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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

It's legitimate to create alternatives to anything, and to re-think what has been done already.

One thing that would be on my personal wish list for any Wikipedia alternative is ease of machine processing: the MediaWiki format/mark-up and the templates are horribly inconsistent and a nightmare to parse. This should be done better by any serious successor. Wikipedia has got the excuse "historically grown", any successor doesn't.

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That seems to be the same goal for https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

Do you mean something different, e.g. not just structured data?

For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification

There’s also this page:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers

For context, the parser I'm talking about in my first post is Parsoid on that list.

The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.

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