> On February 1, 2015 Cunningham announced that the Wiki had been rewritten as a single-page application and migrated to the new Federated Wiki.[6]
I still don't understand the motivation behind this. The "new" SPA is bizarrely unperformant and inelegant. Unnecessary too, since the wiki just serves a bunch of unstyled HTML boilerplate. What was the idea here?
The point wasn't a new front-end. From this Wired article[1]:
> But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. "I always felt bad that I owned all those pages," he says. The central idea of a wiki – whether it's driving Wikipedia or C2 – is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.
So, in short, the point is decentralization, so the Wiki belongs to the people and not be under any one entity's control.
Watch Ward's video on fedwiki's design goals:
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/federated-wiki/ Some of the goals mentioned in the talk is providing tools to aid in journalism, and a chorus of different perspectives on a given topic.
Can't find the post, but someone in the indiewebcamp community had a reflection on how so much of our contributive information gets pushed into comments now, instead of direct contributions of information. There's seemingly a chasm between very large wiki sites like Wikipedia (where the there's more resistance in the contribution process in the form of editing guide), and Personal documentation tools (traditional blogging, gdocs/quip/etc., notetaking platforms like evernote/etc.)
I still don't understand the motivation behind this. The "new" SPA is bizarrely unperformant and inelegant. Unnecessary too, since the wiki just serves a bunch of unstyled HTML boilerplate. What was the idea here?