There’s a lot to love about Wikipedia. There’s also a lot to hate. It’s become an indispensable resource in the digital age, serving as a global encyclopedia that’s free to use and accessible to billions. Yet, despite its noble mission, Wikipedia is not without its flaws. In fact so egregious have some of its controversies become that Wikipedia’s very reputation is now seriously impaired.
Critics argue that its centralized structure and liberal slant lead to systemic issues such as bias, censorship, and lack of transparency. It remains one of the most popular and influential resources on the web today, but even its more sympathetic users would concede that some elements of Wikipedia’s business model could use a makeover.
But as history has consistently shown, radical change rarely comes from within. It often takes an external shock to cause the necessary disruption, displacing a legacy system with a newer, more efficient way of doing things. And make no mistake, in internet terms, Wikipedia is a veritable OG, having been founded in 2001. Can the internet’s encyclopedia be saved from itself or is it destined to be replaced by a superior archive of human knowledge?
The Problem with Wikipedia
Wikipedia operates under a centralized governance model whereby a relatively small group of editors and administrators wield disproportionate influence over content. While this structure helps maintain order, it has also given rise to concerns about censorship and opaque decision-making processes. One of the most glaring criticisms of Wikipedia is its vulnerability to editorial bias.
Articles on politically charged topics, such as U.S. elections and COVID-19, have been flagged for selective edits and suppression of dissenting viewpoints. For instance, in 2020, Wikipedia editors were accused of removing factual information about alternative COVID-19 treatments, citing concerns about “misinformation” while ignoring scientific debates. Similarly, allegations of editorial bias in favor of left-leaning ideologies have surfaced, with claims that Wikipedia’s administrators systematically suppress conservative perspectives.
Wikipedia’s decision-making processes are often shrouded in secrecy, with editorial disputes resolved behind closed doors by a select group of administrators. This lack of transparency erodes trust and limits the platform’s ability to reflect a diverse range of perspectives. Of course, it’s easy to take potshots, and no tech project, from X to Facebook, is immune from criticism. The rejoinder, of course, is if you don’t like it, go build your own. Which is exactly what any number of startups have attempted over the years, particularly those with roots in web3.
To date, none of these projects, seeking to recreate a decentralized Wikipedia on web3 rails, have succeeded in their ambitious goal. But there’s a new contender that’s flung its hat into the ring. And on first glance, it appears to have the tech to make good on its promise of recreating a fairer and more transparent Wikipedia. But can it capture the elusive network effects to make it a success?
Xandeum Takes on the Final Boss of Internet Knowledge
Xandeum isn’t technically in the encyclopedia business – it’s in the file storage business. But guess what: the entire sum of human knowledge takes up a whole lot of data, and if you wanna store that on decentralized infra, you’re gonna need a dedicated data layer that’s up to the task. Enter Xandeum, whose forthcoming Solana data solution promises to deliver exabytes of the stuff on demand for dapp developers.
As a proof of concept, it’s developing info.wiki as a decentralized alternative to the popular knowledge portal founded by Jimmy Wales. Before you rush off to discover how it compares to the original Wikipedia, hold your horses: info.wiki isn’t live yet. But its blueprint, as outlined in a recent green paper, makes a compelling proposition for decentralizing human knowledge.
Xandeum has designed info.wiki as a decentralized knowledge repository. It’s inspired by Wikipedia but designed to leverage blockchain technology for transparency, scalability, and community-driven governance. As noted earlier, this isn’t the first attempt at decentralizing Wikipedia – such efforts can be traced back to the early days of EOS when Everipedia took on the challenge.
But a lot has changed in web3 since then from a technical perspective – and all for the better. Improvements in blockchain scalability and data storage make a project of this magnitude feasible, including fully decentralized storage and instant access to any point of data, natively integrated with smart contracts. Xandeum’s tech stack takes care of all this. And in info.wiki, it aims to provide a practical example of how this capability can be purposed.
A New Approach to Knowledge Sharing
info.wiki will start by adopting Wikipedia’s openly licensed dataset of articles, comprising roughly 250GB of text without media. This dataset is stored on Xandeum’s decentralized storage network, enabling random-access reads and writes while anchoring updates and governance decisions to Solana for added transparency.
Over time, info.wiki will evolve into its own knowledge base, allowing new articles and edits to be published under a unique license. This model ensures that Wikipedia content remains properly attributed while fostering the creation of new, community-driven knowledge.
Unlike traditional blockchain systems that struggle with high data volumes, info.wiki offloads article text and revision histories onto Xandeum, ensuring scalability and cost-efficiency. This makes it practical to handle large datasets without incurring prohibitive expenses. A Merkle-based versioning structure will be used to track all edits and revisions, ensuring that any changes to an article are transparent and tamper-evident, addressing concerns about censorship and unauthorized modifications.
More Than Just Knowledge
info.wiki is about more than merely recreating Wikipedia on blockchain rails – that’s just the foundation. The endgame is then to leverage web3 technology to overcome the issues that have impaired Wikipedia’s once largely-positive reputation for accuracy and impartiality.
For example, info.wiki introduces a novel governance model powered by a dedicated community wiki token. Token holders can propose and vote on editorial guidelines, content disputes, and platform improvements. By anchoring governance decisions on Solana, it is claimed that info.wiki will ensure transparency and trust in its decision-making processes.
info.wiki is slated for an initial launch in late summer 2025, seeded with Wikipedia’s dataset. During this phase, the platform will invite community participation in governance, content updates, and feature requests. It’s too early to say if Xandeum will succeed in its bold goal of building a better Wikipedia. But the project’s very creation raises the heat being directed against Wikipedia and advances the conversation about knowledge sharing in a post-truth world. And that alone has got to be worth something.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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