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What would be a good name for a federated Wikipedia? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Let's say someone created a Wikipedia clone with Activitypub support, so you can freely read and edit articles on other servers. Basically the same way that Lemmy works. What would be a good name for such a project? Bonus points if the name goes with a cute animal mascot.

Edit: Here you can see the names of existing Fediverse projects.

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[–] fishos@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This isn't talking about "wikis". This is talking about an online encyclopedia of knowledge. I don't want 15 versions of the "physics wiki". I want one centralized source. So again, what does Wikipedia currently fail at that decentralizing it would solve? No one is stopping you from making an account right now and making edits.

What you're describing about seeing updates is just an RSS feed.

This is just slapping "federization" on something that doesn't need it because cool new thing.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Agreed, a decentralised wiki wouldn't make much sense.

How would it even work?

Do you join one wiki and that wiki federated with other wikis to make one bigger wiki?

Would you then have to choose which version of duplicate articles you want to read.

I imagine vandalism would be much easier if moderation is spread over many independent servers.

No, it just seems like a pain.

Someone mentioned a wiki which uses something like pull requests instead of edits and that seems much better.

Because Wikipedia is also so incredibly big, I feel like it would be very hard to get people to use the wiki if you actually want it to have only objective and provable facts. You could probably attract a crowd that likes alternative facts. Like: alternative medicine, flat earth, pseudoscience. Basically, I think it would be hard to attract people unless you make it ConspiracyWiki, which would obviously be a bad idea.