I absolutely love wiki walking through random obscure fan wikis, but I hate how most are on Fandom.
I think a federated wiki solution makes sense. I could see it as an evolution of the interwiki concept.
I’ve had this thought before, but have also wondered whether it’s even possible to implement this using ActivityPub, considering that a wiki inherently requires having the same state everywhere, but ActivityPub allows instances to ban and defederate how they like (thus become desynchronized from each other).
I’m not thinking of a single distributed wiki, but something more like Fandom where you can edit pages on other wikis that are federated to yours.
That doesn’t sound like a federated wiki but more like federated account management.
Yeah, people tend to mistake “federated” for “open alternative” 🤷
Sounds like single sign-on (SSO). Which is practically everywhere these days.
I mean most fandom I have seen have more than one wiki as there is more than one wiki company.
It’s not federated by any means, but if you want to replace FANDOM wikis with other equivalents, Indie Wiki Buddy is a great extension to have on hand.
There’s options to remove FANDOM from search results in favour of other options, and they also allow you to redirect to the Breezewiki frontend for FANDOM to get rid of all those shitty ads and UI, which is legal considering the contents of FANDOM pages are still under the Commons.
Yeah, that could definitely be cool.
Cost would be a big factor … Fandom got big by being free and eventually replaced (or heavily customized) mediawiki to the point it’s unrecognizable.
What benefit would federating it bring?
The ability to self-host your own FOSS wiki already exists and has for over two decades. It’s called MediaWiki.
You could have federated accounts I guess but do editors on the Doctor Who wiki really need the ability to see posts on Mastadon or edit pages on the That 70’s Wiki?
In addition to discoverability, I’d say it provides a happy medium between letting every rando with an IP address edit a page and requiring account creation. Part of the point of the fediverse is to have (almost) everything in one place under a single account while still keeping things decentralized.
Can you elaborate on “discoverability”? Finding individual subject wikis has never been a particular problem for me. Even ones that don’t use Fandom, provided they are at least active. Just googling “<insert subject> wikia” (I know. I can’t let it go) always gets me what I need.
Can’t say I see an advantage to universal accounts (I see more disadvantages), but if that’s the big selling point and people really want it. I’m not opposed to having it, i’ve just always treated it as a mild novelty I never use.
As for decentralization, it has already been solved by MediaWiki. Which is GPL and (can be) self-hosted.
On Lemmy you can see (and search) a list of all the activity from every instance federated to your home instance. Looking at Ibis, which a few posters have mentioned on this thread, it has a discover page with a list of federated instances and articles on those instances. The current format is hardly scalable, but it’s a start.
But, as I said before, the issue is less about discoverability and more about editing. Just like I can post in this thread even though I’m on a different instance, you can edit an article on one instance even though you’re on another. The alternative as used by Wikipedia, is to allow anyone, account or not, to edit. Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.
Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.
What would that solve that mandating accounts for a standard wiki wouldn’t?
It’s not federated, but something like BookStack could be an option for self-hosted collaboration.
Easy hosting isn’t quite the issue. Dokuwiki is trivial to self host. What I’d like something that’s a happy medium between requiring account creation to edit pages and letting literally every rando with an IP address go to town.
I wonder if it could be done with a MediaWiki plugin, given how extensible MW and its plugin system is
I wouldn’t doubt it, though MW seems hard to manage.
It’s not that bad once you get the hang of it, especially using a wiki farm like http://www.miraheze.org/
Ward Cunningham has written a federated wiki.
This is another example of the type of thing it would be great for conventions and clubs and such to host.
I used gitit for a while. It’s git backed and you can propagate it around that way.
