- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
Federated Netflix? We already have federated YouTube, it’s called PeerTube
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.
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.
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then add to it genius???
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Everyone should see how incredibly important this project is, and its potential. Wikipedia is yet another US-controlled and domiciled site, with a history of bribery, scandals, and links to the US state department. It has a near-monopoly on information in many languages, and its reach extends far outside US borders. Federation allows the possibility of connecting to other servers, collaborating on articles, forking articles, and maintaining your own versions, in a way that wikipedia or even a self-hosted mediawiki doesn’t.
Also ibis allows limited / niche wikis, devoted to specific fields, which is probably the biggest use-case I can see for Ibis early on.
Congrats on a first release!
Thank you!
Thank you!
If this kills Fandom/Wikia, that would be amazing and somewhat realistic.
Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information, especially over non-English languages that are managed by an independent set of volunteers who could pack up their bags and move everything over wherever they want at any point.
Still a cool project and technological diversity is good though.
Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information
What? How are these two points related at all?
Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia’s brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.
EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y’know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.
Many of the editors are themselves neoliberal American cultural imperialists and proud of it. The issue isn’t direct control so much as an army of useful idiots.
I’m rather sceptical that this can work as a good alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s content moderation system is in my opinion both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. To create a better Wikipedia, you would have to somehow innovate in that regard. I don’t think federation helps in any way with this problem. I do though see potential in Ibis for niche wikis which are currently mostly hosted on fandom.org. If you could create distinct wiki’s for different topics and allow them to interconnect when it makes sense, Ibis might have a chance there.
I’m going to use your comment to tell people to download Indie Wiki Buddy. It’s a plug-in for your browser that redirects Fandom to independent alternatives. I highly recommend it.
The fact is that we can’t rely on any single website to hold the whole world’s knowledge, because it can be corrupted sooner or later. The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information. This is where ActivityPub comes in, the protocol used by Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube and many other federated social media projects.
Thank god Lemmy has no malicious users/bad actors/spam issues…
Interesting idea anyway. I would be a bit more worried that when important information is siloed onto instances, each instance becomes a point of failure, and thus can be corrupted or lost.
Good luck :)
Right? Right now with Wikimedia, everything is hosted in one place and moderated in one place. Having everything spread about in various instances with varying degrees of moderation and rules, and the option to block other instances is not great for information quality and sharing.
Wikipedia has strict notability requirements, which is what spawned the popularity wikia/fandom which is a pretty terrible user experience.
Wikipedia also has an infamously pro-neoliberal bias.
The neoliberal bias also fucks with the notability requirements. The amount of citation loops on anything even remotely political is absurd.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” - Stephen Colbert
Neoliberalism is stuff like putting children to work in the coal mines and also includes modern day conservatives (especially the nazi ones, a lot of people don’t realize how the nazi regime was more or less liberalism taken to its conclusion, which is why it took a war for them to face any opposition from the liberal world order, and even then it was only because they bit the hand that fed them)
“In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.” - Phil Ochs
Is this implying being right of center is bad? You know what that would mean, right?
You would have to start a long conversation about the overton window, and what left vs right even means to both you and i before tackling this question, friend.
Neoliberalism =/= liberalism and especially not leftism (or just “the opposite of conservatism”), which I assume is what Colbert means
“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.”
- Malcolm X
Damn i need to read more x quotes
As much as I appreciate Malcolm X, this quote is very much a product of its time.
Not at all. We’ve seen this our whole lives, and are currently seeing it with the liberal response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine too. They only support emancipatory movements in theory, but in practice are the same as conservatives: they stop when those people are taking direct action for emancipation, specially when it threatens their own positions.
"…who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” - MLK
Liberals didn’t like Mandela’s use of force to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and they wouldn’t approve of it if it happened now either. The same way they aren’t approving of Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas in their war against the apartheid colony “israel”.
I’ve seen fairly universal support from liberal voters both irl and online for Palestine, but not from our politicians.
The abuse potential this has feels quite concerning. You’ve just given kiwifarms a decentralized tool to host its stalking profiles on people.
Gabe, KiwiFarm started from the forum section of CWC Wiki (in fact, the name KiwiFarms itself is a corruption of “CWC Wiki Forums”), which was hosted on MediaWiki, so “not letting KiwiFarms host their own wiki” is a ship that has long since sailed.
I really fail to see how this has more abuse potential than hosting an independent wiki on MediaWiki, even if the content they host there is… not very nice, to say the least. If anything, there is more control against abuse since they would just be defederated.
This is super exciting. I think one of the things a lot of people are missing here is the potential for small wikis to augment existing fediverse communities. Reddit’s killer feature has always been the massive treasure trove of information for hobbyists and niche interests. There is huge potential in the fediverse to take advantage of that sort of natural collaborative knowledge building process.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 agree about this.
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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.
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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.
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First of all, congratulations for bringing a baby girl into this world!! You must be really excited! I am very happy for you!
This looks very cool. I set up a wiki (https://ibis.mander.xyz/) and I will make an effort to populate it with some Lemmy lore and interesting science/tech 😄 Hopefully I can set some time aside and help with a tiny bit of code too.
Thank you :)
Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
Yeah, well. Why was I not surprised when I read its made by a lemmy dev. You guys rock.
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Written on tankie reddit.
I’m on kbin, not lemmy.
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The problem I see with federated wikis is potential creation of echo chambers. Current Wikipedia is often a political tug-of-war between different ideological crowds. For instance, on Russian Wikipedia, Russian Civil War article is an infamous point of struggle between communist and monarchist sympathizers, who often have to settle at something resembling a compromise.
If both sides had their own wikis, each would have very biased interpretation of events. A person who identifies as either communist or monarchist would visit only the corresponding wiki, only seeing narrative that fits into their current world view, never being exposed to opposing opinions.
Could this not also be seen as advantageous? If one wants to get nuanced understandings, they could read from multiple wikis written with multiple perspectives, without the tug of war. Presently, as a centralized platform, there’s the back and forth you mentioned with neither side being satisfied.
Assuming people cite their sources and more reputable instances are more developed, this allows for sharing lesser heard perspectives. A flat-earth wiki isn’t going to dominate, because you can’t get valid sources for that.
Overall, cautiously optimistic. I like the idea, and think that as a framework, this is a great thing! It remains to be seen what will come of this, though.
Interesting project and good luck on this.
Did you not consider something like Codeberg to host this? Many open source devs do not trust MS or their stewardship of Github, and considering the aim of this project is against American control of information, surely this really needs serious consideration.
Many open source devs do not want to use Github at all now.
That is true but most developers are still on Github, which hasn’t been affected by enshittification yet. I also have to keep using Github because of Lemmy, so I don’t want to switch back and forth between two separate platforms.
However once Gitea starts federation we definitely want to migrate Lemmy to a selfhosted instance, and probably Ibis too.
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