- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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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.
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)
Looks very broken on mobile.
@nutomic another useless inactive wiki-like project
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.
It can get a bit boring working on the same project for so many years. Having a different project gives me more motivation.
Fair enough - I can definitely understand that
You don’t have to explain what you do with your time to others then that’s all you are ever gonna be doing .
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.
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
I started a post along these lines on !ibis@lemmy.ml. I, personally, think this will be the killer application for Ibis.
^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.
@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.
@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.
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.
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”
@Quacksalber @Alsephina Wikipedia is already filled with a LOT of fake information and biased
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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.
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.
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. :-(
Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability
Reading the links in this post alone will tell you wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
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.
Wikimedia isn’t written in Rust, so it’s useless /s
@13 @nutomic @vis4valentine how helpful is sarcasm huh
Yay Holocaust denialism /s
Oh man I can’t wait to see what hexbear will do with this, I’m sure people will love to use a platform that actively denies genocides and supports dictators
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You’re thinking of alot of the .world users lol denying the current genocide in Palestine
communists seething at the chance to just bullshit history
A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!
btw is this compatible with Markdown or WikiText?
It uses Markdown because it has the best library support.
YAY! Amazing!
This feels like a hasty “solution” to an invented “problem”. Sure, Wikipedia isn’t squeaky clean, but it’s pretty damn good for something that people have been freely adding knowledge to for decades. The cherry-picked examples of what makes Wikipedia " bad" are really not outrageous enough to create something even more niche than Wikia, Fandom, or the late Encyclopedia Dramatica. I appreciate the thought, but federation is not a silver bullet for everything. Don’t glorify federation the way cryptobros glorify the block chain as the answer to all the problems of the world.
I don’t think the fact that a small group of people who are easy to manipulate by the US government and millions of edits originating from Langley are a small or invented problem. I’m extremely scared of having resources being centralized and controlled by the US propaganda apparatus and think this is a major problem.
I mean we have seen how the Lemmy devs approach certain topics, and it is definitely not with a preference for openness or free exchange of ideas. There are certain topics here which have a hair trigger for content removal and bans, for extremely petty and minor “transgressions,” so the motivation here seems pretty transparent.
So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.
Federated Netflix? We already have federated YouTube, it’s called PeerTube
Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don’t mind paying for things if they’re good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.
There’s a wiki program that natively uses a version control repository, Fossil. You can fork a Fossil wiki and contribute updates back to the original.
It wouldn’t be too hard to for example create a few Fossil repositories for different topics where the admins on each are subject matter experts (to ensure quality of contributions), and then have a client which connects to them all and with a scheme for cross linking between them
Peertube already exists for video, it’s more like a different take on bittorrent.
I’ve just realised that I independently came up with the idea for federated services while imagining how to make yt better over 5 years ago.
Cool!
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then add to it genius???
The neoliberal moderators make that impossible. The talk pages for anything even remotely political is radioactive, with the mods flagrantly abusing their power in reverting any change they personally find disagreeable.
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first article gives the example of the biden-ukraine-smirkov thing, thats a proven hoax by the kremlin so no wonder it wasnt accepted by wikipedia.
the chinese power users just blasted ccp bullshit
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Calling out a government for flagrant propaganda has nothing at all to do with race.
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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
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
‘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.
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.
95% of stuff relevant to you ≠ 95% of all stuff.
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.
