You know what would be great? An ActivityPub version of Fandom. Easy cross-wiki links, no ads, running through open source software. Bonus points for a close integration with Lemmy:
- Lemmy isn’t a good way to store and share relevant info over time, unlike wikis
- Wikis are not a good place to discuss about the articles, unlike Lemmy
Ah, on the news. That’s no surprise, everyone and their dog is leaving Fandom. Nobody wants to wait 20h for an article to load just to see 9001 ads and one line of content.
It’ll be hard to make the new wiki take over the old one in websearch and stuff, given Fandom doesn’t allow you to simply remove the content from it, but this is doable with some “creativity”, plus as the game is still getting updates the Fandom wiki will get less and less accurate over time.
Isn’t mediawiki open source?
It is. And I think that it would be a good place to start - by forking it and making an ActivityPub version of it.
I just feel like wikis would fit like a glove within the Fediverse, as we seize control over the means of computation.
Not sure you need to fork it, maybe it could be done with a plugin. That would make this massively more easy.
If doable through a plugin, that would be even better.
Neat idea. What features would a fediverse wiki have? Wiki’s aren’t meant to generate new content all the time. What would I be subscribing to?
This is just me being the “ideas guy” (i.e. not thinking on feasibility, just cool factor), but:
The wikis would federate themselves roughly like Lemmy instances do: you can register on one and edit/comment articles on another, you can easily link articles cross-wiki, things like this.
If you browse the wiki through Lemmy, the wiki looks like a community in its own instance. Each article is viewed as if it was a Lemmy post, except that you can edit everyone else’s OP (as wikis are collab). You can even post on it through Lemmy, but it’s only text posts, and they’ll get “translated” into wiki articles. If you comment on a post=article, it starts a discussion page for that article.
From the wiki’s PoV, each Lemmy community is simply a federated wiki. You can even link them as such.
A few controls would need to be in place, specially from the wiki PoV, to prevent abuse. But I think that this would make both sides more useful. And while I’ve been focusing on Lemmy, I believe that a system like this can (and should) be extended to Kbin and Mastodon.
Seems like rather than trying to bolt AP onto the side of MW, it would make more sense to provide an auth plugin that allows people to login based on their AP/Fediverse identity.