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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

I think this is not going to work on any large scale. Say you are a domain expert in some tiny little plant on some tiny island. Like, you wrote your PhD thesis on that plant. Sure, this is not very 'big', but it merits inclusion into the Wiki. Telling people that want to contribute, that are the domain experts, that have read and debated all the sources of which they may be the definitive source, that they have to go figure out how to set up their own wiki somewhere and then try to figure how to 'pull' and 'push' things to Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis because of some bot's deletion bias is the best way to make certain that Wikipedia is only written by insane people.

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If you read down to the "Problems" section of the page, you'll see that I agree with you. I don't consider my prototype (that uses git) an acceptable solution at scale.

The actual solution would need to be as easy to set up and use as gmail. But if you're going to do the work of setting up hosted personal servers for wiki pages, you might as well do it for all content. And that's actually the plan! I'm working on it here if you're interested: https://juniorschematics.com/

The point is that the article is likely to be deleted, so if anyone sets up their own wiki it's a net win, since the information won't be deleted altogether.

I understand the point, what I am saying is that most of the contributors will have no idea how to implement this idea nor the technical chops to do it.

Some people do prefer to work on a new article in their user space (sub-pages of their user page which you're free to edit without interference) until it's in shape to be moved to mainspace (the actual Wikipedia that you can search).

They could host personal wiki's and make them easy to setup, like how tumblr etc make it east to setup a personal blog.

I think that it workable, however, how do you tell people to go out and do that? Wikipedia is unlikely to tell contributors to go off to somewhere else to contribute; it makes little sense.

I was thinking something like GitHub, create an account and you can write your own page's or fork other pages, modify them and do a pull request. You're forked version survives regardless of what happens to the pull request.

I do think that is a good idea, however, trying to tell historians and bio-peepz and whomever else that is not a programmer how to do this, and the reasons they need to do this in the first place, will end in failure. Adding more steps in that process will decrease use and contributions.

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