I don’t think a federated wiki is solving any of the problems of wikipedia. You’ve just made a wiki that is more easily spammed and will have very few contributors. Yes, Wikipedia is centralized, but it’s a good thing. No one has to chase down the just perfect wikipedia site to find general information, just the one. The negative of wikipedia is more its sometimes questionable moderation and how its english-centric. This has more to do with fundamentally unequal internet infrastructure in most countries than anything though. Imperialism holds back tech.
I agree that it might be fine for niche wikis but again, why in the world would you ever want your niche wiki federated? Sounds like a tech solution looking for the wrong problem.
sometimes questionable moderation
That’s one way of putting it. Another way is “ramrodding the narratives of anglo chauvinists that are to the right of even the neoliberal historical consensus”.
There is actually at least one other: Conservapedia. It’s for people who live in a weird right-wing fantasy land.
Conservapedia views Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity as promoting moral relativism, …
ithinkihadastroke
Arguably even Fandom / Wikia is ruined by plain old greed more than centralization. What’s wrong with it isn’t content, it’s the fact every page loads seven ads, a roll of clickbait, and a goddamn Discord server. A weird blog site for editable text and tiny images would work fine if it wasn’t twisted to feed Engagemagog.
I think it solves the problems of Fandom, but yeah Wikipedia is good
Wikipedia is good
until you want to learn about a group or country opposed to the west and then it’s about as educational as stormfront
what is stormfront
Nazi forum
Wikipedia doesn’t replace books. In my comment at least that’s why I was specific about “general information”. I think everyone must be aware that when it comes to Wikipedia on history or current events, it will largely be from a liberal and pro-west perspective. Not all the time, and usually the references and further reading sections point in more interesting directions. But this is far more valuable than the most boring so-called Marxist wikis. If you want critical history, go read historians like Gerald Horne, read first-hand accounts from journalists like Edgar Snow and so on.
Besides the purely political, wikipedia is also good for overviews on technical and scientific interests. Even with the negatives of wikipedia, I’d take it any day over some decentralized spam fest where its a gamble if you found the best version of some article. Not to mention core issues of the fediverse, such as whether the hypothetical wiki instance you found yourself on will sustain itself long-term.
Some days I wonder if the core Lemmy developers have drifted further towards anarchist politics and philosophy…
Self-hosting any wiki software solves the problems of Fandom, surely? I fail to see how federation solves any of Fandom’s issues.
No, for the same reason forums can’t replace reddit. Self hosted wikis have been around before and after fandom. The reason it became popular was giving you all the fandom wikis together, one account, discoverable, user friendly so regulars can contribute. If I have to sign up to every fandom wiki I can contribute to, learn a new interface (likely something old and not mobile friendly) and rebuilt up any reputation to gain extra editing rights… I just won’t.
Ibis then in theory allows you to use one account, federate your reputation, use one interface, with lots of third party options if you don’t like the official one (if lemmy is any indication) and have discoverability of new wikis.
Looks very broken on mobile.
When working on lemmy is too relaxing so you need another project to keep you busy :D
There’s Jerboa as well, lol
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.
Thank you for working on this in addition to Lemmy!
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.
So contribute to the statement.
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?
Cool I hope it works out, more alternatives aren’t a bad thing.
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.
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.
^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.
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 [email protected]. I, personally, think this will be the killer application for Ibis.
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?
Synchronicity!
Gesundheit!
¡Muchas gracias!
Interesting, maybe it wanted to tell you about this project :D
…why?
Doesn’t work with javascript disabled.
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 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.
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…
Thank you for that. It will probably work well in pair with Lemmy. The ability to compile a community or instance knowlegde out of the comment section and to an organised wiki will be very nice.
But if someone here reading as the time and skill, the sofware the fediverse is lacking is tv tracker.
That looks like big news. Exciting! 🎉
