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Comment by mlurp | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm not surprised. Articles on contentious topics have always had people trying to control the narrative. As Wikipedia got more and more widely trusted/respected, you'd imagine that people would pay money to do it.

I assume there have already been attempts at decentralized, more democratic versions of it?

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Wikipedia certainly has its issues in regards to bias on many topics, and I can see the allure of decentralization, but I wonder if it's really the solution. It seems to me like it would just make things worse Instead of each side policing each other and helping keep bias to a minimum, it would likely result in multiple extremely biased "versions" of the truth, with each version treated as gospel by its respective fans while dismissing all others.

Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.

> Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.

True, but one of them will be loved by Google, so their side will be widely visible, while the other will not. I don't see any incentive for the side in control of Wikipedia to not want this.

The wiki ecosystem is relatively easy to decentralize - just start more wikis! The Wikipedia naming scheme is well known, so it's trivial to match articles about the same subject; and their content is released under an open license. There's also a well-known "InterWiki" standard, making links inbetween different wikis easier.

I am not sure what do you mean by "decentralized, more democratic versions of it", but one problem with that plan is that Google is going to put x.wikipedia.org in the first place in search results (where x is your country code).

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