I edit sporadically these days, after being really active when I first started editing. Before I began editing, I read whole books about the history of Wikipedia and its internal processes. Because of the anarchy of how Wikipedia started out, with the typical Wikipedian having NIL research and editing experience (not even the research and editing experience implied by getting an undergraduate degree at a research university), you can find plenty of crazy on Wikipedia already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

And of course blatantly false assertions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have already stood on Wikipedia for a long time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04seelye.html...

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-11-wikipedia-apolo...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy...

The Deletionpedia experiment,

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

which seems to have fizzled out, was an archive of pages deleted from Wikipedia, in an attempt to make volunteer Wikipedia editors ("Wikipedians") more accountable for deleting articles. The result of the Deletionpedia experiment was to show that most content that is deleted from Wikipedia well deserves to be deleted, and probably doesn't serve any reader in any useful way anywhere on the Internet.

The Internet is already flooded with counterpoints. It's bad enough that in important subjects (for example, medical research) most of the best published literature is not available on the Internet (it is still behind publisher paywalls), while a lot of scam artists flood the Internet with websites that exist only to sell something that cheats consumers.

I do look forward to seeing how Ward Cunningham's experiment develops. MeatballWiki introduced some thoughtful discussion of online communities to the broader online world,

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/OnlineCommunity

and that was enabled by the innovation of wiki sites, that any user could edit a webpage already posted on the site. There is a place for wikis, and some wikis are very helpful,

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Wiki/index.php/Main_Page

but the last thing the world needs is more content forks for crazy points of view that get edited off of Wikipedia.

morsch4• 14 years ago

I don't think any of what you say particularly supports your final point. The internet is flooded in counterpoints, but few of them are on Wikipedia, or in Wikis. And none of them are as visible as Wikipedia's take on things. I think people are increasingly relying on Wikipedia to provide The Truth(tm) -- mostly because it's gotten so damn good at delivering it, the JFK examples notwithstanding.

Counterpoints seem to survive in ideological communities that have their own closed world view and their own knowledge databases which are considered to be definitive.

nfg• 14 years ago

I've always found you can learn a surprising amount about a subject by reading it's wikipedia 'Talk' page.

Jhonbxl• 14 years ago

If the problem is having the knowledge hosted in one place only, controlled by "one" person only, the solution should be to decentralize, not make everyone able to copy it everywhere. Plus, this solution seems to add more work to the contributors, since you'll need to review each fork/edit and choose which to merge or not.

On the other hand, a wiki working like a P2P network, where everyone hosts the same version and edits are automatically propagated accros the web would solve the "problem" without adding more job on contributors.

pessimizer• 14 years ago

Could this be layered on top of the current Wikipedia through browser plugins? And how would discoverability work in the context of 10,000 current versions of a wiki page? It's hard enough when there's 30 different forks on github.

edit: federated search, federated social? How would the system prevent search gaming and social gaming?

morsch4• 14 years ago

It's a bit too early to worry about 10k forks for a single page, isn't it? The typical use cases -- certainly the early ones, when it's not widespread -- might involve numbers of forks that aren't too different from GitHub.

webwanderings• 14 years ago

Didn't I see something from Dave Winer doing similar thing for Twitter, personal stream?

roguecoder• 14 years ago

It seems odd to me to focus on Wikipedia as the comparison point, but then again I was on C2 back-in-the-day and have always seen the quintessential wiki as a superior version of a forum rather than Wikipedia. If we are comparing to currently-active technology, I would argue that the federated wiki concept has the potential to bring tumblr or del.icio.us style contributions to a different, longer-form audience.

I do worry that the federated concept will make authorship too important. The lack of permanent credit on C2 was part of what made it valuable: people more often wrote things to contribute value when they didn't have the motivation of scoring points, gaining karma or making a name for themselves.

sdfjkl• 14 years ago

At last you can fork the truth and make your own version of it. I imagine this will be a hit with governments everywhere.

themonk• 14 years ago

webring?

Vitaly• 14 years ago

Instead of plain EC2 installer t needs a Heroku Installe. Then anyone can have it running for essentially free in no time

Nux• 14 years ago

"To make Federated Wiki easier to adopt, there’s a one-click installer to deploy a server to Amazon Web Services." <- oh yeah, super-federated.

sp3327• 14 years ago

What's not federated about that? And obviously you don't have to run it on EC2, that's just the easiest way at the moment.

duskwuff• 14 years ago

As I see it, one of the biggest benefits of traditional wikis' linear history was that it fostered quick back-and-forth collaboration between users. Unless there's a strong mechanism for discovering changes made by other users, a forking model seems like it'd rapidly result in a bunch of different (and potentially non-mergeable) versions of any page.

6ren• 14 years ago

With always-on, always-connected devices everywhere, we are not that far from every device being a web-server by default, and every device being a router for web traffic.

Data storage, and even computation may be centralized in the cloud... but why not distributed distribution?

seiji• 14 years ago

Ye olde, but still worth watching: Van Jacobson's Google Talk from 2006, "A New Way to look at Networking": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg

irunbackwards• 14 years ago

Much better headline than the one actually on Wired, "Wiki Inventor Sticks a Fork in His Baby."

pella• 14 years ago

see "In praise of cooperation without coordination: Clay Shirky at TEDGlobal 2012"

"The result is Git, distributed version control, which Shirky is here to explain to us. It’s a distributed workflow that brings chaos back into the system. Yet there’s a beautiful innovation to ensure that said chaos doesn’t promptly override said system: a signature that creates a unique identifier for every single exchange. This enables cooperation without coordination. “I tell you this not because it is great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working,” Shirky says. “I tell you all of this because of what it means for how communities come together.”"

http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/29/in-praise-of-cooperation-with...

Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham develops federated wiki

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