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?
Any community can host their own wiki using the software used by Wikipedia, the WikiMedia software even has very basic support for federation.
An example is the MCO wiki, a specific wiki dedicated to the MCO Minecraft server.
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.
IMHO, Federation makes sense when you don’t want a single owner of a community and the content it produces.
This. My problem is mainly about ownership and the control that comes with it. I don’t want a knowledge repository (no matter if about breeding budgies or world politics) to be in the hands of a few. It has just happened: the evil site we don’t want to talk about has imploded, and whatever information people find there now might have been tampered with in one way or another - those who decide to leave a rotting online portal also leave the accumulated knowledge behind that is stored on the site’s servers. To always retain access to content we create online we need to rethink the whole thing. No matter if it’s a social media portal, a photo sharing site, a music sharing site … for example, who owns Discord and what will happen when that turns to shit? Another few years of content saved per disaster recovery or lost forever?
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:
site:*.*/wiki/Main_Page