Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki. Image: WikiCommons
Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, is proud of his invention. “We changed the world together,” he says of those who contributed to his software development site C2, which spawned the online collaboration software that underpins Wikipedia and countless other services across the net.
But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. “I always felt bad that I owned all those pages,” he says. The central idea of a wiki — whether it’s driving Wikipedia or C2 — is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.
This new creation taps into the communal ethos fostered by GitHub, a place where software developers can not only collaborate on software projects but also instantly “fork” these projects, spawning entirely new collaborations.
Over the years, developers have written over 35,000 pages of content on C2, all of which reside on Cunningham’s server instead of on servers controlled by the author. When you contribute to someone else’s wiki, you risk losing all your changes if that site goes down. It also means you have to play by someone else’s edit rules.
There’s nothing stopping you from copying and pasting your contributions from a wiki, or starting your wiki if you don’t like someone else’s edits. But it can be hard to attract an audience. Cunningham says that in the early days of the wiki, many other people tried to start software development wikis but most of them didn’t get much traction. People wanted to contribute to C2, because that’s where the readers were.
The federated wiki is an attempt to solve these problems. As a starting point, he has built a new piece of software — dubbed The Smallest Federated Wiki — to demonstrate the concept. The radical idea of the wiki was to put an edit button on every page. The radical idea of the federated wiki is to put a “fork” button on every page.
Cunningham’s vision is that you will have your own wiki, perhaps several wikis. When you see a page on someone else’s federated wiki that you want to edit, you can click “fork,” and the page is copied into your own wiki where you can edit it. The owner of the original wiki can then decide whether to merge your changes into the original page.
Readers can still find a list of forks, so even if your changes aren’t accepted readers can still find your version of a page. The federated wiki concept does more than just help editors own their own data, Max Ogden, a Code for America fellow who has advised Cunningham, tells Wired. It enables dissent.
“Wikipedia forces you to give up your own perspective,” Ogden says. There are issues that no one will agree on, but with the federated wiki model, everyone can have their own version of controversial pages. “And they’re all linked together, so you can still explore them like a wiki.”
The similarities between the federated wiki and GitHub are not coincidental. “The radical code sharing that’s implicit to GitHub was an inspiration,” Cunningham says.
But is it too nerdy to catch on? To run The Simplest Federated Wiki, you’ll need your own web server, which Cunningham thinks is an important part of the project. Cunningham credits this philosophy to Network Startup Resource Center founder Randy Bush, who helped Cunningham set up the server that C2 ran on when it first launched in 1994.
When Cunningham met him in 1994, Bush was helping universities in developing nations set up web servers and connect them to the internet. It was Bush who first introduced Cunningham to the idea that everyone should have their own web server. Cunningham doesn’t think you necessarily need to have your own physical server under your desk anymore, but thinks it makes sense for people to control their own servers.
“If people don’t control their own infrastructure, they get needy,” he says. They’re at the mercy of service providers who can disappear, impose rules that constrain creativity and/or make it difficult to backup content that you’ve created. “It’s good to simplify things, but they shouldn’t be simplified in such a way as to make the user helpless.”
To make Federated Wiki easier to adopt, there’s a one-click installer to deploy a server to Amazon Web Services. But today, with even many of most tech savvy of operators choosing to post their content to walled gardens like Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+, Federated Wiki may be facing an uphill battle. But Cunningham is undaunted.
“The assumption is that we won’t be creative, but Facebook proves that everyone wants to have their own page, their own stream,” Cunningham says.
