Yeah, no, wouldn't touch that from a longstick, specially from the political slant it's coming from. Wikipedia itself already has enough problems, Ibis is just asking to be a misinformation hub.
This is a great project. I had the same idea myself, and posted about it, but never did anything about it! It's great that people like you are here, with the creativity, and the motivation and skills to do this work.
I think this project is as necessary as Wikipedia itself.
The criticisms in these comments are mostly identical to the opinion most people had about Wikipedia when it started - the it would become a cesspool of nonsense and misinformation. That it was useless and worthless when encyclopaedias already exist.
Wikipedia was the first step in broadening what a source if authoritative information can be. It in fact created richer and more truthful information than was possible before, and enlightened the world. Ibis is a necessary second step on the same path.
It will be most valuable for articles like Tieneman square, or the Gilets Jaunes, where there are sharply different perspectives on the same matter, and there will never be agreement. A single monolithic Wikipedia cannot speak about them. Today, wiki gives one perspective and calls it the truth. This was fine in the 20th century when most people believed in simple truths. They were told what to think by single sources. They never left their filter bubbles. This is not sustainable anymore.
To succeed and change the world, this project must do a few things right.
The default instance should just be a mirror of Wikipedia. This is the default source of information on everything, so it would be crazy to omit it. Omitting it means putting yourself in competition with it, and you will lose. By encompassing it, the information in Ibis is from day 1 greater then wiki. Then Ibis will just supersede wiki.
There should be a sidebar with links to the sane article on other instances. So someone reading about trickle down economics on right wing instance, he can instantly switch to the same article on a left wing wiki and read the other side of it. That's the feature that will make it worthwhile for people.
It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.
Thanks for the support. I think the era of single, centralized sources of information will soon be in the past.
This would be a project on its own, with writing import scripts, hosting an instance etc. Certainly not something I have time for, just like I'm not running a Reddit mirror for Lemmy. If you or someone else wants to set it up, go ahead!
How would you detect that it's the same article, only from having the identical title? That could fail in lots of ways.
I just assumed that would be easy, that you would have one instance with no actual content. It just fetches the wikipedia article with the same name, directly from the wikipedia website. I guess I didn't really think about it.
I guess that's a design choice. Looking at different ways similar issues have been solved already...
How does wikipedia decide that the same article is available in different languages? I guess there is a database of links which has to be maintained.
Alternatively, it could assume that articles are the same if they have the same name, like in your example where "Mountain" can have an article on a poetry instance and on a geography instance, but the software treats them as the same article.
Wikipedia can understand that "Rep of Ireland" = "Republic of Ireland". So I guess there is a look-up-table saying that these two names refer to the same thing.
Then, wikipedia can also understand cases where articles can have the same name but be unrelated. Like RIC (paramilitary group) is not the same as RIC (feature of a democracy).
I do think, if each Ibis instance is isolated, it won't be much different from having many separate wiki websites. When the software automatically links you to the same information on different instances, that's when the idea becomes really interesting and valuable.
First of all I welcome this idea, and think it's ok if there's many different types of encyclopaedia on different perspectives.
Now, how will a decentralised wiki deal with something like a rando claiming to be uni professor and inserting thyself in admin position over time? How is activitypub helpful in writing wiki?(Edit credits?)
Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you... edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website's UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you're browsing from?
This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia's content moderation problems, but it doesn't do much against that that wouldn't also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others' pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you'd have to make a new account to edit things.
I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you'd know that all the options were wikis that haven't been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki's admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.
I don't know. I'm happy this exists. I think it's interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.
Based on how ...certain... Lemmy instances have handled themselves, the intention to deal with "Wikipedia content moderation" here is almost certainly not to make a freer version of Wikipedia, but to make heavily censored content enclaves with rhe same obvious editorial restrictions concerning certain topics you find on certain large instances.
I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics, but I don't really see it as much of a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Interwiki links have been a thing for a long time, but they're not really used that much. They also are used by specialized shortcut syntax instead of using a more intuitive domain name syntax. So let's say you have a wiki for the Flash TV show and you want to link to an article in the Flash comic wiki. This would be great for that. Maybe have "search related wikis" as an option to search some hand picked wikis?
But for going head-to-head with Wikipedia, I don't really see it so much. Part of the success of Wikipedia is that it forces editors to work in a single namespace, debate the contents, use a common set of policies, and so on. There is also a lot of policy, process, human knowledge, and institution built up over the years geared solely towards writing an encyclopedia. If you go to Wikipedia, it may not be perfect, but it will have gone through that process. Trying to wade through hundreds of wikis to find a decent article does not sound like a treat, especially if effort gets spread across multiple wikis.
