This is a mockup concept for the Smallest Federated Wiki project. The basic gist of it is really kinda neat, and I wanted to take some time to see if the concepts could be polished up for the end user so that they make more sense.
The idea is pretty cool: it’s a decentralized wiki, meaning you can connect different wikis on different servers together seamlessly. It’s kind of in the vein of what Anonymous’ project TYLER is aiming to do, albeit this version doesn’t seem to utilize P2P (although that’s certainly not impossible, considering i2P exposes an API for Ruby on Rails applications using JSON-RPC, and this is a Ruby web application)
Anyway, each time you click a page in the original design, it opened a new page to the right, so that you could still read both items. It’s pretty terrific for navigation, but some of the concepts get fudged around when you try to move to close a page (currently you can only do that by hitting the back button, and some of the pages get a little messed up when you do it that way.).
So anyway…this is my mockup trying to address these issues. I’ll probably make some more, but I feel that if these general usability issues were taken care of, it could become a really powerful piece of software for end users. (WikiLeaks, AnonOps anyone?)
I think that having a non-central wiki system is going to be really, really important, though. One of the biggest problems with places like WikiLeaks right now is that there’s a purely central server where all of their data is. If someone like the DoJ or some other entity wants to swoop in and shut it down, all that data is essentially lost, unless somebody has a backup. Imagine if, instead of one server, you could run it on dozens of servers, or even hundreds.
What if you could even put it on thousands of ordinary computers, and things like user permissions carried over so that the wiki would have every sort of function and infrastructure that a wiki should have, except that you couldn’t destroy it without taking out every computer on the network running it?
I think it’d be amazing for activism.
You can check out the current Smallest Federated Wiki project, which is mainly a server-side implementation and doesn’t have the abstract things I just rambled about. It’s still decentralized though. ;)
Code here, it’s pretty easy to set up and get running: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki
