Smallest Federated Wiki

We introduce the parts of a Federated Wiki page. The "story" is a collection of paragraphs and paragraph like items. The "journal" collects story edits. Should you take my page and edit it as yours, I can see what you've done and may decide to take your edits as my own.

We show how drag-and-drop between federated wiki pages creates a new model for sharing. A simple JSON model of the page makes this all straightforward.

We explore how a federated wiki's page elements get converted to HTML. The conversion happens on the client side. Coffeescript code uses the type of each story item to retrieve "emit" and "bind" functions. Emit creates the HTML DOM objects while bind connects them up to jQuery.

We show an Arduino micro controller collecting data from various sensors and publishing it as a federated wiki page. Squeezing wiki onto the smallest of machines shows us ever more powerful ways to program this new system.
See also Remote Sensing with Federated Wiki

We show more ways to see multiple pages at once where drag-and-drop works like columns in the finder. We also show file import through drag-and-drop from the finder.

When we edit a remote page it becomes our own. We call this a fork and record it in the journal. Click the journal to bring the source up for side-by-side comparison.

A visualization on one page can find data on another. Our prototype showed us this is a good way to work. Watch us visualize two datasets two different ways.

We find inspiration in Science Magazine's interactive figures prepared for their special issue on population. We're using similar javascript libraries and hope to make publishing with them easy.

Where is wiki from? Where might it go to? We asked and answered these questions in a 2005 Wikimania keynote. Our answers hold up. Some guide our work today.

Adam Solove has contributed side-scrolling and browser history integration logic. Bryan Donovan and Stephen Judkins have put together rspec and capybara tests. I promise to fix the bug I introduced generating favicons.

Russell Senior and Sven Dowideit have contributed to the Arduino and Node.js server implementations which stretch our understanding of federation. With so much of the logic on the client side, we can even make read-only sites with Apache.

We resurrect an expense calculator written in AWK in 1981 to show how plugins can interpret the words in a paragraph as calculations to be performed when the paragraph changes.

On a tip from @krogen, we've added our first audio format which we calculate on the fly from formulas passed around within the #bytebeat community. Fans can drag bytebeat paragraphs from each other's pages or create new ones by choosing bytebeat in the new factory menu.

We inherit decades of experience typesetting mathematics when we incorporate MathJax as one more dynamically loaded plugin. The MathJax javacript works trivially client-side with static html and has a sophisticated API for dynamic environments like ours. We'll learn a thing or two from them. Thanks.

We show off old and new ways to copy while telling a story of different interests cooperating without losing their own identities.

Ward is best known as the inventor of wiki technology. Now, as the Nike Open Data Fellow, he has set out to change the world by doing for numbers what he's done for words: use technology to give them depth and meaning that ordinary people can depend on every day.

Our new wiki innovates three ways. It shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization.

We show how data and visualization plugins could serve the needs of organizations sharing material sustainability data.

We repeat the calculation refactoring demonstration from OSCON 2012 and invite viewers to try it themselves at oscon.fed.wiki.org.

We show one practical data example including how we roll data up into a score. We link to documentation that performs, explains and defends the logic behind the numbers.

We show how pages with references trigger the federated wiki client-side search bot to start fetching context for your next search. Kudos to Pete Hodgson for his help.

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We show how search results can be refactored into bibliographic pages and how curating these positively influences the way search works for you and your colleagues.

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We describe network communities before wiki, the elements that make for the eternal "present" in wiki, and how Smallest Federated Wiki expects to look past "now" into the future by slowing down modern communication just a little bit.

We track activity by neighborhood. More neighbors, more activity. Shared pages show together, ordered by collaborator and temporal place within other work.

We show how things can connect to wiki with low-latency websocket connections. A wiki page sends programs and retrieves data which it shares with other pages in the federation.

I wrote the first wiki in a week. Why has it taken me a year to write another? Short answer: when something is already surprisingly simple its hard to make it simpler.

I explain how I better my best success in a talk that includes two of the above videos.