Like with Lemmy, I am excited to see where this goes. And nutomic, congratulations with your daughter!
I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics
This.
I dont know how many people here are aware of Fandom, formerly known as Wikia. Basically what they are trying to do is collecting niche topic wikis in order to profit as much as possible. Very much criticized over the years by contributors for their practices.
Ibis could be the answer for niche wikis who dont want to be associated with Fandom/Wikia.
Fandom was exactly what I was thinking of. Just maybe without having more ads than content. That I'm not a fan of, especially for volunteer supplied content.
Extra thought on search: add a weighting option so individual servers can be searched, but don't come up as high in the rankings. So keeping with the superhero theme, have the Flash comic wiki with a 1 weighting and the more general DC comic and Arrowverse wikis with 0.8 weightings.
Crazy how many people can suddenly peer into the future when this post was made! I hope they can use this power for good, maybe save us from horrible tragedies in the future instead of wailing about a Wikipedia alternative. Great work nutomic! I hope folks pitch in to help this project you've begun.
Half the comments in this thread are the exact same as when we started working on a reddit alternative lol. "I don't see why you're doing this, reddit works fine for me."
Also I'm pretty stunned that more people aren't aware of wikipedia's many scandals and issues. I suppose if you use a site every day and don't see what's going on behind the scenes, you don't seek these things out.
Thank you for that. It will probably work well in pair with Lemmy. The ability to compile a community or instance knowlegde out of the comment section and to an organised wiki will be very nice.
But if someone here reading as the time and skill, the sofware the fediverse is lacking is tv tracker.
It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.
But having an open data project full of information that's actively contributed to and fact checked, with copies over many servers, is much better than having the same thing but fragmented. I still don't see a reason. If it was something else or corporate driven, I wouldn't bat an eye. But Wikipedia?
You can get specific about certain articles needing improvement, but to call all of Wikipedia generally biased without any proof seems like a pretty red lil flag
‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open
The heart of narrative control on Wikipedia is controlling what standards of evidence need to be met and what sources are acceptable. An easy example of this would be the argument over adding an entry for Thomas James Ball to the List of Political Self-Immolations. Before they finally gave in and accepted it, there was a push to establish a standard for entries on the list that almost no existing entry on the list met and apply that standard to determine if Thomas James Ball should be included, while painting it as though the process were neutral.
Oh man I can't wait to see what hexbear will do with this, I'm sure people will love to use a platform that actively denies genocides and supports dictators
This feels like a hasty "solution" to an invented "problem". Sure, Wikipedia isn't squeaky clean, but it's pretty damn good for something that people have been freely adding knowledge to for decades. The cherry-picked examples of what makes Wikipedia " bad" are really not outrageous enough to create something even more niche than Wikia, Fandom, or the late Encyclopedia Dramatica. I appreciate the thought, but federation is not a silver bullet for everything. Don't glorify federation the way cryptobros glorify the block chain as the answer to all the problems of the world.
It only gets corrupted by state department interests if it gets popular, so we must work to make it less popular! (edit: I hope its obvious this is a joke)
Over 95% of Chinese as a whole support the Chinese government. This is according to a Harvard study that spanned around 20 years, from what I remember. So, it does have to do with race.
If the government told me that my "score" dictating my ability to participate in society would be greatly affected based on what I thought of the government, I'd support the heck out of that government too.
The neoliberal moderators make that impossible. The talk pages for anything even remotely political is radioactive, with the mods flagrantly abusing their power in reverting any change they personally find disagreeable.
So you're saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.
Kidding aside, you're absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN'T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it's not perfect.
If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google's many spywares -- there's loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.
Edit: the "federated Netflix" -- I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: "anyone" (anyone federated with other instances) can "upload" videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.
And federated Amazon -- that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.
There's a wiki program that natively uses a version control repository, Fossil. You can fork a Fossil wiki and contribute updates back to the original.
It wouldn't be too hard to for example create a few Fossil repositories for different topics where the admins on each are subject matter experts (to ensure quality of contributions), and then have a client which connects to them all and with a scheme for cross linking between them
Peertube already exists for video, it's more like a different take on bittorrent.
Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don't mind paying for things if they're good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.
I don't think the fact that a small group of people who are easy to manipulate by the US government and millions of edits originating from Langley are a small or invented problem. I'm extremely scared of having resources being centralized and controlled by the US propaganda apparatus and think this is a major problem.
I mean we have seen how the Lemmy devs approach certain topics, and it is definitely not with a preference for openness or free exchange of ideas. There are certain topics here which have a hair trigger for content removal and bans, for extremely petty and minor "transgressions," so the motivation here seems pretty transparent.