Concept: One of the longer-standing difficulties with wikis is that of disagreement (for instance, what is or is not wiki worthy). The dominant solution is moderation/curation, which in extreme...
Concept: One of the longer-standing difficulties with wikis is that of disagreement (for instance, what is or is not wiki worthy). The dominant solution is moderation/curation, which in extreme promotes an imbalance between readers and writers (Wikipedia moderators, despite their best efforts to maintain NPOV, are still human and many off-the-beaten path pages are hugely inaccurate).
Federated Wiki's answer, as the name suggests, is federation (networking independent instances). This is aided by software that promotes forking (to edit someone else's card), merging content (if they like your edit) and discovery (to find alternate versions of a card on other instances). I think the latter two functions are a bit weak, which kind of creates an opposite problem to Wikipedia (conensus too weak).
The target audience is uhh, anyone with a desktop/laptop computer who has Internet and can speak English, and that broadness combined with the extremely experimental/fast-moving design philosophy is a good recipe for crypticness. I don't blame ya for not getting it at first.
By the sounds of it, the underlying mechanisms are solid and interesting, but the "card-style" UI is excessively novel and confusing, and ultimately I see it holding the concept behind it back....
By the sounds of it, the underlying mechanisms are solid and interesting, but the "card-style" UI is excessively novel and confusing, and ultimately I see it holding the concept behind it back.
(Postface: I still to this day don't understand what people mean when they talk about "cards". It's an on-screen rectangle with—occasionally—rounded corners. Actual card-style skeuomorphic design is very rare, the best example to my knowledge would be the Scott Forstall-designed Wallet app in iOS 6).
I wish I could vote this twice, because both paragraphs are worthy of their own individual votes. I think the prevalence of "card-style" UI comes from Google, as I think that's the first place I...
I wish I could vote this twice, because both paragraphs are worthy of their own individual votes. I think the prevalence of "card-style" UI comes from Google, as I think that's the first place I saw it. When someone big and popular (and "cool" in some circles) does something, everyone emulates it.
As my comment history here shows, I'm a huge fan of pro-people platforms & this is a great one. At the moment, Federated Wiki is a bit of a rabbithole, but one with signifcant promise for long...
As my comment history here shows, I'm a huge fan of pro-people platforms & this is a great one. At the moment, Federated Wiki is a bit of a rabbithole, but one with signifcant promise for long term, reusable, collective writing/reading.
I've been using a private instance myself for note-taking and inspiration, but haven't had the time/confidence to host a public one. The emphasis on emergent patterns thru arrangements of pages (and even user browser behavior) is really fascinating as well.
There's several other entry points to the federation, such as Ward's (original inventor of the first wiki and this one), but I think this one is the easiest to grok. If you don't really get it, check out some of their videos.
I'm thoroughly confused by the interface and concept, what's this for and what's the target audience?
Concept: One of the longer-standing difficulties with wikis is that of disagreement (for instance, what is or is not wiki worthy). The dominant solution is moderation/curation, which in extreme promotes an imbalance between readers and writers (Wikipedia moderators, despite their best efforts to maintain NPOV, are still human and many off-the-beaten path pages are hugely inaccurate).
Federated Wiki's answer, as the name suggests, is federation (networking independent instances). This is aided by software that promotes forking (to edit someone else's card), merging content (if they like your edit) and discovery (to find alternate versions of a card on other instances). I think the latter two functions are a bit weak, which kind of creates an opposite problem to Wikipedia (conensus too weak).
The target audience is uhh, anyone with a desktop/laptop computer who has Internet and can speak English, and that broadness combined with the extremely experimental/fast-moving design philosophy is a good recipe for crypticness. I don't blame ya for not getting it at first.
By the sounds of it, the underlying mechanisms are solid and interesting, but the "card-style" UI is excessively novel and confusing, and ultimately I see it holding the concept behind it back.
(Postface: I still to this day don't understand what people mean when they talk about "cards". It's an on-screen rectangle with—occasionally—rounded corners. Actual card-style skeuomorphic design is very rare, the best example to my knowledge would be the Scott Forstall-designed Wallet app in iOS 6).
I wish I could vote this twice, because both paragraphs are worthy of their own individual votes. I think the prevalence of "card-style" UI comes from Google, as I think that's the first place I saw it. When someone big and popular (and "cool" in some circles) does something, everyone emulates it.
As my comment history here shows, I'm a huge fan of pro-people platforms & this is a great one. At the moment, Federated Wiki is a bit of a rabbithole, but one with signifcant promise for long term, reusable, collective writing/reading.
I've been using a private instance myself for note-taking and inspiration, but haven't had the time/confidence to host a public one. The emphasis on emergent patterns thru arrangements of pages (and even user browser behavior) is really fascinating as well.
There's several other entry points to the federation, such as Ward's (original inventor of the first wiki and this one), but I think this one is the easiest to grok. If you don't really get it, check out some of their videos.
My main problem with this is I can't figure out how to scroll right, to see previous cards I was looking at. Am I missing something?
Arrow keys should work if you're on desktop, swiping on mobile (tho it's not really designed for mobile).
Which seems a weakness in a modern design as more and more people browsing the web are doing so on mobile.
Thanks! I'll try it.
Can't say I'll be using it since I don't like it in physical design or principle..