- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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Yeah, no, wouldn’t touch that from a longstick, specially from the political slant it’s coming from. Wikipedia itself already has enough problems, Ibis is just asking to be a misinformation hub.
@AMillionNames @nutomic In which case the ibis, a species of bird that’s also known as the bin chicken, might be a fitting name for the platform?
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.
Wikipedia is biased by design though…
Everything is biased. Even saying something as simple as “grass is green” is biased, it has the bias of normal colour perception. I’m colour blind and don’t see grass as green.
No shit! So it’s not exactly a counter-point to the concept of a “Wikipedia alternative”
Any self-styled Wikipedia alternative ended up dead, thematic, or biased by design
With biased by design I have meant something like Conservapedia, RationalWiki, etc… They do not try to make neutral point of view, as is (or at least should be) applied on Wikipedia.
Each instance would ideally have their own standards for neutrality or bias that they see fit. It’s no different from self-hosted wikis except with the federation concept appllied on top of it. I’m sure someone will create an instance that is a straight up clone of wikipedia, another person will create an instance for everything pro-communism / pro-china, someone will create a strictly anti-theism wikipedia, etc.
I don’t see anything wrong or weird about this, the skepticism this project is receiving is stupid. It’s nothing new under the sun.
What could possibly go wrong!
I think a centralized view of knowledge that Wikipedia provides is great, plus the record of changes and discussions help capture some of the nuances people are aiming for.
That said where this really accelerates is when bias is wanted. For example the Arch wiki vs Debian wiki vs Wikipedia all SHOULD have biases that cater to their specific audience, even if there is obvious overlap.
Interestingly use of wikidata could help create aknowlledge graph associating parts of the fediwikiverse and we might be able to see a dream of mine ; dynamic knowledge content. Where I might be an expert in databases so I can get the condensed version of how postgres but get the beginners version of kubernetes on an article about deploying them together
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.
Our SLRPNK Dokuwiki integration is finally working now. Let me know if you want to test-drive it in the coming days.
lemmy.dbzer0.com also has a DjangoWiki attached, with lemmy integration. How did you do your integration?
Nothing fancy, just account linking via the Lemmy database.
Can you share the deets on how you did it? Currently I’m doing it via API which requires people to add a specific string to their username
Ah I see you’re using a specific dw plugin
^This. The only bit I missed from reddit over here were the wiki entries.
Eagerly waiting for all the info aggregation to take off on all the hobbyist communities.
I started a post along these lines on !ibis@lemmy.ml. I, personally, think this will be the killer application for Ibis.
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.
You call this calm? :D
But I know the feeling. I didn’t really want to run a lemmy but reddit made it intolerable not to and here we are. I should be working on my main project >_<
Nowadays I can easily handle all Github notifications within less than an hour. After the Reddit blackout there were so many notifications that I couldnt even read all the issues, let alone respond. So I had to unsubscribe from issue notifications for some months.
Well, I was more referring to all the drama around lemmy lately due to lacking mod tools etc
Right but that’s already over. And anyway Ibis was mostly finished since some weeks, just needed some minor work to push it over the finishing line.
With all due respect, but that’s not over. There’s still a significant lack of mod tooling on lemmy.
I mean the drama about it is over. We are constantly working to improve mod tools but it takes time.
There’s Jerboa as well, lol
@nutomic This is a cool idea! But I have a lot of questions about how the heck you make a think like Wikipedia work in a federated way. Are articles duplicated on each instance, or do we lose some of them when an instance goes down? How does moderation work? How do I search it?
Also, I see someone else posting screenshots, but the link you posted takes me out of my Mastodon app to a Lemmy page where I don’t see any links to Ibis itself.
(Saw some criticism of the name there. Ibis is an awesome & appropriate name, IMO.)
Yes articles are duplicated in the same way posts are duplicated on Mastodon or Lemmy, so they wont go away. Moderation doesnt exist so far. There is a search field in the sidebar.
The link goes directly to Ibis where I posted the announcement.
The idea of a federated, decentralized Wikipedia alternative is intriguing, but implementing it successfully faces major hurdles. Federating moderation policies and privileges across different instances seems incredibly complex. I believe it would also require some kind of web of trust system. Quality control is also a huge challenge without centralized oversight and clear guidelines enforced universally.
While it could potentially replace commercial wiki farms like Wikia/Fandom for niche topics, realistically replacing Wikipedia’s dominance as a general reference work seems highly ambitious and unlikely, at least in the short term. But as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.
That said, ambitious goals can spur innovation. Even if Ibis falls short of usurping Wikipedia, it could blaze new trails and pioneer federated wiki concepts that feed back into Wikipedia and other platforms. The federated model allowing more perspectives and focused communities is worth exploring, despite the technical obstacles around distributed moderation and content integration. The proof-of-concept shows the core pieces are in place as a starting point.
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.
Yeah, you are right. I’ve always remembered it this way because it makes more sense to me.
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.
The UI on mobile is completely broken.
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.
I’m learning Leptos too, I’ll watch your progress when lost, good luck !
Maybe you can make some contributions to Ibis ;)
Maybe making it work as an headless API and develop a linker to an existing Wiki like Dokuwiki would work better? Something like this plugin that syncs a Dokuwiki with a git backend: https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:gitbacked
It’s only mostly broken. And mostly broken means slightly working!
@nutomic Looks like an interesting project!
Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the front end?
And will you be able to follow Ibis pages (or perhaps edit them?) from Mastodon? Or potentially even Lemmy?
Sure if someone implements those things. I personally already invested a lot of time in the project and wont be able to do everything on my own.
@nutomic That last question was me trying to get my head around how this works.
Will each page have a username, in the same way each Lemmy group has a username, which can be followed from Mastodon?
If you follow that username from Mastodon, will you see a series of posts? If so, will they contain page edits or something else?
What happens if you tag that account in a post from Mastodon? Or reply to one of those posts?
The readme has some basic description how the federation works. Viewing articles from other platforms should be easy to get working. Edits from other platforms would also be possible, but would require changes so that they can generate diffs and resolve conflicts. So not exactly easy.
Yea being able to do it on lemmy would be cool
But… wikimedia is already self hostable.
Wikimedia isn’t written in Rust, so it’s useless /s
@13 @nutomic @vis4valentine how helpful is sarcasm huh
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.
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”
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.
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?! 😂
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. :-(
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.
Removed by mod
@Quacksalber @Alsephina Wikipedia is already filled with a LOT of fake information and biased
Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability
Reading the links in this post alone will tell you wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
@nutomic ok, but did anyone think to test this on an iPhone before making it live?
Nope
It’s not even alpha, just a barely working project. Just give it some time.
Android does not work either. At a guess, desktops seem highly likely to be affected as well.
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! :)
He can do what he wants with his time you should’nt “hope” things from others.
There are many opinions about practically everything - even within STEM. I’m sure some will want an alternative wiki if Wikipedia doesn’t state the opinion that they agree with.
It can get a bit boring working on the same project for so many years. Having a different project gives me more motivation.
You don’t have to explain what you do with your time to others then that’s all you are ever gonna be doing .
Fair enough - I can definitely understand that
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.
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!
Where are you reading this?
Follow the link in the post
I did. It loads an empty page
Update: it just says “Loading…” And it never loads
