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Comment by bdjsiqoocwk | Hacker News Reader

If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.

A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.

> for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias

It didn't?

Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx :

> As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages

Most traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish in the book form. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.

Their significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though

Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.

We used them for further research or quick look up of facts you should know. That seems to be how people use Wikipedia.

That's how people should use Wikipedia, but people generally don't do so in my understanding.

How do they use it then?

We used to copy articles out of them for homework. The more things change…

As a meager pedestrian, I consume Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedias - that I sometimes did when I was a kid

Idk if it was the first. Microsoft encarta was a pretty big player in that space back in the day.

Was Encarta ever released online? I only remember the CD-ROM version.

Yes, i think starting around 1999 so quite a bit after the cdrom releases. Admittedly that is only 2 years before wikipedia.

But not among the paying clientele.

Here in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For every article you can see which scientist was involved in making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc. https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/

I suspect they're growing again, much like Usenet, RSS and the blogosphere. Because, you know. I try to check https://www.britannica.com / https://www.encyclopedia.com for political hot topics.

> but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.

What do you think it would supplement?

It needs to be on the blotchein! What, too soon?

You know, technically i feel like wikipedia already is. Each revision of a pageis hashed, and they form a sequence in time. Isn't that the definition of block chain?

Wikipedia displaced traditional encyclopedias. The number of encyclopedias produced in Finnish fell from ~10 to 1 in the last two decades, that one being fiwiki. The same is true for many languages. What once was a normal thing middle-class families kept in a vitrine is now something old-fashioned and rare. There are no physical copies being printed nor online versions accessible and actively edited. There were online versions, but they were too costly to operate and shut down due to being outcompeted by Wikipedia. There is only fiwiki.

As I've mentioned in other comments, that's not directly related to the rise of Wikipedia because most people no longer read encyclopedias in the way they used to decades ago. I have a counterexample as well; major encyclopedias and dictionaries in Korea are kept alive by portal websites nowadays, but these portals never tried to adopt kowiki instead. (I was one of earlier administrators in kowiki during that transition period, if you wonder.) A better hypothesis for Finnish would therefore be a lack of such sponsors to keep them alive, and that would be completely orthogonal to the existence or absence of fiwiki.

It's not orthogonal, though. We had online encyclopedias for around a decade, they functioned extremely well, and it was the way people got their information. During the latter part of that decade fiwiki started to really pick up steam (although it was years old by that point) and very quickly every other encyclopedia ran out of users and therefore revenue. The concept worked well, it's the movement of users to a competing product that caused their downfall, and therefore it is definitely fiwiki that is the issue.

this could be an alternative to fandom.com

There are already alternatives to Fandom. I volunteer with Miraheze.org, which hosts wikis without all of the ads, has been up since 2015, and has recently become a US nonprofit. We're currently geared towards more technical users, but we're trying to make more tooling to simplify wiki administration as we've taken on more users.

I also hear wiki.gg is pretty good, but they're focused on gaming wikis. A lot of Fandom wikis jumped ship to them (of course Fandom is like Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but your wiki content will never come down).

Or just self-host, Mediawiki is pretty easy to setup, even for a large wiki.

I hear the folks running the Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki are doing so with a server that costs less than $20 a month and they’re hitting serious traffic numbers.

> of course Fandom is like Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but your wiki content will never come down

And Jimmy Wales' Fandom puts enough effort into SEO that combined with their size their version will likely appear in search results before the actually useful ad-free community run wiky :|

Also, if you want your own free MediaWiki instance, you could try : https://www.wikibase.cloud/

Yes, technically you'll also get a MediaWiki instance there, but the point is really to offer Wikibase (which is a set of extensions upon MediaWiki), the software behind Wikidata.

Why not? Do you care to expand on your comment?

Why change it if it's not broken?

this thread really should sink to the bottom, as had also happened.

criticizing is great! but it would be fantastic with enlightening discussion.

Have you ever tried to edit on Wikipedia? It’s one of the most toxic places on the Internet. I’m partially to blame for that, btw, as I started the admin’s noticeboard.

I don't care. As a consumer, I don't care how they do it, what I care is they have an infinite amount of high quality information.

These things are not unrelated.

If the editing being toxic and the quality to the end user being great are not unrelated, then I want the editing to be toxic.

I have, and it’s not. (I steer clear of politics.) I have been involved in pointless edit wars, but that’s just human nature: give them a comment thread and they’ll argue to death (plenty of case studies on this site, the older wikis where people essentially talk to/past each other on the same page were like that as well), give them a text box they can all edit and they’ll fight to death. “Federated” wiki isn’t going to solve shit in that regard.

If you think “fediverse” isn’t “toxic” when it comes to controversial issues, you haven’t really checked it out.

I've edited on Wikipedia for several years and everyone I've interacted with has been nothing more than helpful. Sure, they don't shy away from pointing out the flaws in something I wrote. But I appreciate that level of honesty and transparency. Could you share what area you've experienced editing in that caused you to have this viewpoint?

I think they're referring to AN/I interactions, more than content in articles. ANI is the Administrators' Noticeboard/Incidents page, where people come to complain about more or less urgent problems they have with other users' behavior.

It's a lot of interpersonal conflict, so it has a bit of a reputation (redirects to WP:ANI include gems like "Wikipedia:CESSPOOL" and "Wikipedia:Dramaboard")

Specifically, it was a now-banned editor called BrownHairedGirl caused me to be permanently banned. The community is extraordinarily toxic and her supporters were unbelievable toxic.

Yes. They only encourage me more and more to create sockpuppets. I already have a dynamic IP.

There is Conservapedia for those who disagree with everything on Wikipedia.

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