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.
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.
Also, any such wiki has to be allow-list only by default. Any open wiki is vandalized with spam and hate speech almost immediately. Open federation would make this trivial.
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.
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!
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.
What could possibly go wrong!
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.
Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
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)
Yeah, well. Why was I not surprised when I read its made by a lemmy dev. You guys rock.
Tankiepedia
Written on tankie reddit.
I’m on kbin, not lemmy.
@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.
The frontend is very primitive right now, but it could definitely be made to work without JS.
@nutomic I’d recommend that, albeit not everybody browses with scripts disabled, so not it’s not necessarily the automatic death knell I suggested.
But I’m curious to see how it goes.
Right, and what would also be nice is to be able to export articles in different formats, for example markdown, to conveniently read them in your favourite reader application.
Interesting project and good luck on this.
Did you not consider something like Codeberg to host this? Many open source devs do not trust MS or their stewardship of Github, and considering the aim of this project is against American control of information, surely this really needs serious consideration.
Many open source devs do not want to use Github at all now.
That is true but most developers are still on Github, which hasn’t been affected by enshittification yet. I also have to keep using Github because of Lemmy, so I don’t want to switch back and forth between two separate platforms.
However once Gitea starts federation we definitely want to migrate Lemmy to a selfhosted instance, and probably Ibis too.
They sunset Atom to push VS code despite assurances they wouldn’t.
Co-pilot slurping open source code and spitting out code without license attribution. One example of this was when it spat out Quake 2 code and comment verbatim.
Enshittification started, you just ain’t ready to see it yet. MS has a track record and will continue.
2 git hosts is just 2 tabs and by the time federation happens, you’ve already got vendor lock in because of all the issues. I doubt migration of those will be straightforward.
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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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.
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 :)
A mirror would accomplish the main stated aim of backing up information just as well if not better.
Whereas as you implied, allowing multiple sources of information seems vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, and even more simply bias.
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.
I suspect you mean Conservapedia. It is exactly what it sounds like: a shitty right-wing rag.
On the flipside is RationalWiki, which is basically neoliberal Americentric “reality has a liberal bias” made manifest. It’s also pretty shit.
If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.
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.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” - Stephen Colbert
Neoliberalism =/= liberalism and especially not leftism (or just “the opposite of conservatism”), which I assume is what Colbert means
“In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.” - Phil Ochs
Is this implying being right of center is bad? You know what that would mean, right?
You would have to start a long conversation about the overton window, and what left vs right even means to both you and i before tackling this question, friend.
Fair enough
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“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.”
- Malcolm X
Damn i need to read more x quotes
As much as I appreciate Malcolm X, this quote is very much a product of its time.
Not at all. We’ve seen this our whole lives, and are currently seeing it with the liberal response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine too. They only support emancipatory movements in theory, but in practice are the same as conservatives: they stop when those people are taking direct action for emancipation, specially when it threatens their own positions.
"…who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” - MLK
Liberals didn’t like Mandela’s use of force to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and they wouldn’t approve of it if it happened now either. The same way they aren’t approving of Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas in their war against the apartheid colony “israel”.
I’ve seen fairly universal support from liberal voters both irl and online for Palestine, but not from our politicians.
Neoliberalism is stuff like putting children to work in the coal mines and also includes modern day conservatives (especially the nazi ones, a lot of people don’t realize how the nazi regime was more or less liberalism taken to its conclusion, which is why it took a war for them to face any opposition from the liberal world order, and even then it was only because they bit the hand that fed them)
Well if a tv comedian said it, it must be true.
I mean it is kind of true. Education and liberalism are also correlated.
Comedians often speak truths. Often when others don’t. I disagree with colberts take here but dismissing a point cuz of where is comes from is wrong.
eg carlin, Hicks
Don’t you need to be funny to be a comedian?
The neoliberal bias also fucks with the notability requirements. The amount of citation loops on anything even remotely political is absurd.
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.
I’m going to use your comment to tell people to download Indie Wiki Buddy. It’s a plug-in for your browser that redirects Fandom to independent alternatives. I highly recommend it.
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“Losing.”
If you think a centralized organization governed by legalism is opaque, just wait until you see a thousand islands of anarchy.
No I think it would actually be great. You could peek at two opposing views on the same article, for example. I’m sure some “instances” would be ripe with disinformation but what’s it to you? Idiots are already lapping up disinformation like candy. It’s not like wikipedia isn’t filled with it already…
You could peek at two opposing views on the same article, for example.
Post-truth as a service.
Wikipedia is already deeply post truth.
Post-truth as a service.
If you read through this page you might even conclude that Wikipedia itself is “post-truth”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies
At any point in time you could be reading a defaced or propagandized version of an article.
