• roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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. 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 Tienneman square, or the Gillet 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. It’s not sustainable.

    To succeed and change the works, this project must do a few things right

    1. 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. Ibis will just supersede wiki.

    2. 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.

    3. It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      Thanks for the support. I think the era of single, centralized sources of information will soon be in the past.

      1. 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!
      2. How would you detect that it’s the same article, only from having the identical title? That could fail in lots of ways.
      3. I agree about this.
      • roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml
        0·
        6 months ago

        1. 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.

        2. 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.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • Demoncracy@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    A great idea. I wonder if the fandom wikis could move onto the platform and therefore make the adoption widespread.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • Alsephina@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • vis4valentine@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    I think this could be useful for a project I have where school that are not connected to the internet could create their own wikis, however, I need to see how it develops.

  • airportline@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • Daz@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
    0·
    6 months ago

    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 :)

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      Thank god Lemmy has no malicious users/bad actors/spam issues…

      It reminds me of that conservative wiki that went to create a version without wokeness or something.

  • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    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?

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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!