The problem for forks is to get enough users to keep up with ongoing events. For example, according to Infogalactic, Leonard Cohen is still alive: https://infogalactic.com/info/Leonard_Cohen

The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908: https://infogalactic.com/info/Chicago_Cubs

Without enough users, a snapshot of Wikipedia will quickly decay into unreliability. Most pages don't become inaccurate that fast, but you can't know if the page you're reading is one of them or not.

Surely a lower volume fork of wikipedia could somehow incorporate upstream changes in a more or less automated way? It seems like a site serious about doing this would work on some kind of moderated conflict resolution system for when it does happen, but the vast majority of pages would presumably not need it.

It's in the works. Forking something the size of wikipedia is a serious undertaking, not to mention the rickety pile of code it's built on. It's still early days.

Yeah this seems like a great use of hg update nightly.

This looks interesting, but I'm a bit iffy on a few things.

First of all is the perspectives filtering by relativity rating, which, while not yet implemented, is on the roadmap and seems to be an important future part of this encyclopedia. This idea seems to be an attempt to be more inclusive of people with various political views. This looks like a pretty big gamble to me, because it's not at all clear that this solution won't cause its own set of problems, or even work at solving the problem it purports to solve. The relativity ratings being on a one-dimensional political Left to political Right scale doesn't help my perspective on this, either.

There also seems to be some stuff about advertising in the info pages I read, which does not sound like a good thing. And the "Corelords" being corporate sponsors who oversee the editing of pages in their industry sounds pretty dangerous for an encyclopedia. But it's not clear how all this will work from what I've read, so it might be innocuous. Does anyone know more about this?

Then there are more cosmetic things, like the name being "Infogalactic", and the non-standard names for editors and admins, who are called "Galaxians" and "Starlords" respectively. These are harder to remember, and it's geeky in a sci-fi sort of way that's a bit off-putting to those of us who aren't big fans of sci-fi.

I do like that it's gamified a bit with a level system, though.

Anyone care to share their own perspective on this?

While their current focus does seem and probably should be on politics due to the wide reach of that topic, I think the idea of perspectives in general is a great idea for such an encyclopedia. The problem, in my view, that leads to the culture of deletionism at Wikipedia is the inability for one article to coherently explore all aspects and interpretations of a topic, so editors start deleting all but the parts they care about. Facts that are relevant to one perspective are not relevant to another. For example, Jesus-the-historical-figure is a different topic from Jesus-the-religous-figure.

I think the way Infogalactic solves the problem it is trying to solve is that people no longer have to argue if a particular fact is worth including in an article and have an edit war. It opens up a third option of recognizing that including or not depends on the circumstances of what the reader is looking for. I'm not sure what potential new problems you are thinking of.

As for corporate sponsors, they are bound by the same rules as the rest. I don't think explicitly recognizing corporate interest in the topic would be worse than trying to have an objective page which would probably be subverted anyway.

As for terminology, I don't see how "Infogalactic" as a name is more confusing to new users than "Wikipedia". Most people didn't know what "wiki" meant before Wikipedia. And I don't think new contributors would really have a problem figuring out "Galaxians" and "Starlords" with the obvious context.

wow a wiki fork is amazing. its been needed for a while too.

Out of curiousity, have there been any other forks that have focused on editing the content? I mean, I know there's a bajillion wikipedia mirrors that are just trying to get page views for cheap, but have there been any other forks that are actually trying to bootstrap from Wikipedia and make changes to the underlying content?

As I sometimes mention, informally studying the effects of code structure on community creation is a bit of a long-running hobby of mine, and I'd be intrigued to see any other extant examples of a wikipedia fork.

It's also extremely unlikely to ever get enough traction to steal even a tiny fraction of wikipedia's user base.

That fork by Vox Day? I'm not sure I want to associate with that.