Not only is the noise ratio low, this seems like a good lesson in “encyclopedias are not primary sources nor arbiters nor authorities on information.” Yes, people use Wikipedia that way anyway. No, baking in an even lower trust system does not seem like it’s actually a fix to any of Wikipedia’s problems.
Wikipedia information is often made up of media reports and paid studies so we’re already there.
So you’re saying it would rely on each person to stay objective and use good critical thinking, instead of accepting the first thing they read and fall down an echo-chamber rabbit hole? Wikipedia definitely doesn’t always get it right, but it does try to use a form of institutionalized objectivity.
So you’re saying it would rely on each person to stay objective and use good critical thinking, instead of accepting the first thing they read and fall down an echo-chamber rabbit hole?
This is such a rich statement to make from a social media site of all places. My guy have you even looked at what some of the instances on Lemmy believe in? How is a federated wiki site any different?
but it does try to use a form of institutionalized objectivity.
By all means use wikipedia if you wish. As I’ve already pointed out in another comment, Wikipedia is often edited by bad or nationalist actors that do go undetected for a while.
I don’t need opposing views on subjects, I need the most accurate one that’s the best researched and sourced.
Good thing Wikipedia articles are always the best researched and sourced!
In 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published an article in the Journal of Holocaust Research in which they said they had discovered a “systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history” on the English-language Wikipedia.[367] Analysing 25 Wikipedia articles and almost 300 back pages (including talk pages, noticeboards and arbitration cases), Grabowski and Klein stated they have shown how a small group of editors managed to impose a fringe narrative on Polish-Jewish relations, informed by Polish nationalist propaganda and far removed from evidence-driven historical research. In addition to the article on the Warsaw concentration camp, the authors conclude that the activities of the editors’ group had an effect on several articles, such as History of the Jews in Poland, Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust and Jew with a coin. Nationalist editing on these and other articles allegedly included content ranging “from minor errors to subtle manipulations and outright lies”, examples of which the authors offer.[367]
- 367: Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust”. The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. ISSN 2578-5648. S2CID 257188267.
I don’t think they’re suggesting wikipedia currently is “best researched and sourced,” just that a federated alternative wouldn’t automatically solve that issue.
So? Is your alternative free of mistakes and bias?
I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.
What’s the alternative you’re suggesting that would be comparably comprehensive but regularly more reliable…?
I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.
You don’t see this statement as dogmatic? How do you feel confident in this other than just a feeling?
The majority of the time the articles would require actual expertise to make that evaluation with confidence. An individual can take a few minutes to verify the sources, but for so many topics it’s not realistic to rule out omissions of sources that should be well-known, or even rule out that a source given provides an important broader context somewhere nearby that should be mentioned in the article but isn’t. Can you be sure that the author is trustworthy on this subject? It’s not enough to just check a single page mentioned in a book while ignoring the rest of the book and any context surrounding the author.
An expert on a very specialized topic could weigh with accuracy in on whether the wikipedia articles on their subject is well-researched and sourced, but that still won’t mean they can extrapolate their conclusion to other articles.
…isn’t the good idea here to not enhance visibility of disinformation?
We’re talking about the fediverse here. It’s such a niche place and there are already wildly opposing views and information existing on Lemmy itself.
And that’s not even mentioning the situation on bigger social media platforms and the broader web!
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Considering some of the ungodly biased wikipedia alternatives I see tossed around on Lemmy, I’m not too confident Ibis will end up any better.
Besides, first I’m hearing of Wikipedia losing trust.
Imagine it’s post-2001 and George Bush is saying we need to take away Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). You hear there is a controversy around this topic, so you look it up on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article may not even mention the controversy because it came from “fringe sources” or unreliable media, instead its rules mean they only share the message from approved media sources, and that means the article says Iraq definitely has WMDs and something must be done.
This is how it works now, and always had.
When I was in college in the second half of the 2000s, we were banned from using Wikipedia as a source due to the way it is built. Many complained but given how many controversies Wikipedia has found itself involved in which includes paid editors, state actors, only being able to use biased journalistic coverage to construct articles, refusing to use other media sources such as established bloggers…
Trusting Wikipedia at any point was the mistake. It’s not even the Wikimedia foundation that is the issue, it’s the structure of the site. If no approved journalists will speak the truth, your article will be nothing but lies and Wikipedia editors will dutifully write those lies down and lock down the article if you attempt to correct them using sources they personally dislike.
I’ve never had issues with Wikipedia not at least mentioning a controversy on a topic if one exists. Got any current examples?
I’ve never had issues with Wikipedia not at least mentioning a controversy on a topic if one exists.
How would you know?
Never heard of any examples and certainly no one has provided any in this thread. Just been the usual muh western website is evil by default kind of stuff.
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That looks like big news. Exciting! 🎉
