Ask HN: What will the „next“ Wikipedia be like?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32032045

by endofreach • 4 years ago

12 6 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

fardo• 4 years ago

In the sense of

“consolidated repository of encyclopedic information about basically all topics”

I don’t expect a sequel, it seems that fan wikis and Wikipedia pretty thoroughly cover the space.

In the sense of

”large scale collaboration projects which haven’t been done but would be sea changes”

One I expect in the near future is the incorporation of all our modern tech to do user-friendly, VPN-less, encrypted, censorship resistant and decentralized cross-media piracy.

Torrents seem to have died because streaming got “good enough” and enforcement of anti-piracy got efficient. Streaming services have since then gotten fat and lazy and now want to collect increased rents from users on smaller libraries and with less in-house production. They largely stopped being worth the squeeze to the average consumer, and have split across too many endpoints to be economical.

Tech has greatly improved since the mass piracy die-off of the early 2000s, both in terms of digital privacy and user experience. I imagine a platform that aspires to be like Libby for E-books and audiobooks, Spotify for music, and Netflix and all its ilk - all in a single platform.

You press “download”, and in a fashion that validates the file is actually what you requested (no viruses) and completely masks your requesting it from hostile counter-parties (no legal fuss), simply retrieves the content as asked.

mikewarot• 4 years ago

I think the Memex is the post-Wikipedia way to save things, especially those that need to be resistant to censorship. A browser (or proxy for one), that downloads everything, and stores it locally in a giant buffer.

If you've decided what you saw was interesting, and want to save it for later, you simply bookmark it, and perhaps annotate it. Doing so will increase the reference count from 1 (seen it) to 2 (seen it, and noted something about it)

Once disk space gets tight, anything with a reference count of 1 can be purged, oldest first.

Sharing something with someone will simply involve a dump of the content and the annotations, as with the original Memex and dump to microfilm.

Lolo14• 4 years ago

In terms of contents, I think the "next Wikipedia" might be an encyclopedia of projects. Each project would have its own standardized dedicated presentation page.

The purpose would be for project teams to be visible on a place of reference, so they could find supporters, participants, and resources. Reciprocally visitors could find interesting projects sorted by categories and places, for example near their home, and try to reach project teams. With such a worldwide project mapping, other applications could be done.

In fact I am very much attracted to this specific idea, to the point I try to create such a platform. But I still have a big remaining doubt: would this global platform add value for us, since there are already a lot of specialized websites presenting projects on the web (ex: video games projects on steampowered.com; ecological projects on solarimpulse.com/solutions-explorer; startup projects on... etc)?

I wrote a manifesto about this idea (everyone is welcome): https://projectofprojects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/pro...

samh748• 4 years ago

I don't know how feasible this will be but I love the idea. Very cool.

manx• 4 years ago

It includes all the topics we're still uncertain about, together with good arguments. Kind of like Kialo.

dtagames• 4 years ago

A future version might aggregate and organize all of the world's existing information (from other documents) into a cohesive and accessible UI. This approach would allow comparing multiple sources (and verifying them) along with analysis tools to extract particular facts from the texts.

Ask HN: What will the „next“ Wikipedia be like?

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