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Interesting, maybe it wanted to tell you about this project :D
Synchronicity!
Gesundheit!
¡Muchas gracias!
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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.
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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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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. That 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 Tieneman square, or the Gilets 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. This is not sustainable anymore.
To succeed and change the world, this project must do a few things right.
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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. Then Ibis will just supersede wiki.
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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.
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It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.
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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.
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.
Oh very Thoth coded.
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.
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Nope
Android does not work either. At a guess, desktops seem highly likely to be affected as well.
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.
…why?
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.
Another day another Nutomic W
