Another day another Nutomic W
One of the main devs of Lemmy (@nutomic) just announced a federated wiki project called Ibis
“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.”
Yay, now we’ll have a new wikipedia which will also present russian take on Ukraine invasion, Chinese take on Tianmen massacre and a flat-earthers corner for their “truth”. I think internet already covers that…
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Cool I hope it works out, more alternatives aren’t a bad thing.
…why?
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OH NO, WHAT WE GONNA DO NOW??? NO WAYYYY
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.
You just have to prove them wrong then like you did with lemmy great work .
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.
This ignorance is just more reason to continue working on the fediverse to help break these walls down, you are on the right path. o7
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as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.
I’ve only ever heard, “shoot for the moon, [and] even if you miss you’ll land among the stars”, which is the phrase as it was first said by Norman Vincent Peale. But maybe swapping “moon” and “stars” is a common enough variant of the phrase that I just haven’t heard before.
I can see why. Although the stars occupy a larger portion of the sky, they are also further away than the moon. So either version of the phrase makes sense in its own way.
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Finally. Hope this takes off and breaks wikipedia’s biased monopoly on knowledge.
‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open
‘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.
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
Idk man I’d say wikipedia is probably 95% great. The political stuff will always have it’s issues, sure, but most of it is quite good info.
I’m all for competition though. I hope this one takes off as well.
You are underestimating, by a mile, the editorial effort that goes into fighting scam and spam, vandalism and lies. Wikipedia does have a support structure to do that, I doubt instance admins have the same kind of resources.
That structure is extremely corrupted though. And Lemmy shows that volunteers can handle this kind of stuff. Though Ibis will definitely need a lot of mod tools.
Of course no single site is perfect. Editors may always have ulterior motives. That is what the editing history is for. But with a federated wiki, the only thing you’ll get is multiple different versions that all present their oen little “truths” and at that point you can just go back and search the entire internet for blogs, just like the website you sent me is a blog.
I think thats better than having our single “truth” controlled by a corrupt organization from a different country, different language and different culture. With federation there can be independent wikis for my local country or city.
You can already do that. How does federation help?
By allowing users to interact between different wiki instances. Just like you can interact with Lemmy instances from KBin.
That page starts by complaining that alternative medicine is represented negatively. Going to skip the rest of the blog lol
How could the bias be so widespread they wonder!
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 the 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.
This serves well as a statement.
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.
When Wikipedia collapses, it will be too late to create an alternative from scratch.
All the more reason to push this project forward, as a redundancy.
You can already download the entirity of Wikipedia. If it ever fell, the content could easily be restored elsewhere.
Also, I don’t think I understand why this should be federated.
The infrastructure is already there in that case, to restore it, and it would be less likely to fall.
Having no sole source of information hosting in an encyclopedic format is safer.
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 have all of that good if you want to, but being federated allows people to break off if they want. It also allows for niche servers.
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.
I’ve been scared to use that ever since they actually solved “Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money”.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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”.
