I'm going to assume you've used a wiki before, probably Wikipedia 
. So let's represent such a Wiki like this:
One place, many pages
There is a single "place," (wikipedia.org), where you can find many pages of information. (I'm thinking of each page as a seed on the dandelion.)
There are links within those pages. Some of them are **internal** (to other pages on wikipedia.org). Others are **external**, linking to all sorts of non-wiki websites and maybe even to other wikis.
Now, suppose that, rather than a single central organization hosting zillions of pages, there were a zillion wikis, each hosting some number of pages. That might look like this:
Many wikis
There might be many of those wikis that have information on a particular topic, say mastitis (the most economically significant disease of dairy cattle). That might look like the following. The red blocks show pages about mastitis on the different wikis.
Wikis that talk about mastitis
The good thing about this is that the owners of the different wikis don't have to arrive at a consensus view, as Wikipedia editors must.
The bad thing with conventional wikis is that no author of one wiki can easily use pages of other wikis to weave together a worldview about mastitis that hangs together in a satisfying way.
* [ ] _Say differently? Give example of problem?_ From the *reader's* point of view, what's wanted is the benefits of multiple wikis without the friction caused by the differences between internal and external links.
* [ ] So the federated wiki is a toolset to provide both INdependence and INTERdependence for wiki authors in a way that allows them to produce *coherence* – while still encouraging reader *exploration* through a big network of connected ideas. (That is, the reader should be able to go exploring related pages on multiple wikis without having the boundaries constantly interfering with the smooth flow of reading.) _Meaning that you can click hyperlinks (within the federation of wikis) and have have the response (a page with the same name from another site) show up in the same tab of a browser._
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