Well, unfortunately, there is no project like that with Wikipedia’s critical mass. Most attempts with any attention are rather horrific. See: Grokipedia.
Idk if you even want the kind of attention Wikipedia achieved, given how it ultimately became the target of endless waves of scams and influencer operations.
That said, the Wiki format has been prolific in a way even the core website has not been. The core data for Wikipedia has been harvested and replicated across a thousand different boutique iterations. A lot of what made things like Grokipedia and Conservapedia and the rest flop is that these projects tried to administer the sites even more tightly than the original. And it’s an enormous project, so that loads a phenomenal amount of work on a handful of people.
If Wikipedia dies, nothing good will replace it.
That’s an absurd presumption. Just straight off the bat, you have the old Encyclopedia Britannica. You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors. You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts. You’ve got physical libraries. You’ve got digital libraries. You’ve got LLM compositions of libraries.
The biggest flaw most of these have is the same one any search engine after Google had. “Why would I go here if I can just go to Wikipedia instead?”
But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.
Wikipedia is valuable because its a reasonably sane default reference for billions of people
It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.
What you will experience is not merely a lack of oxygen but a surplus of boot on your neck.
Idk if you even want the kind of attention Wikipedia achieved, given how it ultimately became the target of endless waves of scams and influencer operations.
That said, the Wiki format has been prolific in a way even the core website has not been. The core data for Wikipedia has been harvested and replicated across a thousand different boutique iterations. A lot of what made things like Grokipedia and Conservapedia and the rest flop is that these projects tried to administer the sites even more tightly than the original. And it’s an enormous project, so that loads a phenomenal amount of work on a handful of people.
That’s an absurd presumption. Just straight off the bat, you have the old Encyclopedia Britannica. You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors. You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts. You’ve got physical libraries. You’ve got digital libraries. You’ve got LLM compositions of libraries.
The biggest flaw most of these have is the same one any search engine after Google had. “Why would I go here if I can just go to Wikipedia instead?”
But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.
It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.
What you will experience is not merely a lack of oxygen but a surplus of boot on your neck.