Experiences with wiki technology over the past decade, as well as advances in Internet technologies, present an opportunity for a reinvention.
From a historical perspective, the wiki technology was invented as a way to support collaboration amongst pattern language authors researching programming.
The advent of investigating the potential for using pattern languages in a domain other than built environments is marked by a submission on Using Pattern Languages for Object-Oriented Programs 
by Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham to an ACM OOPSLA workshop in 1987. The community evolved to launch a PLoP Conferences PLoP (Pattern Languuages of Programming) conference September 1994 .
The original C2 wiki was started on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham. This platform was implemented in parallel with the Portland Pattern Repository to support the community.
In 2001, The Wiki Way presented a new way of collaborating, including early support of the development of a pattern language .
The wiki (as most people recognize it) represents an inductive-consensual inquiring system (sometimes known as the second way of knowing). An inductive-consensual inquiring system does not represent the only way of knowing.
In 2011, Ward Cunningham introduced a new vision with Federated Wiki . Wider attention was drawn to this work with a 2012 <i>Wired Magazine</i> article reporting Wiki Inventor Sticks a Fork in His Baby .
The Smallest Federated Wiki technology presents an opportunity to support an alternative way of knowing -- a multiple perspectives inquiring system.