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.
Fediverse
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
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.
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.
If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated 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!
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.
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.
I think it solves the problems of Fandom, but yeah Wikipedia is good
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
This is almost entirely misdirected. The success of Wikipedia is from its human structures, the technical structure is close to meaningless. To propose a serious alternative you'd have to approach it from a social direction, how are you going to build a moderation incentive structures that forces your ideal outcomes?
Federation isn't a magic bullet for moderation, alone it creates fractal moderation problems.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
The UI on mobile is completely broken.
It's only mostly broken. And mostly broken means slightly working!
Im not good at frontend development, my goal was to create a very basic frontend which works to show off the project. Going forward I will definitely need help to improve the design or create an entirely new frontend in a different language.
Anyway the main thing about this project is the working federation, but without a basic frontend it would be very difficult to showcase.
A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!
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.
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.
Wikipedia is not a Big Tech nor a commercial enterprise prone to enshittification nor it profits from surveillance capitalism. We don't need another, competing, universal source of enclopedical information. Wikipedia, on contrary to X, Reddit, Facebook, etc. is not going anywhere. Any self-styled Wikipedia alternative ended up dead, thematic, or biased by design.
However there are many thematical and fan wikis hosted on Fandom, which itself is a commercial company and there were already some contoversies concerning it. Wikis on Fandom are very resource-intensive compared to Wikipedia or independent thematical wikis.
Ability to edit at several wikis from the same account without being tied to Fandom could be one of things that Ibis offers and could benefit independent wiki sites.
And of course, MediaWiki is free software and federation could be added as a functionality.
I'm not sure this really has potential to kick off outside of niche wikis. But maybe that's still good enough.
Though I hope this isn't taking too much of your time from Lemmy development! :)
I'm going to just say that I'm exteremely sceptical on how this will turn out, just because there has been quite a few Wikipedia forks that have not exactly worked out despite the best interests and the stated objectives they had.
Now - Wikipedia isn't exactly an entity that doesn't have glaring problems of its own, of course - but I'm just saying that the wiki model has been tried out a lot of times and screwed up many times in various weird ways.
There's exactly two ways I can see Wikipedia forks to evolve: Crappily managed fork that is handled by an ideological dumbass that attracts a crowd that makes everything much worse (e.g. Conservapedia, Citizendium), or a fork that gets overrun by junk and forgotten by history, because, well, clearly it's much more beneficial to contribute to Wikipedia anyway.
I was about to respond with a copy of the standard Usenet spam response form with the "sorry dude I don't think this is going to work" ticked, but Google is shit and I can't find a copy of that nonsense anymore, so there.
Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.
@nutomic An interesting initiative. Good luck!
I do notice one unfortunate difference from Wikipedia immediately: Wikipedia is functional with scripts blocked, Ibis Wiki is not. I'm sure that even Wikipedia nowadays has some functions that don't work without scripts, but a wiki that won't even display its landing page without scripts enabled, is dead while still in the gate.
When working on lemmy is too relaxing so you need another project to keep you busy :D
I was waiting for someone else to create a project like this. But it didnt happen so I had to write it myself when things became a bit calmer with Lemmy.
Scholars usually portray institutions as stable, inviting a status quo bias in their theories. Change, when it is theorized, is frequently attributed to exogenous factors. This paper, by contrast, proposes that institutional change can occur endogenously through population loss, as institutional losers become demotivated and leave, whereas institutional winners remain. This paper provides a detailed demonstration of how this form of endogenous change occurred on the English Wikipedia. A qualitative content analysis shows that Wikipedia transformed from a dubious source of information in its early years to an increasingly reliable one over time. Process tracing shows that early outcomes of disputes over rule interpretations in different corners of the encyclopedia demobilized certain types of editors (while mobilizing others) and strengthened certain understandings of Wikipedia’s ambiguous rules (while weakening others). Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change.
@[email protected] I am also in agreement that I don't know how a federated wikipedia solves what made Wikipedia so great. Per the paper above, fringe editors saying "the flatness of the world is a debated topic" gradually got frustrated about having to "present evidence" and having their work reverted all the time, and so voluntarily left over time. And so an issue page goes from being "both sides" to "one side is a fringe idea".
From reading the Ibis page, this seems a lot closer to fandom than the wikipedia. Different encyclopedias where the same page name can be completely different.
Skepchick also had a great video about the topic: https://www.patreon.com/posts/92654496
Absolutely hilarious story I've got to share:
I saw a bird today that I wasn't able to recognize - and I've probably seen it for the first time in my life. Most probably, it escaped from the nearby wildlife sanctuary. It was trying to fight a large mongoose, and the screams were frighteningly loud. It looked weird, but beautiful. Kind of like a stork. I was convinced that this bird was a migratory bird.
It was completely black or brown, I could not figure it out. Had a patch of white on it's wings. And the head had a little bit of red color, but my eyes are bad, so I couldn't tell it. Guess the name of the bird?
Red-naped ibis, also known as the Indian black ibis. Coincidence?
Interesting, maybe it wanted to tell you about this project :D
Additionally my daughter will be born within a few weeks, so there won’t be any time for programming.
Congratulations! I hope nothing but the best comrade!
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)?
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 👍