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.
There is actually at least one other: Conservapedia. It’s for people who live in a weird right-wing fantasy land.
Conservapedia views Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity as promoting moral relativism, …
ithinkihadastroke
sometimes questionable moderation
That’s one way of putting it. Another way is “ramrodding the narratives of anglo chauvinists that are to the right of even the neoliberal historical consensus”.
I think it solves the problems of Fandom, but yeah Wikipedia is good
Self-hosting any wiki software solves the problems of Fandom, surely? I fail to see how federation solves any of Fandom’s issues.
No, for the same reason forums can’t replace reddit. Self hosted wikis have been around before and after fandom. The reason it became popular was giving you all the fandom wikis together, one account, discoverable, user friendly so regulars can contribute. If I have to sign up to every fandom wiki I can contribute to, learn a new interface (likely something old and not mobile friendly) and rebuilt up any reputation to gain extra editing rights… I just won’t.
Ibis then in theory allows you to use one account, federate your reputation, use one interface, with lots of third party options if you don’t like the official one (if lemmy is any indication) and have discoverability of new wikis.
Wikipedia is good
until you want to learn about a group or country opposed to the west and then it’s about as educational as stormfront
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…
what is stormfront
Nazi forum
Arguably even Fandom / Wikia is ruined by plain old greed more than centralization. What’s wrong with it isn’t content, it’s the fact every page loads seven ads, a roll of clickbait, and a goddamn Discord server. A weird blog site for editable text and tiny images would work fine if it wasn’t twisted to feed Engagemagog.
It is not well known but there have been numerous scandals which put this trust into question. For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia’s front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.
I don’t really understand how decentralization would address the trust and legitimacy problems of Wikipedia. I do see value in adding community wikis to Lemmy, however.
Wikipedia got as bad as it did because neoliberals had gotten into positions of power and kicked everyone else out. They weren’t the people who made the site (it was one guy who did like 90% of the articles) but they are the ones who made it the shithole that it is today.
Besides still needing to establish that a) wikipedia is bad today (as opposed to just flawed), you also need to establish b) what about this would entice people over from wikipedia and c) if it did succeed, then why wouldn’t whoever got into positions of power with wikipedia get into the same positions of power on the biggest instances?
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!
US-controlled and domiciled site - yes, but I do not see it having a monopoly on information at all. Sure is big, has lots of info, pages, it is a rather good resource in linking stuff to the various concepts that you want to explain others e.g. in an argument.
But the very fact that anyone can edit information makes it not recommendable in academia, for example (really, when I was a student, all my professors were generally not recommending it for information because, as one of them said, even grandma could edit it). So I don’t think I would trust ibis on scientific articles either, at least not in the fields I’m directly interested in - maybe for some random trivia/did you know stuff, idk.
limited / niche wikis
But this is where I think it would really shine, indeed, as one could make a wiki about a game or software more easily, probably link pages from different instances, etc. (as others said already).
Don’t know what else to say, it just seems like an interesting project. Congrats to anyone involved on this first release and looking forward to see what this project will bring.
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.
That statement ITSELF is American cultural Imperialism. There are a bunch of languages other than English on Wikipedia…
Also [citation needed].
Thank you!
Thank you!
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If this kills Fandom/Wikia, that would be amazing and somewhat realistic.
Why not just build a wikipedia mirror?
All the data is available for free via download, torrent, etc.
Idk I have no complaints about wikipedia to lead me to look for a federated alternative.
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?)
Finally a site you might find helpful: https://wikiindex.org/ (https://web.archive.org/wikiindex.org/ as it seems to be down)
Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
Looks very broken on mobile.
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.
Interesting project! Can you explain the vision a bit more - I understand that every instance can have their own version of an article, but how would a user know which version of an article is most relevant to them to read (and maybe even contribute to)?
Thats a good question. Obviously the first place to look for articles would be those hosted by your local instance. Then the instance admin could also maintain an article with links to relevant articles. And I suppose later there could be some software features for discovery, but I havent thought about that yet.
But… wikimedia is already self hostable.
Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be treated in completely different ways. For example geology.wiki/article/Mountain may be completely different different from poetry.wiki/article/Mountain. There can be Ibis instances strictly focused on a particular topic with a high quality standard, and others covering many areas in layman’s terms.
I don’t think something like this exists yet(?), so it’ll be cool to see how this will be like.
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there’s actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
Avoiding conflict is not always a useful aim.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia’s scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others’ views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone’s view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.
The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people “feel” informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?
Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we’re working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an “encyclopedia”?
Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.
If you’re correct, to me the usefulness of Wikipedia is actually different from that of encyclopedia, and the pattern I’m arguing goes against that.
Fair. Though that capability - e.g. the identical wikia software, implementing the MediaWiki protocol - already exists. Maybe federating it would somehow improve it, though it would also open it up to have greater vulnerabilities especially when non-scientists get involved, e.g. a w/article/conservative/vaccine vs. a w/article/real/vaccine. Scientists can handle these controversies, but people who do not have the base knowledge with which to properly understand, e.g. ivermectin, are not going to be able to distinguish between the truth vs. the lies.
So the people that would put it to the best use don’t absolutely need it - sure it would be nice but peer-reviewed articles already exist - while the ones for whom it would be most damaging are almost certainly going to be the primary target audience.
