this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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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:
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
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.