5 ms·

most of wikipedia content is in public domain, how hard is it to "fork" wikipedia and start a new version without the army of their power editors and biased "a

most of wikipedia content is in public domain, how hard is it to "fork" wikipedia and start a new version without the army of their power editors and biased "admins", i.e. take an initial snapshot of the content as a seed but get rid of the centralized bureaucracy and censorship. Edit: looks like there is IPFS version https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

bena 5y ago
And trade them for an entirely different army of weird and biased editors? Wikipedia has the same problem every major "community-driven" site does, those with the most time dictate the culture. And since there is no real compensation for that time, no one whose time is worth anything is going to be a major factor.
jimbob45 5y ago
Sure but those power editors and admins do a lot of heavy lifting that you're taking for granted. Someone's gotta be updating those articles and who's to say the editors you get for your fork will be any less partial than the ones on Wikipedia?
- andyxor 5y ago
  i think it's better to have multiple versions of wikipedia articles, maintained via something like github repo the distribution would be via something like a search portal with ranking similar to Pagerank, or create an explicit mechanism of social voting on articles similar to Reddit. yes, it might also be biased but at least there will be no single source of "truth" and people can make their own mind which version to believe, and be able to do something like "sort by controversial" as they do on Reddit so see different opinions
- rob_c 5y ago
  Could some fork drop the topical, media and "hot" topics and polish the hard sciences? Or historical facts which should be presented as being unbiased and isn't something which is now changing (unless we find an ancient dvd player in the pyramids). If this existed and Wikipedia worked with this "factopedia" to pull from it I'd very happily contribute. Potentially a wiki with some basic checks for having at least an undergraduate in the field of question?
kwhitefoot 5y ago
It's easy to fork it but next to impossible to maintain.

bena 5y ago

And trade them for an entirely different army of weird and biased editors? Wikipedia has the same problem every major "community-driven" site does, those with the most time dictate the culture. And since there is no real compensation for that time, no one whose time is worth anything is going to be a major factor.

jimbob45 5y ago

Sure but those power editors and admins do a lot of heavy lifting that you're taking for granted. Someone's gotta be updating those articles and who's to say the editors you get for your fork will be any less partial than the ones on Wikipedia?

andyxor 5y ago
i think it's better to have multiple versions of wikipedia articles, maintained via something like github repo the distribution would be via something like a search portal with ranking similar to Pagerank, or create an explicit mechanism of social voting on articles similar to Reddit. yes, it might also be biased but at least there will be no single source of "truth" and people can make their own mind which version to believe, and be able to do something like "sort by controversial" as they do on Reddit so see different opinions
rob_c 5y ago
Could some fork drop the topical, media and "hot" topics and polish the hard sciences? Or historical facts which should be presented as being unbiased and isn't something which is now changing (unless we find an ancient dvd player in the pyramids). If this existed and Wikipedia worked with this "factopedia" to pull from it I'd very happily contribute. Potentially a wiki with some basic checks for having at least an undergraduate in the field of question?

kwhitefoot 5y ago

It's easy to fork it but next to impossible to maintain.