Hi everyone,
I have just been reading about a new approach to wikis developed by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki concept, called federated wikis. A federated wiki, to the extent I understand it, is a collection of wiki instances which can draw upon each other's edits and changes in the same way that distributed version control systems allow multiple contributors to edit different parts of a collection of projects, taking up each other's changes and additions, and forking versions that differ substantially from the original. Any one user of a single member of a federated wiki can copy a page from the other wikis, edit and extend it, incorporating it into its local library of wiki pages, available to all as a separate parallel version. While centralized wikis were first created to bring people together to contribute to one document or library, a federated wiki suggests that people can borrow from each other as they develop their own wiki.
More info here:
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http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors
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http://www.wired.com/2012/07/wiki-inventor/
In this current implementation, readers can browse, edit and fork pages through a Javascript client interface which presents a series of pages as parallel columns. Aside from the federation concept, I thought this was pretty appealing too, and helped me understand the different sources delivering the individual pages.
I was wondering if people have thought about bringing some of these ideas into Dokuwiki. Would it be possible for several Dokuwikis to share pages in this way? What would that require?
Cheers,
Ryan