Comment on What is a federated alternative to Wikipedia?
obbeel@mander.xyz 1 day agoI 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.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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 !datahoarder@lemmy.ml) 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.
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 than the risk of 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 option 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.
obbeel@mander.xyz 1 day ago
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.