I remember someone shared a federated alternative to Wikipedia here and I don’t remember the name of the project. Perplexity, Google and alternativeto.net are no good in finding it. Does anybody know its name?
I remember someone shared a federated alternative to Wikipedia here and I don’t remember the name of the project. Perplexity, Google and alternativeto.net are no good in finding it. Does anybody know its name?
I think we need to start with what Wikipedia is meant to be, before even considering whether it would be aided through federation. By their own words:
That describes the content intended to go into the Wikipedia, but we need to also mention the distinction between the Wikipedia itself, the MediaWiki software package which powers Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
With MediaWiki, which is FOSS (GPLv2), anyone can set up their own encyclopedia-style volume of articles to host on the web. And that’s exactly what many fandom websites or technical documentation websites do, because that level of detail would not be accepted into the general-knowledge Wikipedia. And you can hardly blame the Wikipedia for wanting to avoid scope-creep.
Likewise, if someone disagrees with how a topic is discussed in a Wikipedia article, they can go in and make the change, provided that they follow the same rules and procedures as everyone else. Yes there are moderators, but even moderators can be moderated. In a way, Wikipedia is a collective effort that somehow democratized editorship and it’s shocking that it hasn’t devolved into major terf wars.
And that’s where the Wikipedia Foundation comes in. They are both the charitable foundation that keeps the Wikipedia servers running, as well as administering the collection, much like how a museum protects cultural treasures. Dissatisfaction with the limited role that the Foundation plays can be solved by forking the Wikipedia; they don’t assert a monopoly on the collective knowledge, and indeed the entire thing can be downloaded for offline use or to host a mirror under separate administration.
With all that said, Wikipedia as a concept hews very closely to the print version of an encyclopedia. It is functionally a really big book, painstakingly edited by untold numbers of people. The fact that it’s not just a bunch of random blog posts is its strength. Wikipedia is not social media; it is distributed editorship.
But supposing you do want a distributed knowledge base, where there might exist multiple versions of an article, please explain why the World Wide Web doesn’t already accomplish that. People have been writing their own thoughts since the 1990s. If the WWW is too general-purpose for your liking for knowledge articles, then perhaps something like the DICT protocol is more palatable?
Despite ostensibly dealing with dictionaries, DICT has been used to offer the CIA World Factbook and the Jargon File, which are more like subject-matter specific encyclopedias. As a standardized protocol – even CURL can fetch DICT entries – the Fediverse doesn’t need another protocol to do the same thing.
I personally think there is value – a lot of value – in the Wikipedia, precisely because of what it’s not. Wikipedia is not a place to express opinions, it is not a popularity contest of ideas, and it is not a space untethered from facts and logic.
I understand people and entities having wikis for countless reasons, as we see lots of wikis all over the web. And it’s awesome that MediaWiki is open sourced to create these places. However, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying that Facebook had open sourced its code and now anyone can create a new Facebook. Let’s take a real example: Mastodon is open source and Truth Social is based on Mastodon. Does that make Truth Social any more linked to Mastodon core guidelines and philosophy? It doesn’t. Because Truth Social is more like Twitter than it is like Mastodon.
So, why would I want to start a wiki? No, I want a decentralized go-to place that I can check many points of view over a subject, just like the Fediverse works today. I use an instance that is already set up and help that community grow its direction and contribute. It isn’t that hard to understand. A place that is already built up where you can contribute in different ways and it is at the same time decentralized.
There is nothing to fear. It isn’t as if people could create a new wolfballs instance that would ruin the thing; the community can be better than that. Things don’t have to spiral out of control, in the end teamwork would make for it and it would be a nice place. It doesn’t have to be a Truth “Social” Wiki.
I disagree with the premise that multiple POVs on every topic will yield better understandings or discussion. It is the same flaw that Ground News or other services have, which purport to curate POVs from different news media outlets, with the implicit assumption that all the outlets have something useful to offer. This assumption is absolutely balderdash.
The Fediverse is no more – or less – immune from disinformation and other ails, but has better user- and instance-level protections: bans and defederation are effective, because if they weren’t, people here wouldn’t log back on. For Mastodon and Lemmy and other forms of social media, the decentralization has clear and obvious benefits.
A decentralized knowledge-store does not.
There is everything to fear when knowledge is spread out into small libraries across the land. The historical analog is book-burning incidents that dotted human history, whether to suppress paganism, Mayan culture, or the spread of communism. The modern-day analogy is when Vine went defunct and the content was almost wholly lost to the world. The Fediverse example is when an instance unexpectedly disappears, stranding all its users.
But focusing on a knowledge-store, technology has given us the ability to copy data at rates that outpace all of history’s ecclesiastical scribes put together. We can – and do – preserve the largest datasets (see [email protected]) because it is a matter of resilience. Yet that endeavor has become more difficult precisely because of technology. The Internet Archive faces this issue, because they cannot save what they don’t even know exist or cannot see it.
The Fediverse inhabits a very special Goldilocks zone right now, not unlike Wikipedia, where the availability of interest, capabilities, and materiel allow for the existence of this internet experiment. But fragile it is, and instances are no further from risk than by a DMCA notice, a UK age restriction law, a frivolous but expensive SLAPP suit, or just plain ol running out of money.
If I had spare time and energy and were presented with the options to either: 1) set up a decentralized knowledge store of nebulous benefit, or 2) support the online compendium which I’ve personally used for over two decades now and has helped untold numbers of students and researchers with starting the research into a new-to-them topic, and could do so by using my servers to seed the all-Wikipedia torrents… well, I think the choice is clear.
I like what you said. But categorizing and labeling media websites is not at all as contributing with knowledge to a corpus of information. Contributing with more information brings more freedom, while restraining something to a label diminishes freedom.
Edit: For example, if I tell the person that a news website is left leaning, I’m telling her what she needs to know about that website. And it will also shape her opinion about the website, in ways that could be limiting.
When a person visits a website without a formed opinion about it, she can construct her own opinion and have a personal relationship with what the website has to say.
The problem with Wikipedia is who controls the narrative and it is controlled by a few who have incentives to sway public opinion.
https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2025/01/09/the-bias-of-notability-in-wikipedia/
https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-political-bias-embedded-in-wikipedia-articles
You could have spared yourself the AI slop by saying you’re fine with the current bias. Where do you think most source on Wikipedia comes from? Articles from mainstream media which is mostly handled and curated by the western nations that until very recently denied anything bad happening in Gaza? The one that minimized the atrocities of Iraq and Afghanistan war and countless other interventions.
How do you think that works into a “neutral point of view” narrative?
Wikipedia was relatively early in labeling the Gaza genocide.
Also, as others have said, you can clone Wikipedia right now and set up your own structure to edit it. The problem is that most clones end up like Conversatopeda, which generally tends to add a lot of bias to the articles.
This opinion is a bit extreme, but take the “Science” subreddit for example. Reddit is full of rules, but “Science” in particular only lets you post links from trusted sources and is very uptight about the rules.