Wednesday, February 25, 2015

[blkensaf] Censorship resistant Wikipedia

Consider uploading the entirety of Wikipedia into a censorship resistant medium such as Freenet, then allowing it to be updated through that medium also, essentially forking it.

Although this will infuriate a lot of people, the first interesting new capability enabled by this will be the impossibility of removing copyrighted content.  Among other things, this means that the sources of an article can be mirrored and uploaded, too, which will be a tremendous benefit to researching via this forked Wikipedia.  This could be a killer app.  (Though there remains the difficulty of verifying that the mirrored copy of the source is accurate and has not been tampered with.)

Consider the large but not impossible task of preparing an initial upload consisting of all the articles and a copy of as many of the mirrored sources as obtainable within a reasonable budget, as a way of bootstrapping the project and getting others interested in contributing.

There remains the very difficult task of creating a community, of being able to resolve disputes and enforce rules in such a medium, to keep the content at high quality.  Wikipedia has a ban hammer, which might not be available on Freenet.

No comments :