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= Am I Crazy For Wanting to Host my Own Wikipedia = | = Am I Crazy For Wanting to Host my Own Wikipedia = | ||
Revision as of 19:18, 24 September 2026
Hello World, I'm Stoulram! OwO!
This isn't really a wiki but more like a blog site for documenting my own personal life, various tips/tricks, and just sharing cool stuff :3
YouTube
Bluesky
TikTok
GitHub
Fur Affinity
Soundcloud
Mastodon
Latest Wikis
Aviation ✈️
Conventions 🐱
- The Start: Beginning of 2020:
- Watching MLP
- SLARPG + Fastest Furs
- Main Article
- Traveling to furcons on non-rev standby
- Experience of Going to Furcons
Finance 📈
Gaming/Movies/Entertainment 🕹️
- Retro games
- Chiptune
- Ranking my Top Favorite Games
Travel 🧳
Life + Personal Opinions 📝
Am I Crazy For Wanting to Host my Own Wikipedia
We live in crazy times in the digital world. We now have internet, we have LLMs, NFT, crypto. Technology has been changing at a rapid rate and the way we share information has also changed over time.
But one of the core parts of the internet has still remained the same: To share information online.
Wikipedia started all the way back in 2001 and it still exists to this day. It's become a central hub for sharing information online sort of like an online encyclopedia. I remember there were so many times in school where teachers would say "Don't cite Wikipedia as your source" but it's still nevertheless remains a fact that it's one of the best way to get introduced to a topic, find references that you can cite, and get a quick summary of something you don't know much about.
Since then, so many Wikipedia clones have been built. Fandom, wiki.gg, WikiFur, etc. and they all rely on the same software called MediaWiki.
How I got into wikis
I've been contributing to internet communities for a long time. One of the core reasons why I got into Computer Science and Software Engineering is because I love to share information with others. I've always been interested in hearing other people's stories and sharing life experiences online.
I actually created this alt account because I wanted to get more involved with internet fandoms without my employer and irl friends knowing lol. It's easier to be yourself and explore interests outside your comfort zone when no one knows your real identity and you can abstract that part of your life away.
I've been on-and-off with editing various fandom wikis and later wiki.gg and have been really passionate about sharing information online with the whole Internet.
Some wikis I've worked on in the past include:
Why I'm Doing This
I don't like Big Tech
Enshittification
My #1 reason for not liking Big Tech is enshittification. It's not secret that if it were so easy to self-host everything and build your own version of Google that doesn't use your own data to make money, someone would already have done it. But there's only so much a single person can do. Big Tech companies have massive infrastructure like data centers, thousands of employees, and multiple teams in order to host large projects. And even though I follow a lot of communities like degoogle, I myself rely on these tools because it's too convenient and when it comes to work and school I just need something that works, has best security, and allows collaboration.
However, I've known a trend lately with Big Tech which is enshittification. I don't like how things we used for years like cloud storage, hardware, and smart IoT devices is suddenly getting worse just for the sake of prompting people to buy the latest model or the flashiest new trend. Good example is with iPhones and how Apple is notorious for slowing down older iPhones with software updates. I myself have experienced this issue. I remember my old iPhone 5 was running the latest iOS 10. One day, I decided to jailbreak it and downgrade to iOS 8 before Apple issued all these slow down updates, and it was so much incredibly faster it felt brand new! Even with software, there's just too many cases of AI (specifically LLMs) being embedded in every single service. Like do I really need a chatbot when talking with customer support smh. Give me the simple thing that's been working for years and not something that ends up making the product more complex and harder to use just for appeasing stakeholders.
Freedom of Speech + Self-hosting
Since all of this is self-hosted, I have freedom to post whatever I want on here. I am free from all the Big Tech censorship or Google Cloud or AWS decided to take it down because of accidentally going over their free service limits and refusing to pay a couple hundred for it.
I'm using LAMP stack for this and it's all self-hosted on my personal laptop at home. I have setup cloudflare tunnel to hide my real IP + namecheap domain to make it easy for people to find. It's also way cheaper since the only thing I'm paying for is the hardware (which I bought this laptop back in 2022) and ongoing electricity costs (in which this laptop is plugged into my home router back at home so stealing their electricity lol).
As for my laptop specs, here's the hyfetch UwU:
Paywalls and Login to View Content
I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately where in order to view content on a site, you have to create an account where they'll inevitably use your data to target ads and make money off of you even if it's free to sign up. Here’s a couple examples:
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Why is this the case? All I want to see is the article or video from a Google search. Why do I have to give these companies my data just to see info that I found online?
I spend way too much time on Reddit and online forums
Reddit is a website filled with best the best and worst of the internet. I've learned so much by joining subreddits and reading about people's experiences. However, there are so many times where I've spent way too much time writing posts just for it to get removed and downvoted for no reason. Also I hate how mods have so much power to the point where they can lock posts, remove posts for not following the rules, etc. And for so many of the top-voted posts like the ones you see on r/popular and r/all, they just seem so fake or reposts. I often wondered how redditors on r/askreddit get so many upvotes for posts/comments which are obvious trolls or low effort.
Inspiration from Childhood Friend
When I was in grade school, one of my classmates created his own website where he would write entire tutorials and content for stuff that we learned in school. For lessons that we learned that day, he would go home, write entire recaps, and sometimes even record a youtube video of himself and embed it in the website. Many students liked his stuff, others found it super cringy cause he would literally go on the teacher's whiteboard and promote his website on it. But looking back, he did something that most students wouldn't take the time to do: going beyond the classroom environment to share knowledge with other folks.
Interest in ActivityPub, Fediverse
It’s really cool how to see how much self-hosting has grown in popularity. Now we got major social networks like Mastodon and Lemmy in which anyone can self-host an instance and view content from other instances through a protocol called ActivityPub.
This can all easily be archived and backed up
- Edmodo - Back in grade school, I remember all my classes used this site. It was like the Facebook but for school. We would have class discussions, assignments submissions, etc. Then one day, they suffered a huge data breach and within a couple months from that date, they closed everyone's accounts. All those memories are now gone.
- Groupme, Discord hard to archive - Call me old school but I prefer seeing things on websites. I hate how information and entire communities are hosted off in walled off gardens in which you have to create an account to view the info. Additionally, these sites make backup and archive nearly impossible. Good luck backing up years of messages on Discord. One day these companies might deactivate your account, you might banned for any reason, and all that data is just gone. At least when communication takes place on desktop-first websites like Gmail and Reddit, there's tons of tools and extensions available that will allow you to archive it such as archive.org, extensions, and these sites also have their own means of exporting data like Google Takeout.
And did I mention this whole wiki is easily archiveable? Well, in fact here you go: Special:AllPages
Reflecting on myself
When I was younger, I used to keep diaries of my experiences in school, family, and travel. Nowadays, I don't handwrite my stuff as much as I used to because I can't carry so much paper around. But I can still share my experiences with others through this mean!
Why am I using MediaWiki if this is basically a blog
- I want to focus less on the coding aspect and more on writing
- Since I'm already so familiar with MediaWiki and syntax, I thought this would be a great option.
- Also wanted to challenge myself with hosting MediaWiki by itself since it's very customizable.
- Gives me old Internet vibes
- Why reinvent the wheel?
- There's great templates online for making your own blog page with modern MERN/MEAN stack, But why should I reinvent the wheel when I can just do this?
- I want this to be a living page where I can update it at any time. Also it's great for viewing past history and changes sort of like git.
- Wikimedia Commons is extremely goated: . I don't even need to upload manual pics anymore when I can get free use pics directly from there.
MediaWiki has been installed.
Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.
