- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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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!
If this kills Fandom/Wikia, that would be amazing and somewhat realistic.
Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you ?
US-controlled and domiciled site - yes, but I do not see it having a monopoly on information at all. Sure is big, has lots of info, pages, it is a rather good resource in linking stuff to the various concepts that you want to explain others e.g. in an argument.
But the very fact that anyone can edit information makes it not recommendable in academia, for example (really, when I was a student, all my professors were generally not recommending it for information because, as one of them said, even grandma could edit it). So I don’t think I would trust ibis on scientific articles either, at least not in the fields I’m directly interested in - maybe for some random trivia/did you know stuff, idk.
limited / niche wikis
But this is where I think it would really shine, indeed, as one could make a wiki about a game or software more easily, probably link pages from different instances, etc. (as others said already).
Don’t know what else to say, it just seems like an interesting project. Congrats to anyone involved on this first release and looking forward to see what this project will bring.
Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information, especially over non-English languages that are managed by an independent set of volunteers who could pack up their bags and move everything over wherever they want at any point.
Still a cool project and technological diversity is good though.
Wikipedia also releases all content for free download under a permissive license, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that the US government is a meaningful threat to its quality of information
What? How are these two points related at all?
Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia’s brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.
EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y’know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.
Many of the editors are themselves neoliberal American cultural imperialists and proud of it. The issue isn’t direct control so much as an army of useful idiots.
That statement ITSELF is American cultural Imperialism. There are a bunch of languages other than English on Wikipedia…
Also [citation needed].
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?
Interesting, maybe it wanted to tell you about this project :D
Synchronicity!
Gesundheit!
¡Muchas gracias!
Oooh this is cool
This serves well as a statement.
It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.
All the more reason to push this project forward, as a redundancy.
You can already download the entirity of Wikipedia. If it ever fell, the content could easily be restored elsewhere.
Also, I don’t think I understand why this should be federated.
The infrastructure is already there in that case, to restore it, and it would be less likely to fall.
Having no sole source of information hosting in an encyclopedic format is safer.
But having an open data project full of information that’s actively contributed to and fact checked, with copies over many servers, is much better than having the same thing but fragmented. I still don’t see a reason. If it was something else or corporate driven, I wouldn’t bat an eye. But Wikipedia?
So contribute to the statement.
Cool I hope it works out, more alternatives aren’t a bad thing.
Finally. Hope this takes off and breaks wikipedia’s biased monopoly on knowledge.
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.
‘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.
…why?
@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.
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.
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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Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability
Reading the links in this post alone will tell you wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
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. :-(
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.
Wikimedia isn’t written in Rust, so it’s useless /s
@13 @nutomic @vis4valentine how helpful is sarcasm huh
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.
One of the main devs of Lemmy (@nutomic) just announced a federated wiki project called Ibis
“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.”
Yay, now we’ll have a new wikipedia which will also present russian take on Ukraine invasion, Chinese take on Tianmen massacre and a flat-earthers corner for their “truth”. I think internet already covers that…
@nutomic ok, but did anyone think to test this on an iPhone before making it live?
Android does not work either. At a guess, desktops seem highly likely to be affected as well.
It’s not even alpha, just a barely working project. Just give it some time.
Nope
You’ve picked a nice name :) I’m glad you didn’t choose fedipedia.
I just created an account on open.ibis.wiki and created “Lemmy” article but it’s not shown on ibis.wiki 🤔 I guess it still has a long way to go, but I think it’s a nice project 👍
Right ibis.wiki wasnt following open.ibis.wiki. I did that now, made an edit and it got federated as expected.
Nice. I guess “Summary” is something like git commit message. I thought it more as the summary of the article :)
Yes true.
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.
So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.
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!
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.
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.
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then add to it genius???
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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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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 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.
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.
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
communists seething at the chance to just bullshit history
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You’re thinking of alot of the .world users lol denying the current genocide in Palestine
