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Ward Cunningham started the Smallest Federated Wiki project in 2011 to reimagine the potential of the wiki engine: a federated wiki is a new type of distributed wiki maintained and operated in a decentralized way by its users, but with standards of conflictual collaboration similar to those established in git.
UbuWeb was founded in 1996 by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith a year after Ward invented the first wiki. Goldsmith's approach to the problem of the marginal distribution of crucial avant-garde material remains gleefully unaffiliated with any formal institution, commercial or otherwise. Yet the project was
via neil davis 
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> never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our internet service provider (ISP) pulls the plug, we get sued, or we simply grow tired of it... We don’t run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; more often than not, the already small group of volunteers dwindles to a team of one.
Compare this to the first user-editable website launched on 25 March 1995:
> Portland pattern Repository started as a community system to look for useful and reusable patterns in software development. >Extreme programming made programming feel like a cage went looking for a bird >Category Home Page unrolls the full list of more than 3600 members and visitors that contributed to the Wiki Wiki Web since 1995
Before Wiki was the fifth most visited website in the world it was just an Informal History Of Programming Ideas. This quickly evolved into a large volume of material recording related discourses and collaboration between its readers. Ubu means FOSS and Goldsmith
> posts much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order.
Like the Wiki Wiki Web, UbuWeb began as a self-hosted repository of free content intended to push the boundaries of web computing meanwhile taking advantage of
> glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill.
For the past 25 years, the database has been hosted by Goldsmith on his personal server in homage to the scatology of the 19th century, Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi. The project remains shackled to the heels of the Modernist project. These abstractions are as trivial as a shuttlebus to the Honolulu airport.
How is this financed? UbuWeb's economic immunity is probably derived from UPenn, but without UbuWeb, UPenn would have to serve Takashi Murakami's Louis Vuitton ad from its library portal.
So would every university that teaches Žižek. If you think the internet sucks, campus internet sucks more. "shadow library"
> Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We've won every prestigious Internet award there is and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools; we've gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders researching a paper on concrete poetry.
What UbuWeb and Wiki have in common are "marginal situations", created by domain experts working in the two most esoteric fields on earth: computer programming and conceptual poetry. Yet both have committed a significant portion of their careers to ensure access to and distribution of the kinds of content that make open creative community possible. Each
> embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4 dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.
Ward and Ken operate in the distinct domains of poetry and programming, respectively, to ensure access to and distribution of the kinds of content that make open creative community possible. Ubuweb's distinctively red hyperlinks hark to a familiar platflorm that can be edited by any person such that blue words are nearly universally associated with it.
Federated Wiki, the culmination of the SFW project reached in 2015, asks peers to launch their own sites on a self-hosted system of personal servers in order to share and distribute content. A server component, managing page storage and collaboration between peer servers, and a client component presenting and modifying the server state in server specific ways, comprise the software as a mode of authorship.
Federated Wiki has evolved relative to changes in the understanding of content and context online, as intellectual property on the web undergoes transformations within and against the conditions of its re-use. Against which, gnubuweb feels not only appropriate, but the only thing that could possibly be appropriate, at least when it comes to maintaining webservices as "vociferously anti-institutional" and "eminently fluid" between users that "refuse to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by" towards ways of working by doing that are flexible, robust, and capable of serving and surprising even domain experts.
Readers ✓ wiki on the nav bar below to read-write avant-garde, all the time. See Fedwiki's not ubuweb to contribute.