this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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In addition to discoverability, I'd say it provides a happy medium between letting every rando with an IP address edit a page and requiring account creation. Part of the point of the fediverse is to have (almost) everything in one place under a single account while still keeping things decentralized.
Can you elaborate on "discoverability"? Finding individual subject wikis has never been a particular problem for me. Even ones that don't use Fandom, provided they are at least active. Just googling " wikia" (I know. I can't let it go) always gets me what I need.
Can't say I see an advantage to universal accounts (I see more disadvantages), but if that's the big selling point and people really want it. I'm not opposed to having it, i've just always treated it as a mild novelty I never use.
As for decentralization, it has already been solved by MediaWiki. Which is GPL and (can be) self-hosted.
On Lemmy you can see (and search) a list of all the activity from every instance federated to your home instance. Looking at Ibis, which a few posters have mentioned on this thread, it has a discover page with a list of federated instances and articles on those instances. The current format is hardly scalable, but it's a start.
But, as I said before, the issue is less about discoverability and more about editing. Just like I can post in this thread even though I'm on a different instance, you can edit an article on one instance even though you're on another. The alternative as used by Wikipedia, is to allow anyone, account or not, to edit. Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.
What would that solve that mandating accounts for a standard wiki wouldn't?