Those who follow this blog will know that I’ve taken a bit of time off from federated wiki in order to try to bring some principles from federated wiki into WordPress. While most days this feels like having left Xerox PARC to go work on Windows 1.0, there are other days where it feels really good.
After a hard weekend of Starbucks-ing here’s what we have: a very simple proof of concept for the idea of forkable WordPress content with an attribution history.
A couple notes here: you can of course edit and reformat the articles you copy to your site any way you want. I made the quick annotation field because what I found was when most people browse federated wiki editing comes later. People ask questions in this order:
- Do I want a copy of this on my site?
- Does it link to other things of mine?
- Do I need to add a note as to why I copied this (or a note about having to fact-check it, etc)?
Then, after all that, that’s when they think — maybe I could edit or extend the core article here.
So I made annotations look kind of like comments because I want people to be fairly profligate about what they copy. In general I think people are to timid about copying when they first start out; by presenting copying as something akin to a “retweet with comment” we hope to spread good stuff more widely, while not requiring everyone be on the same service.
Anyway, let me know what you all thinks. And thanks to fedwiki-ers Alan Levine, Alyson Indrunas, Lisa Chamberlain, and Kate Bowles who have been busy producing WordPress-based federated wiki content that we will soon get to test the new code on!
Hapgood 
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