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.
Comment on Federated wiki software?
EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
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?
early_riser@lemmy.radio 4 weeks ago
EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
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.
early_riser@lemmy.radio 4 weeks ago
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.
EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
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?
Mubelotix@jlai.lu 4 weeks ago
Discovery. The current state of google dooms such small wikis. They will have zero traffic. Google has been overtaken by AI slop, so if we want to be relevant, we have no choice but to federate