It’s too late for an alternative to have much hope of success, because Wikipedia is financially embedded with Google and with Amazon, so they are going to continue to promote linkage and “readership” through devices like Google Home Assistant and Alexa. So, the next-best hope is to push for progressive changes within the Wikipedia platform and by continuing to monitor the wasteful spending at the Wikimedia Foundation. We do a lot of that at Wikipediocracy.com, which you’re welcome to join.
One really easy-to-implement change would be to remove Jimmy Wales from the Wikimedia board of trustees, now that he has a clear conflict of financial interest between the non-profit Wikinews and the for-profit Wikitribune.
Another easily-implemented change would be to apply “Pending Changes” feature to all article pages on all Wikipedia languages. This would have the effect of filtering out (approximately) 90% of the current misinformation and sloppy prose that leaks onto the Wikipedia platform every minute of the day. The “open” nature of Mediawiki software was excellent for building a brand-new encyclopedia, but the time has come to put quality ahead of quantity, and begin curating the content of Wikipedia as much as adding new content to it. This is something that was rather successfully implemented more widely on the German Wikipedia, but it just doesn’t pass on the English Wikipedia (I believe) because the Foundation wants active editors more than higher-quality content, because active editors turn into financial donors every year — high-quality content doesn’t donate money to the Foundation.
I hope that my thoughts and words have moved the needle a bit, in terms of how you view the relationship between “knowledge” and any project that has been (mis)managed by Jimmy Wales.
