I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?
I'm not sure federation is that important on sites that aren't built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.
I could see a setup where each server is a separate wiki around a specific topic, and federation allows people from other servers to edit or comment/discuss. Pretty much like Fandom but federated. It would be beneficial in that people wouldn’t have to make a login for every wiki they follow, and may help discoverability.
This is what I mean. Lots of small wikis, like subreddits, like the old forums, only that a wiki setup seem to me a better way to collect and present knowledge than the forums, mailing lists, facebook groups, subreddits or wherever we used to put our stuff.
Thanks to your post I've noticed that just typing the following string while using a search engine (Google in this case) we can get all of wikis that use MediaWiki that are indexed because they follow the same URL structure:
Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.
I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don't benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily... that's frankly most of the benefits there.
wiki software that can kind of talk among each other
What do you feel wikis have to gain from being able to talk to each other?
Are you picturing a situation where 20 people host their own, say, music wikis, and every time you look up an album, you're presented a list of up to 20 hot takes about that album, all independently hosted and federating, rather than those users collaborating on a single communal knowledge source? I feel like removing the "communal knowledge source" aspect defeats the purpose of a wiki; they're supposed to be collaborative by nature.
Or are you picturing a world where I could host a music wiki and you could host a TV wiki, and we could link to each other if we wanted? Because that's already how it works, eh.
Others have covered why they think this isn't appropriate, but I'm curious what you thought we stand to benefit from federated wiki software.
I’ve used Gitit for that. The backing store is Git so all git’s distributed VCS capabilities are there too. If you run Debian, apt install gitit should set it up for you.
Wikis serve mainly lurkers, and federation of these sites does not matter much for them. The main advantage of wiki federation would be ability to edit several wikis under the same account. However, you can achieve the same effect with OAuth (that is, logging to many sites with the same account on another one).
As others have said: Federation doesn't matter. You don't need your star wars wiki to be compared to your battletech wiki and your pro wrestling wiki
As for avoiding "centralized" hosting companies: It runs the risk of "ruining a good thing", but Github pages are pretty much perfect for this. Public repository where the "mods" are the people who review pull requests. Make a pull request to the page of your choice and the markdown goes up. And because it is just a git repository, migration becomes trivial.
All you guys think fandom type wikis. I am thinking about practical knowledge. A wiki about donkey care can very well need a quick link to a wiki about medicinal plants, and wikis about adjacent practical topics, or think for example car tuners and motorbike tuners - they might like to have different wikis but will have lots of similar or equal topics. Wouldn't a federated wiki mean it can be better protected from attempts of centralized censorship?
The benefit of federation would be shared accounts. Which aren't at all needed.
Like, you mention fandom. They have more or less killed wikis. They were not the norm a decade ago. And it was pretty common to see the trivia section for an actor or actress say "And they were in star wars!! WOOKIEPEDIA BITCH!" as a link
And that is how the internet worked. That site about engine repair? If they felt there was a good site on how to do timings for a transmission or whatever, they would link to that. And they might even contribute on multiple message boards with multiple accounts.
I think that the nature of a wiki is inherently centralised. You want a central, curated wiki, not one that has a thousand different versions, each of which needs to be mixed together, and checked. Otherwise, you’ll have quite the time dealing with conflicts and things.
But the upside of a wiki is that it can be self-hosted. If a current wiki isn’t good enough, you are able to host your own, and work from that instead. Issue is that it’s not great if you’re technically inclined, and it’s a lot easier to manage a wiki that someone else hosts, tying it all the way back to a single central service.
Miraheze Will allow you to make a wiki and you only have to stay active. Another option is Pepperminty Wiki if you plan to self host, this one is the simplest and also annoying to understand.
@crashex Was playing around with Hubzilla, it can federate at will and connect to another network. Seems like an interesting type of site constructor with webpages, wiki and few neat tricks. Problem lies that you really need good HTML CSS and other knowledge to use it properly and also it's design really unintuitive. The neat thing you can import and export your work so if you have something to work with might be much easier. I just explore things that have fediverse https://fedidb.org/software .
Sure! You know when you want to show your friend a specific toy in your toy box, you point it out directly? That's kind of how the Internet usually works too - it looks for the specific place (like a website's server) where information is kept.
But, imagine if you could find that same toy even if it was in a different box or at a friend's house, as long as you knew what it looked like. IPFS, which stands for InterPlanetary File System, does something similar for the Internet. It doesn't just look for where information is stored, but what the information is. This way, even if the information gets moved, it can still be found because IPFS knows what it's looking like, not just where it used to be!
tldr sort of like P2P content sharing. Wiki content is just files at the end of the day.
iirc You “pin” content to access, which means you’re also then hosting it. You wouldn’t need to necessarily store the entirety of wiki for example unless its held in like, data files rather than page per content.
Im not fully up to scratch of the intricacies on IPFS, just thought it sounded like a possible solution to your use-case
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