In 2015, Mike Caulfield described the practice of digital gardening in a keynote and companion essay for Digital Learning Research Network. He presented gardening as an alternative to the relentless stream of social media. "Federated wiki... radically changed how I think about online communication and collaboration. ... I’m talking about a different way to think your online activity. And ... I’m talking about a different way of collaborating as well. ... Imagine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew."
_content warning: Caulfield's essay tells a story of about participating online in controversial news stream about gun violence and also suicide. Rather than talking about the violence itself, he contrasts the vital difference in his own participation when curating a digital garden rather than shouting into the stream._ The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral. Mike Caulfield. essay 
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Five years later, in 2020, Maggie Appleton resurfaced Caulfield's work amid a surge of new interest in knowledge management tools and practices. A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden: A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web. Maggie Appleton. article
> If anyone should be considered the original source of digital gardening, it’s Caulfield. They are the first to lay out this whole idea in poetic, coherent words.
Much of this wiki is inspired by wonderful insights Appleton gathers around the practices of other digital gardeners. Especially this ethos about respectful disclosure to readers while learning in public.
> Publishing imperfect and early ideas **requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers**. You should include some indicator of how "done" they are, and how much effort you've invested in them. > > This could be with a simple categorisation system. I personally use an overly horticultural metaphor: > > 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas > 🌿 Budding for work I’ve cleaned up and clarified > 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these over time).
> Shawn Wang has written the Digital Gardening Terms of Service which I adore and ascribe to. They ask the reader to allow the writer to be wrong, offer constructive criticism, and attribute their work. They ask gardeners to be considerate of others (don’t share private information or name and shame), offer epistemic disclosure, and respond to feedback.
Source Shawn Wang site
I enthusiastically embrace these terms of service and conventions and patterns.
However, in contrast to both Caulfield and Appleton, I will deliberately draw your attention to unique capabilities that federated wiki has to offer which are missing in other digital gardening tools, even these ten years later. Though, I will put that content in different wikis so that this one can remain focused on collecting the kinds of annotations I use to apply these terms of service.