Submitted 1 week ago by early_riser@lemmy.radio to fediverse@lemmy.world
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.
Hubzilla (macroblogging service in the Fediverse) can also be used to create and collaborate on wikis.
I can only find a German-language manual for this right away: help.hubzilla.hu/benutzerhandbuch/wikis.html
Hubzilla is pretty amazing and has a ton of potential, unfortunately hasn’t really taken off at all.
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.
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?
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
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.
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 see, thanks. Will look into that.
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.
Sounds like single sign-on (SSO). Which is practically everywhere these days.
Ward Cunningham has written a federated wiki.
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
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.
Hosting a wiki isn’t that expensive it’s basically texts and some lightweight pictures. The whole english wikipedia is around 109GB of data.
That doesn’t include images. Images are stored on wikimedia commons, which is about 425 TB.
I used gitit for a while. It’s got backed and you can propagate it around that way.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
ibis.wiki ?
nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Thanks for linking my project. Im happy to answer questions about it. Also here you can find the git repo.
early_riser@lemmy.radio 1 week ago
This looks interesting.
Seems like it’s still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 week ago
This looks very awesome. So it also functions as a redundant wiki?
Wikipedia should use it. Then others can create their own wikis, which keep a version of articles of Wikipedia.
sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
This is the answer.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Seems like there is a federated solution for everything lol
There’s also a list of ActivityPub software on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub#Software_using_…
lgsp@feddit.it 1 week ago
Nah… Missing IMHO:
Binette@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
yes!