I don't think a federated wiki is solving any of the problems of wikipedia. You've just made a wiki that is more easily spammed and will have very few contributors. Yes, Wikipedia is centralized, but it's a good thing. No one has to chase down the just perfect wikipedia site to find general information, just the one. The negative of wikipedia is more its sometimes questionable moderation and how its english-centric. This has more to do with fundamentally unequal internet infrastructure in most countries than anything though. Imperialism holds back tech.

I agree that it might be fine for niche wikis but again, why in the world would you ever want your niche wiki federated? Sounds like a tech solution looking for the wrong problem.

Wouldn't they just use a VPN? I know they're technically illegal in China but from what I've heard lots of people still use them regularly.

Wikipedia doesn't replace books. In my comment at least that's why I was specific about "general information". I think everyone must be aware that when it comes to Wikipedia on history or current events, it will largely be from a liberal and pro-west perspective. Not all the time, and usually the references and further reading sections point in more interesting directions. But this is far more valuable than the most boring so-called Marxist wikis. If you want critical history, go read historians like Gerald Horne, read first-hand accounts from journalists like Edgar Snow and so on.

Besides the purely political, wikipedia is also good for overviews on technical and scientific interests. Even with the negatives of wikipedia, I'd take it any day over some decentralized spam fest where its a gamble if you found the best version of some article. Not to mention core issues of the fediverse, such as whether the hypothetical wiki instance you found yourself on will sustain itself long-term.

Some days I wonder if the core Lemmy developers have drifted further towards anarchist politics and philosophy..

You can but it won't be respected. It will continue to default to their included Noto fonts despite whatever font you select. You can test this yourself. I'm sure they do it for some "privacy reason" but if I wanted that trade off I'd simply use the Tor Browser or one of those hardened firefox profiles.

Librewolf doesn't respect your choice in system fonts if you uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above". I don't use it for that reason.

What a depressing view of "socialism" you have.

I hate that projects name themselves "fed" as that word is permanently associated with, well, feds.

"Welcome to the Fediverse, we got pigs of all kinds"

If you mean communists that support capitalist states like China, then yes, unfortunately. Better than being around nothing but liberals or anti-communists though.

So classic anti-communism then.