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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Grant
Theme fund: NGI0 Discovery
Period: 2020-06 — 2022-10
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Services + Applications

XWiki ActivityPub

First class ActivityPub support in XWiki

XWiki is a modern and extensible open source wiki platform. XWiki is the first wiki that is part of the larger federation of collaboration and social software (a.k.a. fediverse), allowing users to collaborate externally. XWiki is embracing the W3C ActivityPub specification. Specifically we're implementing the server part of the specification, to be able to both view activity and content happening in external services inside XWiki itself and to make XWiki's activity and content available from these other services too. A specific but crucial use case, is to allow content collaboration between different XWiki servers, sharing content and activity.

Why does this actually matter to end users?

There are all sorts of places on the web where people come together to share knowledge and store information for others to benefit from. Whether you are documenting the internals of vintage cars, collect knowledge of procedures within an organisation or project, or gather technical specifics of software - a very common way of empowering everyone to collaborate is a wiki. A wiki is a website users can edit themselves. You will surely know the free community-backed encyclopedia Wikipedia, but there are many other instances that bring together a wealth of communities. On a wiki, people can effectively organize their own knowledge base, decide how their information is organized and linked, making it easily findable. Wiki's are used by organizations, governments and businesses everywhere, sometimes storing data essential for everyday operations, or with sensitive credentials. Some cities have their own wiki's, containing rich localized content useful for inhabitants, shop owners and tourists.

To make a wiki work, you need active and involved users. Xwiki is a mature free and open source platform that allows organizations to create their own knowledge base, extending and modifying how their wiki works as they please. Extensibility is essential, which is why Xwiki in this project wants to connect itself to the larger federation of decentralized social networks, also known as the federated universe or fediverse. Connecting to content and interacting with users of for example Mastodon, Nextcloud and PeerTube makes Xwiki an even richer wiki platform, allowing all sorts of useful extensions of your knowledge base, website, or collaborative intranet using Xwiki. And because the project is built on open source software and protocols, other communities can learn from these efforts to tie all sorts of public and hidden treasure troves of knowledge together precisely how they want to, while staying in control over their social data and the information they want to share online.

Run by XWiki SAS

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This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.