this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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... doesn't this already exist?
I mean to say, anyone can already start a website and call it a wiki, set whatever policies they want, synchronize with other websites via RSS feed or whatever, and open it to editing by anyone and everyone (or no one) they choose.
And anyone does. There are hundreds of thousands of wikis out there.
The point of decentralization and federation was to merge the benefits of personal websites - privacy and personal control of your data - with the communication and collaboration powers of centralized social media. So your account is hosted on your instance and under your control and then you can go post on a thousand other instances with that same account. And I don't think it's failed in that.
But wikis are already personal websites. And if somebody wants to federate a wiki they can host it on the same server they have their Lemmy instance on and put a link on the Lemmy homepage.
And the idea that a bunch of people hosting their own wikis with no correction or accountability mechanisms will be less corrupt and have less disinformation then those same people working together to build consensus on the same website? Not persuasive, is all I'm saying.
I can see the benefit for when different groups of Wikipedia editors have differing policy opinions where for an average user both the fork and the original are perfectly fine but now information is in both places or worse some in one and some in the other, especially for cross linking purposes. Wikipedia can hyperlink to wookiepedia for star wars stuff and wookiepedia can hyperlink to the aaroads wiki when referencing highways for example. It all become one much larger wiki effectively.
On the other hand, part of the draw of Wikipedia is the extremely high editing and page creation standards that has led to such a high quality source of information
Edit to add a positive and a negative:
I can see a federated wiki being very good for project wikis especially when linking to other projects, as well as for some level of redundancy
But also this is being developed by one of the 2 Lemmy developers, who still haven't implemented many of the needed moderation and administration tools for Lemmy
All good points, except the existing software does not have that developers name attached to it.