So like Fandom without the ads or miraheze, but fediverse-adapted
Promising…
That’s exactly what i was thinking. It replace fandom.
Cheers to this new alternative together, fellow crab brother…
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability over a “wikipedia” destined to just devolve into islands of “alternative facts”
Ik I’m late to the party, but I think this would be soooo much better than Wikipedia for finding useful information on niche or controversial topics.
Instead of being limited to Wikipedia’s contributors and having to accommodate or guess their biases, and have a terrible, incomplete “controversies” section on every page, you could browse the same page across instances whose biases are much more explicit and see what each group determines is most important about the topic.
Instead of having to find a single mutually agreed upon article where each “faction” has their own set of issues with the content, you can now browse pages that each of those factions feel best represent their POV, and use the sum of them to form an opinion where no information is omitted.
Obviously lots of instances will have complete bullshit, but it’s likely enough that you will find instances that have well-sourced material from a diverse breadth of viewpoints, and can pick an instance that federates to your preferred criteria for quality. Misinfo will exist regardless, and if they get it from a federated wiki, it will probably be at least marginally better quality or better cited than the Facebook or Reddit posts they were getting it from before.
It would be useful for the “what does X group think about Y” aspect alone.
There’s also nothing stopping diverse, consensus-based instances from popping up. Or lots of niche academic instances with greater depth on their areas of expertise.
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Are you of the opinion that people don’t already use internet resources, libraries, interviews and other educational avenues to inform themselves? Many here seem to be needing an education on how to use Wikipedia responsively, they seem to think that one is unable to engage with a wikipedia article critically. I just checked the article for BP, as one of the blogs linked here claimed that over 44% of BP’s wikipedia page was corporate speak. The ‘controversies’ section is one third to half the wikipedia page in length. As a jumping-off point for further study, it is perfectly adequate.
Are you sure that you meant that to respond to me - and not e.g. the xkcd comic one below?
Fwiw I totally agree with you, and I think that’s a fantastic example that you brought forth - kudos b/c I think a specific example really does add something to this conversation. Just as it does so on many wikipedia pages. There are ways to phrase most things that can be agreed upon by most people, by wrapping it in the proper context.
At a guess then, they do not think that the language describing communism is extreme enough, and so want to bypass working together to achieve consensus and instead strike off and make their own internet. But I could be wrong. Then again, the burden of clearly explaining what they want to do is on them, so if so, I don’t take all of that blame.:)
But then again, you could say this about Lemmy and Reddit too.
Lemmy took 5 years to get to this point. Let’s give this a few years and see how it turns out.
I am okay with bias in my social media.
Far less so in my encyclopedia.
You won’t find any encyclopedia (or anything really) you can use then since everything is biased towards something. Wikipedia has a massive neoliberal bias for example. And a heavily biased leadership as linked in this post.
I would love to read both a marxist.wiki/article/communism and a libertarian.wiki/article/communism - opinions are great, fine & dandy, but at the end of the day, I don’t want a marxist/grasshopper vs. a libertarian/grasshopper, and I DEFINITELY do not want a conservative/vaccine vs. a liberal/vaccine each feeding misinformation from a slightly different and both-sides-incorrect approach. The enormous EFFORTS that go into finding neutral and balanced information are worthwhile, imho, as is having a central repository that would not need to be individually updated hundreds or thousands of times.
A mirroring/backup process would just as easily perform the same stated goal of preserving human knowledge - and these are already done. Arguably the federation model works best for social media, a bit less so I am told for Mastodon, but I think would not work well at all for an encyclopedia style.
But don’t mind me, I am simply grieving the death of facts and reason over here… - the fact that we would even want to contemplate different “alternative (sets of) facts” at all means that we already have lost something that was once good. :-(
Wikipedia is hilariously biased, especially on any politics or history topics.
here are extensive lists of complaints of bias, from both left- and right- wing alternatives:
…are these people writing about the same website?! 😂
Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability
Reading the links in this post alone shows wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
And with this system you will definitely see other attempts at impartial wikis too.
@Quacksalber @Alsephina Wikipedia is already filled with a LOT of fake information and biased
Wikimedia isn’t written in Rust, so it’s useless /s
@13 @nutomic @vis4valentine how helpful is sarcasm huh
You’ve picked a nice name :) I’m glad you didn’t choose fedipedia.
I just created an account on open.ibis.wiki and created “Lemmy” article but it’s not shown on ibis.wiki 🤔 I guess it still has a long way to go, but I think it’s a nice project 👍
Right ibis.wiki wasnt following open.ibis.wiki. I did that now, made an edit and it got federated as expected.
Nice. I guess “Summary” is something like git commit message. I thought it more as the summary of the article :)
Yes true.
Oooh this is cool
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.
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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.
Why is it named after those bin juice drinking cunt birds?
I love the idea, but I hate the name.
Could be a reference to Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of knowledge, or alternatively could refer to Israeli special forces
Why the heck would it be referring to the Israeli special forces? It’s obviously in reference to Thoth.
No it’s special forces
The link says they use the Ibis as their emblem
Probably because in Egyptian mythology, Thoth, who was an Ibis headed deity, was the god of knowledge and wisdom, and thus Ibis became a symbol of knowledge and reason.
It’s somewhat amusing that the Egyptian Ibis is so closely related to the Australian Bin Chicken that they may actually be the same species
TIL, nice.
