A view from Marc Pierson . . --- The Federated Wiki is personal, shareable, multimedia media writing platform. It can be private or public. But the federated Wiki is not is a back and forth tit for tat blog with comments. It is meant to move at a slower pace with more reflection and more writing rather than responding and commenting.
Federated Wiki sites come provisioned with a welcome page. All other pages have to be created by the user.
**Columns:** The Federated Wiki has the structure of a newspaper. That means that it's in columns; however, the nice thing is you can rearrange the columns anyway you want. And the columns can go as far off to the right as you want. And anytime you want to remove all the other columns you just click on the column you're on and the rest of them disappear. You can get them back by refreshing the page if you need them back.
**Drag:** Another nice thing. Is that everything you add or write can be moved around within the page, just by clicking and dragging, and across columns or between one federated wiki website and another.
**The paragraph:** The main unit of the federated Wiki is a paragraph or a paragraph like object. It's very easy to add, photographs, videos, diagrams, music to your pages as needed.
**Search the neighborhood:** One of the most interesting things about the federated Wiki is that it has a powerful search function. I can search across sites. The compliment to that is that you can choose a set of sites to search across. And it is called the neighborhood. And the neighborhood can have as many sites in it as you like. It can have your sites in it or any other sites that are created in the federated Wiki.
A person can have one or many federated wiki sites.
**Single authorship:** Each federated Wiki site is owned by a single individual. No one else can write or edit in it. So when you're reading in the federated Wiki you know that what you're reading is the point of view of one individual. This is very different than the Wikipedia where the point of view has been vetted my community and can be changed by others at any moment.
The federated Wiki keeps track of everything you write. At the bottom of each page. Is a growing list in what is called the journal. The sequentially shows you every change that's been made. If you borrowed the page from someone else, it shows you all the changes they made in the sequence they made before you borrowed it.
At this time. The federated Wiki is configured for writing on a computer not a smartphone or a tablet. One can read the federated Wiki. On computers. And smartphones.
**Forking:** One of the nice things about the federated Wiki. It is designed for other federated Wiki users to copy and use pages created by someone else. It is possible for the person who originated the page to see the changes made by others.
It is possible to know who created the content originally. But everything written and placed in the federated wiki is done under a community commons 4.0. License acknowledging that it's meant to be borrowed. And that whoever publishes it is committing to attributing authorship as appropriate.
**Uses:** Books and articles and **large documents** can be published and a federated Wiki. This allows and users too and users who have their own federated Wiki sites too. Copy parts of the article or book and make notes and or modify the content as they desire.
I recommend then federated user, federated Wiki writers, have a **private version** of the federated Wiki that is not directly connected to the internet and a public version. This allows you to clean up your writing before you publish it.
One could easily create a **neighborhood newspaper** with multiple contributors. This would be done by having each contributor have their own federated Wiki site and then an editor who moves or copies pages from the contributors into the main newspaper site.
One can imagine a community or a neighborhood using the federated Wiki in such a way that they have a shared source of news, shared books, shared educational materials and curriculum. I cannot think of a better open source **educational platform** than the federated wiki. Anyone can create content. Anyone can copy content. Presumably the content that's copied is useful. One can keep track of who's copied what, how often and slowly create curriculum that people like and use.