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Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.

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Because "wiki" was a buzzword in 2000s, and "git" is a buzzword of the 2010?

Is a million forks the missing feature of the wikipedia experience?

Yeah! Although I'm not sure git is the right model. I'd like something where people can have "channels" that are their own contributions, then various levels of aggregation and curation so that I can subscribe to a few massive, "mainstream" channels plus a few smaller special-interest wikis.

How would that address the issues of contributions and quality of articles? Would using git not reduce the group of potential contributors?

How about, instead of git, a git-like (or really, modern version control like) model, rather than the linear, non-branching model that makes "pending" changes and "suggested" changes impossible to accurately convey. While the underlying tech may be git, and that certainly makes it easy and largely natural to the tech crowd, it's also an open tool for others to build proper editors/apps on top of.

If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites.

It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page would ask them to provide a citation.

This version would be suitable for children to use.

The ledes would be re-written to give an ELI5 intro to the topic for people with little to no knowledge of it.

There'd be torrent downloads of it, so people could run it locally offline.

100,000 is an admirable goal, but I do not envy that "most important" selection process. Excluding episode and character articles (even the Good Article-ranked ones) may be a good start, but the worst bloat may be elsewhere.

The problem is that Wikipedia's selection process for Featured Articles and Good Articles doesn't take into account the importance of the article. So you have lots of excellently written, thoroughly researched articles... about South Park seasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_(season_13)

If it's money, rather than time, that's the problem I bet you'd find support for such a project on Kickstarter...

How would that be an improvement over the current situation?

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