Right now this appears to be more of a tech demo than an actual encyclopedia.Wikipedia is the most popular online encyclopedia, and millions of people rely on it every day to provide trustworthy information on a wide variety of topics. It is not well known but there have been numerous scandals which put this trust into question. For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia’s front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.
These problems have been going on for a very long time, and there is no indication that Wikipedia is willing to solve them. There have also been numerous attempts to create new, centralized Wikipedia alternatives but all of them failed to gain critical mass. The fact is that we can’t rely on any single website to hold the whole world’s knowledge, because it can be corrupted sooner or later. The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information. This is where ActivityPub comes in, the protocol used by Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube and many other federated social media projects.
(via Hacker News) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045