5 ms·
> I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation w
by j-pb 5y ago
> I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible.
Everything wrong with wikipedia summed up in one paragraph, nice!
- bawolff 5y agoI mean, if you want to make a website with different goals and properties than wikipedia, by all means go make one. Wikipedia is just one way of doing things. Its hardly the last word on how to make an online encyclopedia, and quite frankly, some competition in this space would probably be good for everyone. But disagreing with wikipedia's goals as a product is very different from a claim that the solution intended to meet those product goals is over-engineered.
- j-pb 5y ago> Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a free widely accessible encyclopedia; How are centralization, real time editing, and user blocking properties toward the above goal? You probably know full well that network effects are prohibiting any other collaborative knowledge base from from ever croping up again. All big companies link against wikipedia because the network effect, all funding and donations go to wikipedia due to the network effect, all editors spend their time on wikipedia due to the network effect. Wikipedia is eating it's own childen, and if we ever want to get something better, it either needs to grow up and start acting like a responsible adult (which we know it won't because at it's core is the failed web equivalent of the stanford prison expetiment), or die and make space for a new genration of tools.