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:
Wikipedia’s purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia; a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge.
Encyclopedias are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, is a tertiary source and provides overviews of a topic.
Content is governed by three principal core content policies – neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research.
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 stength. 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. If the WWW is too general-purpose for your liking, 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.
jxk@sh.itjust.works 33 minutes ago
To be fair, out of all non-federated platforms, Wikipedia is the one that needs federation the least.