Historical Resources

We consider how we have explained ourselves to ourselves and to others.

We launched the project by writing ReadMe documents within a directory structure reflecting our anticipated client/server architecture. github

We wrote goals and roadmap in the project-related wiki. Miscellaneous other documents have been contributed there. github

We continue to discuss features and problems in the project-related issues tracker which forwarded email to those who chose to be notified. github

We migrated the project to a series of repositories, each organized into the structure and documentation expected of that component when distributed via npm. github

See Aggregated GitHub Issues for an experiment reintegrating issue tracking.

We started making screencasts demonstrating features as they became available. We numbered these chronologically and titled them with keywords.

We recorded with ScreenFlow and edited video to include a talking head and run 5 to 10 minutes each.

We posted these in order using embed codes for YouTube and Vimeo in a hand-coded html document distributed through GitHub's pages. archive github website

See Federated Wiki Videos for the same videos now organized into functional categories and supplemented with recorded conference presentations.

We've centered our developer community around GitHub though few repo watchers followed us to the fedwiki repos. We've supplemented GitHub with various other channels, not all successful.

We've had a list server, possibly on google groups, which has never found much use. Time to try this again?

We've have an IRC channel that has seen modest activity on occasion. #fedwiki on www.freenode.net.

We host a weekly google hangout visited by three or four regulars and as many visitors. We've attracted only griefers when promoting on G+. Now we tweet the weekly address and post it in the fed.wiki.org FAQ.

We started documenting federated wiki in federated wiki as soon as it became reliable enough to save our pages. We've tried several ways to link these pages together.

A few default pages are made available by nature of being built into the server. These include Welcome Visitors and versions of pages cited there. These can become out of date but readers will be alerted to newer versions.

We tried distributing a default Welcome Visitors page cloned from the tiny site, new.fed.wiki.org. The idea was that the 'new' site would include information aimed at new users. This added noise to Recent Changes that never went away.

See How To Wiki for help's current incarnation.

We extended the plugin architecture to include documentation that can be served out of the plugin.

Plugin documentation is always rooted in a page titled "About {name} Plugin". A server will reveal its current complement of plugins. json

The How To Choose Plugins page includes a list of popular plugins. Farm operators can revise this page as they configure more plugins.

The TextEditor often used to edit plugin markup will retrieve a plugin's about page in response to command-i.

Plugin authors can revise plugin documentation by launching a wiki serving from the plugin directory.

We have evolved to making separate sites for different kinds of documentation. This started with my own personal notes on ward.fed.wiki.org.

See Names of Things for a glossary of terms.

See Federated Wiki Videos mentioned above.

See Federated Wiki for personal notes made public.

See About Plugins for their details and motivations.

See Wikiduino for this fringe implementation.