Recently I was wandering if there is someone or some group preserving , collecting , organizing and publishing all the knowledge of mankind ever created throughout its existence so that if ever mankind faces the 6th mass extinction we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can have a kick start to our new post apocalyptic civilization .
That is pretty much exactly the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia and its sister projects.
But by now we figured out what wikis can do well and what not. Wikis are suitable for crowdsourcing objective facts about the world (all it takes is one person to add any given fact), they are not a universal remedy for everything, especially not contentious issues or useful instructional materials.
I have made more than 100000 edits to their projects. I don’t participate there anymore. The time when they were a force for good in the world is long past.
Their goal isn’t to collect all human knowledge, only notable human knowledge.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information .
Why aren’t they a force for good anymore?
Many reasons most of which you’ll only understand if you pay some attention to what’s going on behind their scenes.
There are reasons why nowadays pretty much everywhere else on the Internet more content is created all the time than on the Wikimedia projects.
The Wikipedias’ “neutral point of view” policy used to mean “we try to treat all sides fairly”, now it means “we are writing an unconditional propaganda organ for the status quo”. The mainstream media that is accepted as “reliable” as Wikipedia sources just isn’t that credible anymore.
Also, when I started editing there, the individual projects were mostly left alone by the WMF. Nowadays the WMF issues intransparent sanctions, up to lifetime bans from all projects, left and right.
I wish someone started an organization with the same goals as the WMF with an actually working system where people could actually enjoy participating.
Be the change you want to see in the world…
Heck most of the hard work is already done for you, since the software that runs Wikipedia is open source.
Many people have tried that before. Wikis just aren’t that appealing anymore. Today’s internet is all about social media.
If there’s anything that is absolutely atrocious as a searchable repository of knowledge, it’s social media.