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 
Woot! – Looks like you got it figured out!
Oh crap I forgot to mention you were fedwiki-ing! So sorry. Fixed now.
I have been a slacker, no worries. Just excited it is coming together!
Am I correct that the requirement for something in wp-admin means you have to be self hosted for this to work at the moment?
Yeah, for the moment (and with file access). I think there are probably ways to do this with the API for people who know the whole world of OAuth + JSON API, but I don’t have those superpowers yet.
Slick! Do I need to throttle you at Open Ed to find out why stuff needs to go in wp-admin ? there should be ways around that.
I do like the flow idea of grab/connect first and annotate later. I would maybe even set the status on publishing to “pending” (pending approval) so you can have in WP a place where all the stuff you annotated is sitting waiting for annotate and publish (and tag and categorize).
Some begs the question- where is the federation? where is the wiki? 😉
Well, I don’t know if it *has* to go into wp-admin — but it’s a file that writes new posts, so it seems like it should. Draft could be a checkbox option.
Working on basic link resolution next.
Incidentally, on the question of Post Now vs. Draft vs. Scheduled Post I think ideally the default should be whatever gets people to republish the most stuff. People are very timid.
I could actually see a default like “Schedule this for tomorrow” being useful — if you get to it, you get to it, if you don’t it goes up anyway.
However, there is no draft state in real FedWiki….you just [[ ]] and create. Draft state implies the need for perfectionism, hesitation, etc.
Mike – this is really interesting – one question that I didn’t quite get from your video – with this code added to the WP site does that make the site content copiable into SFW? If so this may be just the thing I was thinking about this morning – playing with SFW and thinking about moving my public writing to it, but would love a simple way to pull content from my wordpress blog.
Not quite there with SFW compatibility yet, but we do have something called the Transporter which allows you to drag it over to a SFW site.
Is there a git repo I could take a look at please, or is this private dev?