Wiki creator reinvents collaboration, again

The engine of the net is collaboration, that this web log is devoted to exploring.

 virtually nineteen years past, once I was computer memory unit magazine's govt editor and internet developer, I received the subsequent email:

    From: Ward Cunningham
    Subject: wiki
    Date: could twenty two, 1996 at 11:23:10 AM PDT
    To: Jon Udell

    Jon -- therefore what does one consider wiki? I place it up a year and a [*fr1] past
 once HTML authoring tools were briefly offer. i believe it's delayed
 pretty much, tho' I suppose its days ar numbered. Still, there is
 one thing concerning it we have a tendency to decision WikiNature that's briefly offer on information superhighway
    and in computers generally. Regards. -- Ward

What i assumed once I saw that wiki was that perhaps I ought to keep quiet concerning it. The Portland Pattern Repository was a cooperative effort to outline the practices and principles that inform the agile software package movement. and therefore the wiki Ward mentioned -- the world's first! -- was the dish during which that culture grew. it absolutely was wide open. Anyone may edit a page. those that did conversed eloquently and distilled a group of unforgettable patterns:

    DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork
    OnceAndOnlyOnce
    YouArentGonnaNeedIt

It was the foremost stunning issue i would however seen on the planet Wide internet.

My worry was that by drawing attention to the current extraordinary and apparently fragile web site, i'd destroy it. within the finish I did write one thing. i am sorry to mention i am unable to notice the article currently or recall specifically what I wrote, however Ward says: "I recall you omitted the link, that was enough."

As it seems that wiki was less fragile than I feared -- and its days were additional various than Ward had expected. But on Feb. 1, 2015, this notice appeared:

Wiki Wiki System Notice

 when twenty years of service i am happy to announce a whole rewrite of wiki as one page application with a distributed information which is able to last America for a minimum of twenty years, maybe 200.

    see http://c2.fed.wiki.org

    We've recently endured abuse that has affected our conversion date forward before we have a tendency to were totally ready. I apologize for this. Expect the unaccustomed be aligned with the capabilities of the fashionable web with many chance for participation that wasn't attainable before. many thanks all.

The rewrite, referred to as the littlest federate Wiki, could be a GitHub add progress and a laboratory during which variety of key ideas ar percolating. initial and foremost, it's localized. There ar several servers, none privileged, every hosting a group of pages beneath the management of associate owner. however content flows freely among servers. I will drag a paragraph from a page on your website} into a page on my site. Or I will fork the complete page onto my website. If I build changes, you'll or might not opt to merge those changes into your website.

A conventional wiki, says electro-acoustic transducer Caulfield, is "a relentless agreement engine." A federate wiki could eventually yield agreement, however it promotes what Ward Cunningham calls a chorus of voices. will that sound sort of a pipe dream? maybe, however therefore did wiki, agile practices, and localized version management.

This new wiki consists of a server and a consumer written in CoffeeScript. The server could be a nominal persistence engine that is designed for situations starting from laboratory management systems to tutorial server farms. The pages it stores contain solely JSON, rendered by the consumer, that will most of the work. 2 JSON objects comprise a page: the story (a set of things) and therefore the journal (which remembers however items were additional, edited, moved, or deleted). You add things to the page by means that of plug-ins that inject paragraphs of plain text, HTML, or markdown, similarly as pictures, video, equations, raw data, charts, and computations.

The browser displays multiple pages organized as a horizontal lineup that will embody a combination of pages from your server and pages from alternative servers. The lineup are often a composable pipeline for information. I will load a uniform resource locator from your website that flows a knowledge set from one page into a chart on consecutive, then fork your page of knowledge, change it, and compare the 2 charts. each time I edit my copy of the information set, the journal records a replacement version. If someone else forks my page, she'll have the complete history: your original information set, your changes, the version I forked, and my changes.

The federation as an entire includes all the servers running this software package. however as a user of a personal server i'm a part of a "neighborhood" that forms dynamically as I navigate to remote pages, visit pages with special references to pages elsewhere within the federation, or load pages that were forked from elsewhere within the federation. The neighborhood defines the scope for search and for resolution of links by page name instead of by totally qualified uniform resource locator.

Over the vacations I participated in a groundwork of federate wikis with a gaggle of instructional technologists. There was many head-scratching as a result of -- i will be honest -- this new wiki will things we have a tendency to did not expect, in ways that we have a tendency to did not perceive. I've distressed, as I did years past, whether or not it's knowing draw attention to the current brave experiment.

But i am unable to facilitate myself. Everything concerning federate wiki makes my spidey-sense tingle. everybody who's used it sees a special set of aborning potentialities. It rings a bell in my memory that magic will still happen on the net, particularly once Ward Cunningham is waving his wand.

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