Beloved programming community: many of you are hearing about the US DoJ threatening Wikipedia.
Some of you are thinking of ways to thwart this. Download the Wikipedia dumps, put it on IPFS or hand-couriered USB drives or other less-censorable systems.
A good impulse, but missing the point.
Wikipedia is not just a big document or a software artifact.
Its true value is that it is effortlessly available to a wide audience, can be updated rapidly, with no preconditions to view or edit.
Many nerds dream about less-censorable distributed tech, and think a great event like this will finally make their dream relevant. Move Wikipedia over and the audience will switch!
The audience will not switch. Distributed networks with no chokepoints are possible, but are always inconvenient or insecure. The audience was already finding it more convenient to chat with AIs.
The audience may not even be allowed to switch! The government can easily influence device manufacturers.
It's certainly possible that a new knowledge-sharing paradigm could eventually bloom, one that's native to the properties of a distributed network.
But if you want to preserve the value of Wikipedia _today_, its connection to audiences _today_, you're not going to win by dodging it with clever tech.
You have to actually fight this.
They have to relocate to Canada (or similar), it's the only way
Neil Kandalgaonkar
Progressive Tom
The Penguin of Evil