Wikity was a WordPress theme that turned a self-hosted blog into a federated personal wiki. Described as "social bookmarks, wikified," it grew directly out of work with Ward Cunningham's Federated Wiki, translating that project's core ideas into a platform millions of people already knew how to install and run. Where Federated Wiki required its own server environment, Wikity ran as a standard WordPress theme, making the garden model of the web accessible to anyone with a cheap hosting account.
The basic unit was the card, a short piece of content representing a single idea, piece of evidence, or data point. Cards could be linked together into thematic collections called cardboxes, and the front page presented them in a Pinterest-like visual grid. The crucial difference from Pinterest was federation: users could fork cards from other Wikity sites to their own, editing and extending them while the system maintained portable revision histories and attribution. Each person controlled their own site, but the network of sites created a shared knowledge commons.
Over about 300 hours of development, Wikity accumulated a small but committed user base and more than 2,000 cards on the author's own instance. The retrospective after one year was honest about what worked and what didn't. The tool was valued by the people who used it, but it was "completely non-addictive," lacking the social gratification loops that drove engagement on Twitter and Facebook. Rather than chase those loops, the project wound down as attention shifted toward studying social media's effects on civic discourse, work that led directly to the SIFT method and the digital literacy projects that followed.
Wikity is now recognized as a precursor to the digital gardens movement that emerged in 2019 and 2020. Its card-based, non-chronological, individually owned but forkable architecture anticipated tools like Obsidian, Notion, and Roam Research by several years.