The Encyclosphere

You may or may not know it, but Wikipedia is not the benevolent information-sharing program it purports to be. There are places out there as the following 2007 article shows, that weaponized Wikipedia in an effort to spread propaganda or, in a very Orwellian sense, ban "thought forms" from existence. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia-idUSN1642896020070816

The view of Wikipedia being self-correcting is naive since it is the difference between volunteers writing something versus an informational warfare unit equipped with career soldiers writing and making edits. Who do you suppose is going to have more time to contribute to this conflict? Who do you suppose owns the majority of the infrastructure that drives traffic and can, given certain profiles, ban certain IP addresses from being able to arrive at a given website? Who do you suppose is better funded and who, do you suppose, is going to be targeted if they express an unpopular opinion in the Animal Farm the internet has turned itself into?

There are murmurs out there that everything a person looks up on Wikipedia is reported to an "Xkeyscore" like system. All of these things are quite nasty uses of what was supposed to be a knowledge sharing among mostly civilians. Why civilians? Because the government all ready has troves of information. We have to file "Freedom of Information Requests" from them--not the other way around.

The good news is this--one of the founders of Wikipedia--Larry Sanger--is working on a way to solve the problem of Wikipedia. He has started a new project that is called the Encyclosphere.

How does it solve the problem? Well, for ease of communicating what it is trying to do, I will simply say that it is, ideally, a loosely federated aggregator of diverse encyclopedia information that can be distributed in a peer to peer fashion. To write an article on the Encyclosphere, you will, at the moment, require your own domain. The domain will be used via a system of keys similar to PGP to sign your signature to whatever you write with the key in question tied to your domain. This then can be sent off to the above named aggregators. There are other plans to have this information distributed via webtorrent, which would make it peer to peer and not subject to domain tampering.

This allows for a greater chance that a truly decentralized alternative that isn't easily as trackable with software like Xkeyscore can exist in "wiki" format.

Before you accuse me of having on my tin foil hat, you should glance through Wikipedia and see if you can spot any political bias. If you cannot, I suggest you get your eyes checked and your license to drive any sort of vehicle revoked. An encyclopedia, you will remember, is supposed to present information, not necessarily ideologies, as facts.

Furthermore, lest you say, "Hey, JB, I think you just think all intelligence agencies are evil," I will tell you quite quickly I think they came into existence for a specific reason and most troublingly, their analyses are not always wrong. However, they do have a history of abusing their power in ways that circumvent the "Will of the People" that they are ultimately supposed to be preserving. Wikipedia is a case in point.

So, if you want to be on the leading edge of what may well be the next movement of "shared knowledge" you should hop on over to the Knowledge Standards Foundation and get involved. Here is the link: https://encyclosphere.org/.

I understand that soon, a Wordpress plugin will be available for "pushing content" to aggregators. This is the best of both worlds in the sense that you will still "own" your content but you just happen to be sharing it as well with the greater "encyclosphere". If you are adventurous sort, you could start your own wiki to add to the "crawler" in the "federated aggregator" realms. It's a chance to get in on the first floor of something that should, hypothetically, be harder to infiltrate. In other words, there is a definite chance that one MIGHT be able to post up factually true things that are less likely to be tampered with. Of course, if you happen to be evil, you might also see it as a chance to corrupt another form of information so you can gain world conquest and convince everyone to inject graphene into their bodies. Whatever floats your boat, but remember, knowledge is a double-bladed sword.