Wikipedia Alternative

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survivingbias25
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Wikipedia Alternative

Post by survivingbias25 » Sat Dec 03, 2022 9:31 pm

I just came across landing page for Wikipedia alternative in development called Tomus (tomus.xyz). It seems to be an attempting to take a bottom up approach to sharing and validating information. Curious to see how this pans out.

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Re: Wikipedia Alternative

Post by ylevental » Sun Dec 04, 2022 4:34 pm

Hopefully they will succeed. Britannica articles are better written than Wikipedia, but are shorter.

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Re: Wikipedia Alternative

Post by Criminal Minds » Tue Dec 06, 2022 9:05 pm

I've been on the internet and a member of online communities for a very long time. I have witnessed several attempts to establish "alternative" forums to bigger, more popular ones. Every single one of them was a failure. I have also seen attempts to re-create dead communities. Again, failure.

See also the right-wing alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc. All massive failures that will only ever amount to small echo chambers. They will never attract enough users to compete with the originals.

Wikipedia is the most popular website of its kind. This is enabled by the dominance of Google. This makes Wikipedia part of a system that is tough to beat. Because people tend to take the path of least resistance, they'll always go to Wikipedia first because Google leads them on that path. Even if you manage to get past Google's preferential ranking of Wikipedia, you're still going to be fighting a household name for attention. For the average prole, Wikipedia has been the go-to source for knowledge for 20 years, and it's got bigger brand name appeal than any competing website ever will. Many people would still LOOK for the Wikipedia results just because they're so used to going there, anyway.

This does not even get in to the millions of dollars of "donations" the site receives every year from the same "pbilanthropists", "non-profit donors" and big tech. In other words, the deeply rooted "invisible network" of people, companies, and intelligence agencies that love Wikipedia so much they're willing to pay for it. Good luck competing against that kind of muscle.

But even if the alternatives somehow won, their website would just become Wikipedia all over again. The problem is humanity, not the website they use to post their repugnant distortions of reality. There can never be an alternative to Wikipedia, because it wouldn't be anything like Wikipedia. Anything that allows the free dissemination of info by non-scholars is going to be like Wikipedia.

Wikipedia needs no alternative, because Wikipedia never needed to exist in the first place. There should never, ever be a source of information that is written by anonymous people. Every source of knowledge should be written by known scholars (from establishment universities) and subjected to rigorous peer review. Wikipedia is already an alternative to this, and that is why it sucks, because it is rooted in a proletarian hope that things like status, legacy, merit, and hierarchy don't matter, and that all men are created equal. They fucking do. We fucking are not.

The brutal truth is that there is no alternative to Wikipedia and there's nothing we can do to beat it at its own game. Attempts have been made for years and they are always met with failure. If you still think there's an "alternative solution" that involves emulation, you're living in la-la land.

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