wuphysics87 comments on Can we please stop arguing about whether Bluesky is decentralized?

[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.

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[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.

By the way, centralized doesn't mean "walled off".

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[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn't that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a "main and central" repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn't centralized. It's distributed.

In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:

Read the source code
Modify the source code
Distribute the source code
Distribute your modifications to the source code

edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

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[–] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

Sure but I don't think that makes it "decentralized" it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren't parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.