Some franchises have significant fandom overlap and crossover, so somebody might want to use their Marvel wiki account to also do some work on the DC wiki.
It would also make it easier to cross-link incidental mentions. For example, quite a few actors appeared on both Star Trek and Stargate. If the Stargate wiki can write “John DeLancey also played [[Q]]@startrek.wiki”, it makes for a less seamful reading experience.
I’m having a hard time applying my (frankly lacking) understanding of federation to what is mostly a static database. Would the benefit be that, say, in case the Star Trek wiki changes its structure and the URL changes, you don’t have to change the Stargate wiki as well?
Wikis benefit more from the ability to mirror them and to link between them than they benefit from full federation. You need much better antispam on a popular wiki than in most other user content systems, and that’s not solvable with just blocklists like in many other federated systems. You need almost all antispam working server side, the user side fixes doesn’t work effectively.
It would be useful with atproto (bluesky) style portable identity where you could log into other wiki hosts from your own hosts user account to submit stuff (allowing you to maintain a single account in federation through OAuth logins, while still allowing each wiki to be centrally managed) with support for mirroring and native cross-linking between mutually trusting wiki hosts. You could replicate the Wikia/Stack Exchange user experience this way, without all the ads and without any central gatekeepers. (Very similar to stack exchange actually, as each individual Wiki would be read-only to you until you login to it separately (still using one a single account))
Things like content addressing could allow proper static links that survive page name changes for the cross-linking, etc.
PieFed communities do have reddit-style wikis attached. They work pretty well but don’t federate. Like somebody else mentioned, i think Ibis is closest we’ve got.
Is there a reason for it to be federated? Like, would you want to follow the change log for each page?
Some franchises have significant fandom overlap and crossover, so somebody might want to use their Marvel wiki account to also do some work on the DC wiki.
It would also make it easier to cross-link incidental mentions. For example, quite a few actors appeared on both Star Trek and Stargate. If the Stargate wiki can write “John DeLancey also played [[Q]]@startrek.wiki”, it makes for a less seamful reading experience.
I’m having a hard time applying my (frankly lacking) understanding of federation to what is mostly a static database. Would the benefit be that, say, in case the Star Trek wiki changes its structure and the URL changes, you don’t have to change the Stargate wiki as well?
Wikis benefit more from the ability to mirror them and to link between them than they benefit from full federation. You need much better antispam on a popular wiki than in most other user content systems, and that’s not solvable with just blocklists like in many other federated systems. You need almost all antispam working server side, the user side fixes doesn’t work effectively.
It would be useful with atproto (bluesky) style portable identity where you could log into other wiki hosts from your own hosts user account to submit stuff (allowing you to maintain a single account in federation through OAuth logins, while still allowing each wiki to be centrally managed) with support for mirroring and native cross-linking between mutually trusting wiki hosts. You could replicate the Wikia/Stack Exchange user experience this way, without all the ads and without any central gatekeepers. (Very similar to stack exchange actually, as each individual Wiki would be read-only to you until you login to it separately (still using one a single account))
Things like content addressing could allow proper static links that survive page name changes for the cross-linking, etc.
Fair enough. I guess I can see some other discoverability a related uses too (e.g. related pages on other wikis, or backlinks)
The Reddit wikis were also useful at one point like for each lemmy community.
What has that got to do with federation though?
PieFed communities do have reddit-style wikis attached. They work pretty well but don’t federate. Like somebody else mentioned, i think Ibis is closest we’ve got.