Ask Lemmy

So, first, it's trivial to make a wiki that aims to be an encyclopedia with some other viewpoint. Conservapedia is an (in)famous example.

The problem is that scale is very important to Wikipedia's utility. It's not the existence of the thing, but enough people who want to put useful information in it to make the thing valuable. If what you want is something comparable in utility to Wikipedia, that's going to be a lot harder. You're going to have to line up a lot of people who specifically want to write for that wiki, unless you can figure out some way to generate the thing outside of using human writers.

Second, I'd say that it's hard to define Wikipedia as specifically American by many metrics that I'd consider important

I mean, content comes from people all over. My guess is that the great majority of content in, say, Georgian language Wikipedia is very probably not written by Americans. Might be that most English-language content is, though. shrugs

Wikipedia's content is under a Creative Commons license, as I recall, so anyone can fork it, if you just want to host your own; the Wikimedia people put up the content in compressed form periodically. The MediaWiki software is open source, and you go go run your own instance of the stuff. I've seen various wikis that have basically just copied Wikipedia content and run it on their own MediaWiki instance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_forks_of_Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_encyclopedias

I'm going to be honest with you, though

I think that it's going to be very hard to produce something that is really competitive with Wikipedia at an international level unless:

• You're a state that just bans Wikipedia period and have major scale and maybe a predominant number of users in the language in question. Wikipedia says that China has blocked Wikipedia since April 23, 2019, for example.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike

  Baidu Baike (/ˈbaɪduː ˈbaɪkə/; Chinese: 百度百科; pinyin: Bǎidù Bǎikē; lit. 'Baidu Encyclopedia', also known as BaiduWiki internationally[1]) is a semi-regulated Chinese-language collaborative online encyclopedia owned by the Chinese technology company Baidu.[2] Modelled after Wikipedia, it was launched in April 2006.[3] As of 2025, it claims more than 30 million entries[4] and around 8.03 million editors [5]— the largest number of entries of any Chinese-language online encyclopedia.[6] Baidu Baike has been criticised for its censorship, copyright violations, commercialist practices and unsourced or inaccurate information.[7][8][9][10]

• You are going to do basically the same thing, but with a coalition of states. I'm skeptical that there are a lot of coalitions that have similar language and similar content concerns, but...oh, for example, there are a number of Muslim states who don't like their citizens having access to LGBT stuff. That's come up on here, where users of some Threadiverse instances

e.g. the transexual-oriented lemmy.blahaj.zone

are blocked from those countries. Maybe someone could get many states to do something like a "Muslim-acceptable Standard Arabic encyclopedia" or something, and block competitors. A big problem here is that I suspect that a lot of those states also have problems with narratives that other countries have. For example, Morocco and Algeria probably are not going to be happy about articles relating to the Western Sahara. Maybe you could make an encyclopedia that specifically facilitates political censorship on particular topics, like "this article has been flagged as one where there is a Morocco and Algeria version, and you can only see your version in your country". That wouldn't be very appealing to me, but I could imagine making something like that work.

• You do one of the above two options, but instead of an alternative to Wikipedia, you maintain an actively-merged fork that keeps merging from upstream Wikipedia. Like, say you're fine with Wikipedia in general, don't have a problem with, say, policy or citing or whatever, but you are super-upset about content relating to a relatively-small portion of the wiki. I think that this is true of very many people who don't like Wikipedia for one reason or another. Like, they don't care about, say, Wikipedia's article on furniture, but they really get upset about articles that relate to religion or politics or whatever in some area where they don't agree. So, you write software that is set up to maintain an "active fork". Like, each page has something like a patch to yank out content that you don't like, which gets re-applied whenever the Wikipedia version of the page is updated. This sort of thing is not uncommon in software development, working with source code rather than human language text. If a merge fails on a new version of a page, then you just keep the old version of the page until a human can go update the patch, which is an option that isn't really available with software development. Some of the pages will get out of date, and there's going to be an ongoing labor cost, and you always are going to have some amount of content that you don't like leaking in, but it might be a lot less labor than doing a new encyclopedia.

• You use a radically-technically-different approach. Elon Musk, for example, has gone for an "alternative source of truth generated by an AI" with Grokipedia. I think that making that work is going to require a lot more technical work, but maybe down the line, if Musk can make it work, other states and institutions will also create their own alternative sources of truth generated by AIs.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia

  Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia operated by the American company xAI. The site was launched on October 27, 2025. Some entries are generated by Grok, a large language model owned by the same company, while others were forked from Wikipedia, with some altered and some copied nearly verbatim. Articles cannot be directly edited, though logged-in visitors to the encyclopedia can suggest corrections via a pop-up form, which are reviewed by Grok.

  xAI founder Elon Musk positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" he believes is promoted by the latter,[1] with Musk describing Wikipedia as "woke" and an "extension of legacy media propaganda".[2]

  My own personal suspicion is that the state of AI is not really sufficient to do a good job of this in early 2026. But I also suspect that it will eventually be

there are obviously people and institutions who want to have alternate sources of truth, either for themselves or because they don't want other people exposed to Wikipedia for whatever reason, and AI might be one way of doing mass generation of content while baking in whatever political or ideological views one wants via use of software.