I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia back in the day. It is monstrously screwed up too, less by the profit motive per se than by innate bureaucratic urges, and (in the Wikimedia Foundation's case) the desire to control a bunch of money and direct it to one's pet projects, which is the next best thing to getting one's own hands on the money. Besides money, the other corrupting substance is Google search rank, which leads to a single article repo that everyone wants to control. The search rank attractor stops the editing community from splitting off. The profit motive is a particular form of status seeking, and one of very potent influence, but there are other forms too, and Wikipedia has those a-plenty.
Wikipedia's original vision was 1) to free the content and the communities for forking as well as copying, and 2) to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia in his or her own language. I have a big rant about that but the quick version is that Wikipedia.org (the web site, not the project) should have been designed like Github, so you would use it for editing and creating forks, but (mostly) not for reading articles. Instead, whenever you buy a new consumer PC, through deals set up by the WMF, Wikipedia in every language should already be on its hard drive (you can delete it if you want the space instead). You'd read articles locally instead of through a privacy invading web site and internet surveillance apparatus, you'd get updates through a nightly equivalent of git pull that got all the changes with no indication of what you had been reading, you could downstream your copy to your friends or followers, you could make a fork and downstream that if you don't like Wikipedia's policies, etc.
I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't have the exact same problems as Reddit. It is arguably not as bad as the current version of Reddit (we're here right now because Reddit is about to get much worse), but it has its own problems, spreads propaganda that is taken more seriously than Reddit posts are, etc.
Come to think of it, we also had a perfectly good distributed, peer to peer, FOSS source control system called Git, but it got mostly supplanted by a centralized "hub" now run by Microsoft, the original closed source empire. It never stops.
And to get there first: please don't bother saying that forking Wikipedia is permitted under its licensing, since that is near irrelevant in practice. It could and should be made simple and easy. Wikipedia's main value these days seems to be AI training rather than informing humans, which was supposed to be the point of an encyclopedia.
I love the idea of built-in offline Wikipedia, huge plus.
Coming back to your first point... how often would you maintain a fork of your own encyclopedia? Even with Git, you would fork mostly in order to submit a PR to the original repo. I'm just trying to understand the use-case here since I cannot imagine a situation where I would fork Wikipedia and make my edits to be shared with my friends only and my friends would do the same.
Did you mean something like fandom.com where communities (not individuals) can start their own wikis? I'd also love that.
That would have been a good space for experimentation if the Wikipedia monoculture hadn't stopped it from happening. One idea is you could mark specific articles or categories as forked, so that your changes in those wouldn't get pushed upstream. Overall it might be something like the Linux kernel, where there are tons of forks out there for particular device families or whatever.
As a Wikipedia example, look up Joy Milne (the lady who can smell Parkinson's disease) with a web search, then look her up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia says nothing or almost nothing. That's not an oversight, that's Wikipedia bureaucracy in action. You might be able to get an edit through by battling the bureaucracy for long enough, but if you have an interest in this illness and wanted to gather and share info about it, it would be simpler to just fork the Parkinson's article. Et cetera.
Wikipedia's original vision was 1) to free the content and the communities for forking as well as copying, and 2) to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia in his or her own language. I have a big rant about that but the quick version is that Wikipedia.org (the web site, not the project) should have been designed like Github, so you would use it for editing and creating forks, but (mostly) not for reading articles. Instead, whenever you buy a new consumer PC, through deals set up by the WMF, Wikipedia in every language should already be on its hard drive (you can delete it if you want the space instead). You'd read articles locally instead of through a privacy invading web site and internet surveillance apparatus, you'd get updates through a nightly equivalent of git pull that got all the changes with no indication of what you had been reading, you could downstream your copy to your friends or followers, you could make a fork and downstream that if you don't like Wikipedia's policies, etc.
I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't have the exact same problems as Reddit. It is arguably not as bad as the current version of Reddit (we're here right now because Reddit is about to get much worse), but it has its own problems, spreads propaganda that is taken more seriously than Reddit posts are, etc.
Come to think of it, we also had a perfectly good distributed, peer to peer, FOSS source control system called Git, but it got mostly supplanted by a centralized "hub" now run by Microsoft, the original closed source empire. It never stops.
And to get there first: please don't bother saying that forking Wikipedia is permitted under its licensing, since that is near irrelevant in practice. It could and should be made simple and easy. Wikipedia's main value these days seems to be AI training rather than informing humans, which was supposed to be the point of an encyclopedia.