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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

I think the most productive move that folks critical of Wikipedia can make is to create an alternative. It's unfortunate that Jimmy Wales and his clique comport themselves the way they do, because Wikipedia would be much stronger if they didn't.

I find it useful for browsing on subjects that interest me but I don't tend to use it for subjects that are too controversial. At least superficially. And yet given what I know about the biases of Internet denizens I have to wonder how much of what I expose myself to is accurate and not the result of some weird personal biases.

I also consider the citations listed in the footnotes which gives me a bit more confidence than none, I suppose.

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How would any alternative be any less biased?

I had an idea that you could create a Wikipedia with the same content, but allow for certain, more opinionated alternative articles. A link to these would be incorporated into the UI of the site and by default the best, most neutral one would be shown but you would suspend neutrality on the alternative articles. All the other Wikipedia policies would still apply.

How would you judge neutrality? I think that's the main challenge.

Plus if it's about idk, community votes, those are easily cheated on with bots, farms and/or brigades.

That makes sense to me. Instead of aiming for a consensus article, just point searches to a consensus neutral article. Or maybe not even that, if there's too much contention, but just a list of labeled articles. Just as there are now disambiguation pages.

But of course, you'd need consensus labels, but at least that seems more feasible than consensus articles.

You'd just branch the article, or tag it - much like you do in git.

Right.

So could that ever happen in Wikipedia as it stands?

As it is now, there's pressure to merge forks, right?

It wouldn't. Someone would need to develop an alternative. It could work - just use the existing Wikipedia, but branch it. In essence change Wikipedia to a decentralized model.

OK, Wikipedia uses open-source software, so one could clearly branch that. And given Creative Commons licensing, I suppose that one could clone the entire site, as the basis for an alternative. Providing attribution, and marking changes, would be somewhat hairy, but conceivably doable.

And indeed, I see that Larry Sanger has been championing a blockchain-based alternative, Everipedia.[1] Wikipedia calls it "commercial".[2] And I see that its business model relies so far on ads and sponsorship notices.

However, I gather that they didn't just clone existing Wikipedia content. But accounts are invite-only, and I don't do either Telegram or Reddit. I wonder why they didn't use Wikipedia content. Maybe they don't want to use Creative Commons licensing.

Edit: Damn, Telegram wants a mobile number, which Mirimir doesn't have. So is there another way to get an invitation to Everipedia?

0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

1) https://everipedia.org/

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia

In 2002 there was an attempt to fork the Spanish Wikipedia. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork. There was a lot of internal pushback to the forking, but they did it. But the technical and economic issues of keeping a fork of Wikipedia up and running was one of the biggest obstacles. Wikipedia requires huge amounts of infrastructure (both technical and human maintained).

The technical infrastructure to run a fork isn't that horrendous. The real challenge is to build a community that actually wants to work on it. For Wikipedia forks, you face a big uphill fight against the network effect.

Smaller wikis sometimes have been successfully forked though. And true: Spanish Wikipedia DID pull it off, I guess due to being early. :-)

For example, Wookiepedia shows the cannon articles by default, but at the top you're able to select the Legends version of the article, which uses sources that were retconned. Just replace Legends with a different name/bias, and add multiple tabs.

Precisely my idea!

>I think the most productive move that folks critical of Wikipedia can make is to create an alternative.

Would not work.

There are a lot of alternative wikis. Almost any forum or web has one (and they are like a deserted city). Most of them (if not all) would fall into two types: The private wikis restricted to a small topic and paid by the owner of the brand; and the wikis covering any topic and supported by volunteers

The first group are created to keep control over a product (films, music, superheros) and promote a fanbase. This is supported by the owner of the brand normally. If done by fans will be quickly closed if damages the image of the product in any way, so is free to say anything only if this helps to sell the product.

The second ones are created normally as a parody of wikipedia. Treating all topics for comedic effect and shock value. A new something-pedia would be instantly classified as parody and ravaged by trolls, or would be jailed inside the boundaries of some very specialised topic.

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