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What Massive Wiki Means
Massive Wiki is a movement to create a wiki ecosystem (rather than just an engine) that provides classic wiki utility, with a plurality of tools and processes that enable decentralization and federation of the pages.
In "Massive Wiki", the word "Massive" is inspired by an acronym, "MaSVF". The word "Wiki" represents naming and easy linking between pages, as well as the "wiki culture" of collaborative writing.
MaSVF stands for Ma rkdown, S hared, V ersioned, F iles.
Markdown
We use Markdown because it is a lingua franca. It's simple to learn and use, and "good enough" for many, if not all, formatting needs.
Shared
Wiki is best when it's shared with others. Sharing files lets them move around, from centralized servers to decentralized servers, and from peer to peer.
Versioned
When page contention happens, version history is important to be able to do whatever manual merge is necessary.
Version history is also very handy if you want to refer back to a previous version of a page.
Files
Each page is one file.
Standard files are an easy and reasonably precise unit of data interchange between different computer systems.
The plural "files" is important -- a wiki needs more than one page.
Wiki
Using easy linking and named pages, Wiki is one of the best ways to organize and share text-based information and knowledge. Wiki was first developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. We gratefully acknowledge Ward's gift to the world.