Sounds great. I want an openly opinionated wikipedia where a supposed fact is acknowledged as known to possibly exist even when the source is not known (but this should be indicated), where it is Ok to mention an opinion (also labelled) and where nobody deletes "unimportant" pages/facts others write.

Federated Wiki by Ward Cunningham deserves a mention here:

http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federat...

If the maintainers are reading this is cool. I would start with an exporter/importer for pages from Wikipedia format into whatever format you use, it should also deal with the media. This is no small task but what you need.

ActivityPub federation, while maybe a little complicated, seems to be well thought through.

I think many platforms would benefit from implementing that. Especially git forges, though I think someone is already working on that.

This alternative doesn't load with NoScript on, so I think I'll pass.

Federation of a wiki is... well, it's a bit strange, isn't it? Imagine if only one library at a time held a copy of a given book you need, and the only way to access that book was via an inter-library loan via library partnerships, or by visiting the library that has the book. This is assuredly the situation many academics are in for key reference texts, but it is not what I'd call ideal. It is in fact very fragile at times. There is a book I need right now, for example, but if I want to read it I will have to drive to see it... The library that has it won't send it for ILL. In a physical sense they "declined to federate."

The difference between a wiki and a social media network is that anyone can spin up a template social media site; the fundamental user-side barrier to entry is pretty small. The same is not true of wikis - at least not high quality ones. Documentary standards, tone, quality, reviewership, consistency, policy, moderation, accountability, leadership, thoroughness, these are all qualities that take time and commitment to develop. They are hallmarks of centralization for a reason: arguably the innovation of human governance is centered around qualities like these. They take a long time to develop.

As a counterpart to Wikipedia, well... fragmentation is often a death knell for efficient knowledge transfer. We are already losing massive swathes of our early Internet history due to fragmentation, attrition, and destruction. The thought that any piece of knowledge stored in a safehouse could go offline at once, without replication or warning, it scares me a bit. The thought that we don't really know who we're trusting as stewards of human knowledge in a federated model disturbs me too. You can have your issues with Wikipedia but at least you know who they are. You know their biases.

That's not to say there aren't use cases for this... but man, this seems like an easy way to lose or destroy important parts of our shared history on accident.

I hope it attracts more developers and I look forward to seeing it evolve!

Citing a litany of stuff that happened as far back as 15 years ago and raised alarm bells way back when is a sign that the governance model of Wikimedia works, not that it’s broken. Governance is not about bad things happening; it’s about having set practices in place to manage the organization, including having ground rules when things go wrong.

That this project tries selling these warmed-over scandals as basic reasons for its existence shows that it’s not serious.

Every online collective eventually fosters corruption. The difference between this group and Wikimedia is that you know what you’re dealing with when it comes to Wikimedia.

EDIT: Since the link is broken on the site, I will make the case that the cited “investigative journalist,” Helen Buyniski, is less than convincing, using her role to criticize Wikipedia’s stance on alternative medicine, just as an example: https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014407/http://helenofdes...

Citing an apparent conspiracy theorist does not a convincing case make.