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If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.
by bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoA federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias It didn't? Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx : > As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages
- lifthrasiir 3y agoMost traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish in the book form. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.
- ChrisKnott 3y agoTheir significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though
- lifthrasiir 3y agoWikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.
- emj 3y agoWe used them for further research or quick look up of facts you should know. That seems to be how people use Wikipedia.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoThat's how people should use Wikipedia, but people generally don't do so in my understanding.
- blowski 3y agoHow do they use it then?
- chgs 3y agoWe used to copy articles out of them for homework. The more things change…
- szundi 3y agoAs a meager pedestrian, I consume Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedias - that I sometimes did when I was a kid
- bawolff 3y agoIdk if it was the first. Microsoft encarta was a pretty big player in that space back in the day.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoBut not among the paying clientele.
- Erwin 3y agoHere in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For every article you can see which scientist was involved in making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc. https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/ https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/
- medstrom 3y agoI suspect they're growing again, much like Usenet, RSS and the blogosphere. Because, you know. I try to check https://www.britannica.com https://www.britannica.com / https://www.encyclopedia.com https://www.encyclopedia.com for political hot topics.
- bawolff 3y ago> but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough. What do you think it would supplement?
- kamray23 3y agoWikipedia displaced traditional encyclopedias. The number of encyclopedias produced in Finnish fell from ~10 to 1 in the last two decades, that one being fiwiki. The same is true for many languages. What once was a normal thing middle-class families kept in a vitrine is now something old-fashioned and rare. There are no physical copies being printed nor online versions accessible and actively edited. There were online versions, but they were too costly to operate and shut down due to being outcompeted by Wikipedia. There is only fiwiki.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoAs I've mentioned in other comments, that's not directly related to the rise of Wikipedia because most people no longer read encyclopedias in the way they used to decades ago. I have a counterexample as well; major encyclopedias and dictionaries in Korea are kept alive by portal websites nowadays, but these portals never tried to adopt kowiki instead. (I was one of earlier administrators in kowiki during that transition period, if you wonder.) A better hypothesis for Finnish would therefore be a lack of such sponsors to keep them alive, and that would be completely orthogonal to the existence or absence of fiwiki.
- kamray23 3y agoIt's not orthogonal, though. We had online encyclopedias for around a decade, they functioned extremely well, and it was the way people got their information. During the latter part of that decade fiwiki started to really pick up steam (although it was years old by that point) and very quickly every other encyclopedia ran out of users and therefore revenue. The concept worked well, it's the movement of users to a competing product that caused their downfall, and therefore it is definitely fiwiki that is the issue.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- techaqua 3y agothis could be an alternative to fandom.com
- labster 3y agoThere are already alternatives to Fandom. I volunteer with Miraheze.org, which hosts wikis without all of the ads, has been up since 2015, and has recently become a US nonprofit. We're currently geared towards more technical users, but we're trying to make more tooling to simplify wiki administration as we've taken on more users. I also hear wiki.gg is pretty good, but they're focused on gaming wikis. A lot of Fandom wikis jumped ship to them (of course Fandom is like Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but your wiki content will never come down).
- iamacyborg 3y agoOr just self-host, Mediawiki is pretty easy to setup, even for a large wiki. I hear the folks running the Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki are doing so with a server that costs less than $20 a month and they’re hitting serious traffic numbers.
- account42 3y ago> of course Fandom is like Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but your wiki content will never come down And Jimmy Wales' Fandom puts enough effort into SEO that combined with their size their version will likely appear in search results before the actually useful ad-free community run wiky :|
- altilunium 3y agoAlso, if you want your own free MediaWiki instance, you could try : https://www.wikibase.cloud/ https://www.wikibase.cloud/
- mmarx 3y agoYes, technically you'll also get a MediaWiki instance there, but the point is really to offer Wikibase (which is a set of extensions upon MediaWiki), the software behind Wikidata.
- madsbuch 3y agoWhy not? Do you care to expand on your comment?
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoWhy change it if it's not broken?
- madsbuch 3y agothis thread really should sink to the bottom, as had also happened. criticizing is great! but it would be fantastic with enlightening discussion.
- chris_wot 3y agoHave you ever tried to edit on Wikipedia? It’s one of the most toxic places on the Internet. I’m partially to blame for that, btw, as I started the admin’s noticeboard.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoI don't care. As a consumer, I don't care how they do it, what I care is they have an infinite amount of high quality information.
- account42 3y agoThese things are not unrelated.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoIf the editing being toxic and the quality to the end user being great are not unrelated, then I want the editing to be toxic.
- oefrha 3y agoI have, and it’s not. (I steer clear of politics.) I have been involved in pointless edit wars, but that’s just human nature: give them a comment thread and they’ll argue to death (plenty of case studies on this site, the older wikis where people essentially talk to/past each other on the same page were like that as well), give them a text box they can all edit and they’ll fight to death. “Federated” wiki isn’t going to solve shit in that regard. If you think “fediverse” isn’t “toxic” when it comes to controversial issues, you haven’t really checked it out.
- j_maffe 3y agoI've edited on Wikipedia for several years and everyone I've interacted with has been nothing more than helpful. Sure, they don't shy away from pointing out the flaws in something I wrote. But I appreciate that level of honesty and transparency. Could you share what area you've experienced editing in that caused you to have this viewpoint?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pornel 3y agoThere is Conservapedia for those who disagree with everything on Wikipedia.