this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Wikipedia is not a Big Tech nor a commercial enterprise prone to enshittification nor it profits from surveillance capitalism. We don't need another, competing, universal source of enclopedical information. Wikipedia, on contrary to X, Reddit, Facebook, etc. is not going anywhere. Any self-styled Wikipedia alternative ended up dead, thematic, or biased by design.
However there are many thematical and fan wikis hosted on Fandom, which itself is a commercial company and there were already some contoversies concerning it. Wikis on Fandom are very resource-intensive compared to Wikipedia or independent thematical wikis.
Ability to edit at several wikis from the same account without being tied to Fandom could be one of things that Ibis offers and could benefit independent wiki sites.
And of course, MediaWiki is free software and federation could be added as a functionality.
Wikipedia is biased by design though...
Everything is biased. Even saying something as simple as "grass is green" is biased, it has the bias of normal colour perception. I'm colour blind and don't see grass as green.
No shit! So it's not exactly a counter-point to the concept of a "Wikipedia alternative"
With biased by design I have meant something like Conservapedia, RationalWiki, etc.. They do not try to make neutral point of view, as is (or at least should be) applied on Wikipedia.
Each instance would ideally have their own standards for neutrality or bias that they see fit. It's no different from self-hosted wikis except with the federation concept appllied on top of it. I'm sure someone will create an instance that is a straight up clone of wikipedia, another person will create an instance for everything pro-communism / pro-china, someone will create a strictly anti-theism wikipedia, etc.
I don't see anything wrong or weird about this, the skepticism this project is receiving is stupid. It's nothing new under the sun.