Yeah I’m pretty skeptical as well tbh. I mean fine, you’ve made sort of a Wikia/fandom wiki but federated, that part I think is interesting and good, being able to have community wikis that can interlink in a more organized fashion…
But as far as the general interest/wikipedia use case, it’s going to be so messy to have 12 (or 120 or 1200) different articles on Donald Trump, or any other topic. Wikipedia isn’t particularly well maintained in terms of quality already, though it has plenty of critical mass for it to stay mostly up to date, and I don’t think fragmenting it into a bunch of different sites with competing articles, different formatting, different quality standards, etc. will really be an improvement. I mean I’d use a ProleWiki style Ibis instance I guess, but god if you think the struggle sessions on here are bad imagine a fediverse wikipedia
Oh and on the technical level, you will be hosting the data of any encyclopedia you federate with. So it will probably descend into the same federation/defederation, blocklist/allowlist drama that lemmy and mastodon always seem to.
I feel like the first step to make this useful for general knowledge is to have an instance that’s just a mirror of Wikipedia. Then build from there. Maybe have something analagous to crossposting so that other instances can crib wikipedia articles as a baseline, but make their own revisions and ultimately maintain their own version of the page.
Also specifically the kickstarting federation of new servers using the search bar is really pretty shit yeah
Yeah I’m pretty skeptical as well tbh. I mean fine, you’ve made sort of a Wikia/fandom wiki but federated, that part I think is interesting and good, being able to have community wikis that can interlink in a more organized fashion…
But as far as the general interest/wikipedia use case, it’s going to be so messy to have 12 (or 120 or 1200) different articles on Donald Trump, or any other topic. Wikipedia isn’t particularly well maintained in terms of quality already, though it has plenty of critical mass for it to stay mostly up to date, and I don’t think fragmenting it into a bunch of different sites with competing articles, different formatting, different quality standards, etc. will really be an improvement. I mean I’d use a ProleWiki style Ibis instance I guess, but god if you think the struggle sessions on here are bad imagine a fediverse wikipedia
Oh and on the technical level, you will be hosting the data of any encyclopedia you federate with. So it will probably descend into the same federation/defederation, blocklist/allowlist drama that lemmy and mastodon always seem to.
I feel like the first step to make this useful for general knowledge is to have an instance that’s just a mirror of Wikipedia. Then build from there. Maybe have something analagous to crossposting so that other instances can crib wikipedia articles as a baseline, but make their own revisions and ultimately maintain their own version of the page.
Also specifically the kickstarting federation of new servers using the search bar is really pretty shit yeah