A key design feature of wiki is the ability to read and write in the same place. You may need to switch modes (as with Mediawiki), or double-click to edit (as with federated wiki) - but reading and writing and kept as closely integrated as possible.
An obvious thought is that this design decision is the essence of wiki. I would argue that it is a means to an end.
Wiki is about placing reading and writing on an equal political footing, It is not about a particular design decision to reach that goal. Bringing readers and writers together is not an interface question it is a social objective that can be obtained in many media and forms of representation.
When the web was young, and there were relatively few coders, the issue was about how you get stuff on the server. Bringing readers and writers together meant giving everyone (the writer or reader) the ability to publish content to the server.
# Writing in code
Now we need a new wiki. Not just for writing, but for expressing ourselves in code. Federated wiki, or more precisely The Federation is an environment in which you can read and write, not just text, but also code - that is the ability to manipulate the content and social relations.
The aim of wiki is to bring these communities as close together as possible, whether in dialogue, or by enabling individuals to easily switch hats - writing, reading, or coding should be available to all and represented in an environment which allows you to shift between all three easily and naturally.
# Structure
Achieving the political aims of wiki - that is changing the power relations of writers and readers towards a more decentralised egalitarian manner - does not mean we have to flatten the functions of reading and writing into a single design space - we can achieve the same function, more powerfully, by other means.
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