This wiki was founded at a workshop in 2011 devoted to individuals owning their own work. We asked for the "smallest" implementation as a proof of concept and dropped this adjective a year later around the time we were working on the second implementation.
The first commit enumerated our aspirations for the project in the form of ReadMe documents in three directories. github 
Smallest Federated Wiki Goals ============================= Demonstrate that wiki would have been better had it been effectively federated from the beginning. Explore federation policies necessary to sustain an open creative community.
Client Goals ============ Offer to a user a browsing experience that is independent of any specific server. Support writing, editing and curating of one server in a way that offers suitable influence over others.
Server Goals ============ Encourage the deployment of independently owned content stores. Support community among owners through systematic sharing of content.
.
Thoughts for federating wiki date back to sharing page name through a process called Sister Sites. wiki pdf
We describe an adaptive architecture for federating peer object servers. Both
architecture and implementations are called Folk Memory alluding to the
social process by which folk tales or folk songs are remembered and propagated within a
culture. wiki pdf
Paul Rodwell assembled this animation from the various github repositories we've used throughout the Smallest Federated Wiki project.