• sab@kbin.social
    4·
    8 months ago

    I’m not sure I see the benefit of this. The point that Wikipedia might eventually become corrupted is made moot by the permissive licensing of the information there. The main challenge of the Wiki format is with fact checking and ensuring quality, which is only made more complicated by having a federated platform.

    ActivityPub is great for creating the social web. The added benefit of ActivityPub for non-social services is not obvious to me at all.

    That said, it’s a cool proof of concept, and I’m sure it can be useful for certain types of federated content management - I just don’t see how it could ever make sense as a Wikipedia alternative.

      • zarenki@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren’t affected by Fandom’s problems.

        Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I’m not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more sense to make an ActivityPub plugin for the open-source MediaWiki software Wikipedia runs on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could expand on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format it. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MW plugins—Semantic MediaWiki in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis, like articles that could query and aggregate information from other federated articles rather than just linking to the text.