It isn't really the normal use for it, but I made my own subreddit for this - I only use it as a personal repository of information, but it would suit pretty much all of your requirements, and it has stats on usage etc built in :P

This went over my mind, but I've read about other people using a subreddit for that. Indeed, it looks like a nice option - free, can add content (using markdown!), other people can comment/vote on it, easy searchable.

One key component would be SEO juice. The knowledge should be easily findable by others, even if people use different words to describe what they're looking for.

An open question would be how to make the site sustainable monetarily. About.com is this idea (but non-wiki editable) and they've plastered so many ads on the pages that it's become nearly unusable.

I like the idea a lot, and have started the most barebones version of this at http://aboutfact.com . If anyone else is interested in chatting more about this, let me know.

It's funny, Notedock[1], one of the things I'm currently working on is kinda like what you've described. The original vision at least.

It's currently being offered as something like a self-hosted wiki or similar as you say, but has some hidden, unadvertised "social" features.

Like sharing pages to other sites in the Notedock system. And pages can also be public (you can choose to set individual pages as public or private). Here's an example of my "public" site: https://jb.notedock.com/public Members of that site, and the members of sites each page is shared to can add to the Comments section. But for public pages, there's also a Disqus[2] option at the end (which I've turned off for my public site).

The original vision also included being able to "follow Notedocks" instead of "follow users" like you've described. What I didn't have in mind was the Medium type comments and "forking". So it's leading me to think that we probably have/had the same inspiration, but different ways of implementing this.

[1] https://notedock.com

[2] http://disqus.com/

I like this. Some ideas that come to my mind:

Text analysis. Automatically match pages with similar content, so that even if everyone just posts their own stuff it will be connected to the rest automatically. I think the problem of a wiki-kind-of knowledge base is that pages are easily orphaned, especially if people just do brain dumps. Nobody wants to spend time tagging content, and you also don't want to manage a site-wide structure. It would be great if the content would organize itself. Could also be used to automatically link terms within text (to the most relevant page about this in the network).

To extend on the "nice tricks, something that they learned about": Let students (or even professors) put their lecture notes up, structurally and visually enhanced. KhanAcademy and edX do a great job providing professionally produced courses, but maybe my friend or I can explain a specific problem better in easier terms, and you'll be even able to comment on it or provide a fix for some error.

Smallest Federated Wiki[1] is something you may be interested in.

Smallest Federated Wiki is a distributed wiki. It allows anyone to fork a page by clicking the fork button; this copies the page to their own wiki and they can edit it. The original wiki owner(s) can then decide whether to merge the change into the original page.

Ward Cunningham has a few short videos about it at http://wardcunningham.github.io/.

[1] http://fed.wiki.org/ and https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki

You might want to take a look at Smallest Federated Wiki (https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki)

example wikis: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki/wi...

This falls under the "Why didn't anyone think/built of this yet?" Where is the global knowledge base? I am sorry, but it is not wikipedia. Wikipedia is what all us know/think to be XYZ?

What you are describing is a place for you to share everything you know about a subject, and I can use to find what 200 other people know about it.

This is simple and extremely powerful.

I'm happy you're liking it. I've posted this over HN exactly because I like it, and hope someone will pick it up (I might think about doing it myself, but I'm not exactly a good coder, so who knows if I'd manage).

I know this thread is old, but if anyone is interested and want to talk about it a bit, my email is in my profile :) (also spittie over freenode)

A team and I built something like this (www.pilot.me). It's written in Ruby and we're looking to hand it off to new owners. Unfortunately, there is a government stakeholder who put some money into it and they'll probably need a small amount of money to release it completely. andrew dot peek at gmail if you'd like to know more.

Did you take a look at https://coderwall.com/ ?

I didn't, thanks, it looks pretty similar to what I meant.

I would like it to be "more wiki", coderwall seems more a social profile where you can share small tips, not a wiki where you can write whatever you want.

It's also missing the "git" stuff, which I think could be huge (or maybe it's just silly, but it sounds good in my head).

And I also don't really like the "closeness" of the site. for example I can't even see every tip shared by an user without having an account (it just show the first ones and then a blurry mess, a-la Quora).

some influencial tech blogs (in order less famous) in France use a lot this delicious-clone : https://github.com/sebsauvage/Shaarli.

It's a one-click bookmarlet with public/private separations, RSS built-in for syndication, and there are implementations of dashboard multiplexing sources : http://shaarli.fr/.

No comments though (the author seems against it).

As the proud owner of mypro.tips, I'd be totally down to create this. Piggybacked off GitHub Gists, maybe?

Interesting.. I can finally put my domain have.tips to good use.

Sorry, I accidentally down-voted you..

You just described a wiki.