Ward Cunningham

I first proposed a project called Smallest-Federated-Wiki thinking that federation would be easily demonstrated by a small application server that could be written by myself and colleagues at a coding workshop. We barely started in the day we had.

# 2011

# 2016

Now with 1000 sites in the wild and interest in connecting these every which way we return to thinking what it means to be federated.

The Small Again Wiki represents the first 90 minutes of our exploration of a server-side javascript-free implementation. It is interesting for what it does and doesn't do. We document that here linked to the repo's first commit.

There are many better ways to join the federation than running this code. Most involve some mystery that we hope can be removed. Our 60 line version here would have met every expectation we had for the original project (save editing). Understanding it is a great first step into contributing to our ongoing work.

# 2020

We launch a federation outpost to explore small servers with new architecture. See Smallest Wiki Explained

We explore the boundary between authoring and publishing. See Publication Ready

# Related

We ask, what is the least code with which a community can collaborate with each other and the larger federation?

We share an interest in the continued growth in federated wiki as an important concept and in the open codebase that demonstrates its advantages.

Federated wiki is designed to be a growing, moving, sprawling thing that can outlive any advice that I might give here. But start somewhere we must.

Some success came early and was documented in screencasts for each new feature. But after a year of work we felt being federated was more important than being small. We dropped one adjective and focused on ease of installation.

These pages chronicle the founding Smallest Federated Wiki project and report its early achievements with a series of short screencasts.