I thought the whole point of a wiki is to be an authoritative source of info. So if e.g. the USA + Russia + NK has one set of information, and the EU has another set, and like let’s say that South America and then also Africa each have their own sets, thus four sets in all, doesn’t this defeat the point?
Or am I thinking of this all wrong? Should this be considered more like a type of interconnected fandom wikias? But even there, if the edits are shared - i.e. federated - then how is that different from the above?
I just don’t get it, I suppose.
I suppose the idea is that “truth” is, in some ways, subjective - is (perhaps was) America the guiding like of freedom or is it the great Satan? The tankies definitely have their own take on Tianamen Square, for example. So, in theory, it would allow two articles on the same subject to exist on different instances.
That seems like the high-mindes aim. Personally I see it as more of a fandom replacement (as well as general wiki) and one you could run alongside a Lemmy instance - feddit.uk’s would cover UK events and media, lemmy.org might cover the German-language stuff but lemm.ee might offer those last articles in English.
And it needn’t be either/or - you can see the parallel in Lemmy - c/politics are different beasts on .world and .ml, feddit.uk has communities for British books, films and TV.
Reddit has a small internal wiki component as well, and it definitely is useful to add a *persistence" component to a forum-based platform, where once something drops out of the variety of “feeds” (Subscribed, All, New, Top) it becomes super difficult to ever find again.
So things like an instance FAQ - what is “Lemmy”, what apps work for it, what are “tankies” and why might I want to avoid them, etc.
However, by that same token, why would e.g. feddit.uk’s wiki be okay to be editable by people with accounts on Hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.ml, and USA centrist instances, all bringing their own political viewpoints and causing edit wars? In short, wouldn’t feddit.uk’s purposes be better served by having an internal wiki rather than a federated one? What good does the federation component add, and how would that good not be outweighed by the bad?
It makes sense for forum software to be federated bc people don’t need to be educated or speak proper facts when the purpose is to just talk, so as feel less lonely. But the purpose of a wiki is entirely different - there, facts do (or at least should?) matter much more?
So all the tactics that we cannot stop on the Threadiverse - vote manipulation, disinformation campaigns, bots spewing prepared nonsense, etc. - seem like they will be magnified significantly further by now adding a persistence component.
TLDR: I’m not against wikis, just wondering what benefits that federation adds to them, especially in relation to the known detractions.
So I’m mostly used to Confluence at work but would like to have something for my private use which has some of the features. What I seem to miss here are especially the WYSIWYG stuff like tables, headlines, lists, links to other articles, etc. Perhaps I need to look into the features.
I’m using a lot of tables to store data in them but here tables seem not to be supported?
Also I’m using the tasks and mentions of other users quite a lot, that seems to be missing too.
Zim wiki maybe, if you want local only (or vimwiki or EMACS org mode, or even raw markdown, if you’re a shell goblin like myself).
