An experience report from several years of living and learning with wiki. Wiki is a medium in which I construct my own knowledge and understanding. I learn as I go. I build on what I have learned before. I build on what I have learned from others. As I construct and grow, my collaborators, with deeper insight into my interests, draw my attention to other sources. We construct shared knowledge while building our individual thinking.
Before I learned of the federation, I was experimenting with turtle geometry in web browsers. I discovered a need for turtle authors to share drawings (which are also programs) & primitives (which are a lot like functions). Although, I have yet to bring my geometry experiments to wiki, the meandering journey of learning and exploring has been deeply rewarding.
It was Jon Udell 
who first drew my attention to wiki. One of his many influences on my thinking, long before pointing to wiki, was a notion of conservation of keystrokes. blog
I wrote in my blog for many years with that principle in mind: writing can be made valuable to a wider audience by publishing on a blog. It allowed me to adopt a practice of small-scale, digital publishing. I still find myself sending links to things I wrote many years ago. Wiki is a natural improvement to blogging. It encourages refinement of an idea over time instead of a strictly chronological journal.
As I explored Learning With Wiki Code, I came in touch with many pages in the federation that improved my writing and thinking and memory. For example, Ward suggests a mode of journaling which he learned from Mike Caulfield. hapgood.us
When web surfing, if you find a page or video that you want to share... Create a page. Include the link. Copy or paraphrase only the parts of the article or video that really resonated. Give yourself permission to be incomplete.
The practice yields surprising results. It is a small, but still noticible amount of extra time to create a page. That time is rewarded by anchoring the content more deeply in my brain. Over time I have accumulated a wide collection of resources. Gradually, wandering and remembering the pages become cross-linked. As I revisit the content, sometimes new ideas capture my interest and become additional items on the page.
When later I am gathering my thoughts for writing of my own, I have an accumulation of lightly annotated references.
This practice has network effects in the context of the federated wiki community. Some of the content that catches my attention are already mentioned in wiki pages. I can fork other author's pages and then tune the commentary to match what catches my interest. I can connect ideas that strike me with simple links.
Gradually I build a rich, personal knowledge base. I construct a sparse record of my own wanderings through the Internet.
The threads are woven more intricately.
Turtle geometry was a formative experience. In junior high or early in high school, with logo at hand I generalized TRIANGLE and SQUARE into POLYGON. The strength of that epiphany echos through the decades. At the time I was completely blown away to create for myself my first working abstraction. One loop, a clever division of PI, and two instructions express what all regular polygons share. Behold a tool to create any of them! I glimpsed a hint of Newtonian infinitesimals as I created 30-sided, 90-sided, 270-sided polygons indistinguishable from circles. In years since, on top of that truth I have built the scaffolding of topology and of differential geometry.
This lesson I taught myself was not an accident. Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon designed LOGO to provide exactly the rich environment in which a kid like me could construct exactly that kind of deep mathematical knowledge. See wikipedia
See Constructionism.
Papert's work with children programming in logo is what inspired Alan Kay and colleagues in the creation of Smalltalk. Smalltalk inspired Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. And now I find myself collaborating with Ward myself in a wiki with the same capacity for created understanding, but with the added wonder of Writing with Strangers and a Chorus of Voices.
Indications from neuroscience suggest Seymore Papert and Piaget in their careful attention to how children learn glimpsed how our brains work on the inside.