I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?
Any community can host their own wiki using the software used by Wikipedia, the WikiMedia software even has very basic support for federation.
An example is the MCO wiki, a specific wiki dedicated to the MCO Minecraft server.
Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.
I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.
I’m not sure federation is that important on sites that aren’t built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.