• CameronDev@programming.dev
    1·
    8 months ago

    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 :)

    • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
      1·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          The neoliberal bias also fucks with the notability requirements. The amount of citation loops on anything even remotely political is absurd.

          • MBM@lemmings.world
            1·
            8 months ago

            Neoliberalism =/= liberalism and especially not leftism (or just “the opposite of conservatism”), which I assume is what Colbert means

          • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            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)

          • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
            0·
            8 months ago

            “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

          • Alsephina@lemmy.mlEnglish
            01·
            8 months ago

            “The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.”

            - Malcolm X

              • Alsephina@lemmy.mlEnglish
                01·
                8 months ago

                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”.

                • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  8 months ago

                  I’ve seen fairly universal support from liberal voters both irl and online for Palestine, but not from our politicians.

    • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

  • spaduf@slrpnk.net
    1·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • joenforcer@midwest.social
    1·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • jeremyparker@programming.dev
      1·
      8 months ago

      So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.

      Kidding aside, you’re absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN’T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it’s not perfect.

      If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google’s many spywares – there’s loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.

      Edit: the “federated Netflix” – I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: “anyone” (anyone federated with other instances) can “upload” videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.

      And federated Amazon – that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.

        • jeremyparker@programming.dev
          1·
          8 months ago

          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.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
        0·
        8 months ago

        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!

    • socsa@lemmy.ml
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      It only gets corrupted by state department interests if it gets popular, so we must work to make it less popular! (edit: I hope its obvious this is a joke)

  • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

  • Manucode@feddit.de
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • Rolder@reddthat.com
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          8 months ago

          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.

          • Rolder@reddthat.com
            0·
            8 months ago

            I’ve never had issues with Wikipedia not at least mentioning a controversy on a topic if one exists. Got any current examples?

      • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        8 months ago

        If you think a centralized organization governed by legalism is opaque, just wait until you see a thousand islands of anarchy.

        • ikka@lemmy.sdf.org
          0·
          8 months ago

          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…

            • ikka@lemmy.sdf.org
              0·
              8 months ago

              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!

          • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            I don’t need opposing views on subjects, I need the most accurate one that’s the best researched and sourced.

            • ikka@lemmy.sdf.org
              0·
              8 months ago

              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.
              • ripcord@lemmy.world
                0·
                8 months ago

                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…?

                • Christian@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  0·
                  8 months ago

                  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.

              • bermuda@beehaw.orgEnglish
                0·
                8 months ago

                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.

          • Murdoc@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            8 months ago

            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.

            • ikka@lemmy.sdf.org
              0·
              8 months ago

              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.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    I’m going to just say that I’m exteremely sceptical on how this will turn out, just because there has been quite a few Wikipedia forks that have not exactly worked out despite the best interests and the stated objectives they had.

    Now - Wikipedia isn’t exactly an entity that doesn’t have glaring problems of its own, of course - but I’m just saying that the wiki model has been tried out a lot of times and screwed up many times in various weird ways.

    There’s exactly two ways I can see Wikipedia forks to evolve: Crappily managed fork that is handled by an ideological dumbass that attracts a crowd that makes everything much worse (e.g. Conservapedia, Citizendium), or a fork that gets overrun by junk and forgotten by history, because, well, clearly it’s much more beneficial to contribute to Wikipedia anyway.

    I was about to respond with a copy of the standard Usenet spam response form with the “sorry dude I don’t think this is going to work” ticked, but Google is shit and I can’t find a copy of that nonsense anymore, so there.

    • explodicle@local106.comEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      I’ve been scared to use that ever since they actually solved “Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money”.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.

        • Unruffled [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          I dunno, it’d be nice to know the people receiving donations to work on Lemmy are actually working on Lemmy, and not on some side project that nobody asked for. There are currently 38 open issues just on the topic of moderation tooling alone. While I’m sure this is an interesting side project, I don’t understand how it is a priority. Ruwiki just launched last year if anyone wants to learn more about the Kremlin’s “alternative facts”.

    • Justinas Dūdėnas@soc.dudenas.lt
      0·
      8 months ago

      “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 @liaizon

  • vis4valentine@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Is it linked to the ongoing Drama on the french wikipedia ?

    How does federation works with with “SEO” ? Wikipedia is always among the top result on search engine, how would peopel find about Ibis ?

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      I dont speak French and havent heard about that drama. But its about the problems pointed out in this article among others.

      If Ibis gets popular it will get listed higher in search results. Same as Lemmy which is also slowly going up in results. Before that it will most likely spread through word of mouth.

      • Alsephina@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Same as Lemmy which is also slowly going up in results

        Huh. Searching for “Lemmy” on Google actually brings it up on the side now instead of Lemmy Kilmister like it did during the Reddit exodus. Neat.

  • CaptKoala@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Why is it named after those bin juice drinking cunt birds?

    I love the idea, but I hate the name.