I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?
As others have said: Federation doesn’t matter. You don’t need your star wars wiki to be compared to your battletech wiki and your pro wrestling wiki
As for avoiding “centralized” hosting companies: It runs the risk of “ruining a good thing”, but Github pages are pretty much perfect for this. Public repository where the “mods” are the people who review pull requests. Make a pull request to the page of your choice and the markdown goes up. And because it is just a git repository, migration becomes trivial.
All you guys think fandom type wikis. I am thinking about practical knowledge. A wiki about donkey care can very well need a quick link to a wiki about medicinal plants, and wikis about adjacent practical topics, or think for example car tuners and motorbike tuners - they might like to have different wikis but will have lots of similar or equal topics. Wouldn’t a federated wiki mean it can be better protected from attempts of centralized censorship?
Hyperlinks exist?
The benefit of federation would be shared accounts. Which aren’t at all needed.
Like, you mention fandom. They have more or less killed wikis. They were not the norm a decade ago. And it was pretty common to see the trivia section for an actor or actress say “And they were in star wars!! WOOKIEPEDIA removed!” as a link
And that is how the internet worked. That site about engine repair? If they felt there was a good site on how to do timings for a transmission or whatever, they would link to that. And they might even contribute on multiple message boards with multiple accounts.