10 ms·

Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

163 points by chasingtheflow 3y ago

tripdout 3y ago
Doesn't even display properly on mobile - can barely read the page.
mdaniel 3y ago
https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation > applying all associated edits in order. Instances can synchronize their articles with each other, and follow each other to receive updates about articles. Edits are done with diffs which are generated on the backend, and allow for conflict resolution similar to git. I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sincerely doubt that git's conflict resolution is going to be a good experience Also, as I understand federated things, the real hazard to usefulness is one of discovery. So how would I, owner of a hypothetical mdaniel.wiki, discover who has the best CRDT documents in their wiki such that I could subscribe to updates on those pages? A wiki of wikis?
- foul 3y ago
  >I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sincerely doubt that git's conflict resolution is going to be a good experience CRDT adds automatic conflict resolution, wikis need at most, if any, manual conflict resolution, because their page editing has little need for concurrent real-time edits, it's a slower process (ironic given the meaning of wiki in Hawaiian). About git, OP tried to explain to non-wiki editors what wikis do under the hood, conflict reconciliation in wikis is vaguely similar to git but simpler, and the tech Ibis uses, paired to a design for independence prone to content rotting (every url of the federation can differ even in context about any page), makes me smell of just importing by hand or by trust edits from peers into the backing store.
- bawolff 3y ago
  I think it depends what you want. Diffs are better if you want to review changes and intelligently merge them. CDRT is better if you want there to be just one document that everyone is editing at the same time, with merging being an automatic process and the rare non-sensical merge being acceptable.
- tux3 3y ago
  Git conflict resolution isn't great, but it's also not much worse than MediaWiki's existing conflict resolution today. It doesn't matter all that much whether your servers are federated or served from a single domain, the time users spend with the page editor open is much longer than the latency of a federation request. A server somewhere might be horribly out of sync and cause a lot of conflicts, but presumably those are also the scuffy servers with low traffic that don't see a lot of edits per minute anyways. CRDT is cool, but it's deploying a very shiny new tech for a small problem that doesn't really need anything fancy.
- viraptor 3y ago
  CRDTs are cool for tiny concurrent edits. For example two people typing on one line. But it doesn't save you when you get large conflicting edits. No system can automatically merge instance A removing a sentence and instance B adding some words within the that sentence. It's still the user that will have to make a decision. And at that point, you're effectively looking at a git style 3-way merge.
- kemayo 3y ago
  Automatically merging updates between different variants of the article, in fact, seems like a terrible idea. This is because resolving conflicts between edits is easy, but making sure that (for lack of a better word) semantic conflicts don't make it through requires a manual review of changes. Your CRDT merge can be a technological marvel that will seamlessly stitch together different edits on a topic... that say wildly different things about it, resulting in a completely nonsensical article.
- rakoo 3y ago
  CRDTs make sure there is only one version, but that version might be garbage. Think taking all the lines from all conflicts in git. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes not. It's even worse than that: you don't know there was a conflict, so you don't know if there was a problem or not. It's trying to solve social problems with technology, it's never enough (but can bring us a good way there) Manual merging is mandatory to have human meaning, so might as well use it all the time.
bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias It didn't? Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx : > As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      Most traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish in the book form. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.
      - ChrisKnott 3y ago
        Their significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though
        lifthrasiir 3y ago
        Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.
kemayo 3y ago
…they couldn’t think of a good Wikipedia scandal from within the last decade? (The "why wikipedia is bad" bit at the start talks about things from 2005, 2007, and 2012.) Anyway, this might be pretty "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" since I work for the WMF, but I'm not really seeing much appeal from federation in this area. It certainly seems less relevant than in social media, anyway.
- matricaria 3y ago
  Just search for anything remotely political and you will find a lot of bias.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    I'm not talking about whether there are scandals about Wikipedia. I'm saying it's weird what the article chose to use as a demonstration.
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      And Wikipedia does have an extensive list of its own controversies [1]. That doesn't mean Wikipedia is not to blame, but miraculously it did have a good track record compared to other online projects of the similar size and influence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    I don't see how federation can help with that. At worst it's going to have hundreds of conflicting versions of a document, where each federated node disagree on which is the current master of the document, because each node is fighting for their bias, or it's going to be Wikipedia, where there is one promoted version of the document with whatever bias.
    - account42 3y ago
CynicusRex 3y ago
Horrible rendering on mobile. And screw those pyramid scheme (crypto“currency”) donation links.
tomgp 3y ago
Wikipedia is the worst possible system for making an encyclopaedia, except for all the others.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cmeacham98 3y ago
I clicked through, but the site is completely unusable on mobile, clearly hasn't even been tested let alone designed to work here.
- hereonout2 3y ago
  It also has no articles, one of the main ones listed is titled "Hello World". Looks like a toy weekend project by someone learning web development. A worthy endeavour no doubt but not sure why it's on the front page.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    My understanding is that the person creating it is also the person who made Lemmy, which is a somewhat-successful federated reddit-alternative. Existing notability translates into more interest in otherwise uninteresting things.
buro9 3y ago
How does moderation work in this system, and if it results in multiple diverging pages on the same topic, how is any of it trusted? As much as it's a complicated mess, a centralised system with a broad army of moderators operating to similar standards, is the feature of Wikipedia. They may be wrong at times, but they're accountable somewhat collectively for that and so hold each other to account.
varjag 3y ago
Not sure how federation is going to increase the trustworthiness.
ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
I'm sorry, but aren't web sites already federated? I don't understand what the technical contribution is here. If we wanted to build a federated network of wikis (do we?), then links to articles are just links and identity is provided by OpenID Connect. What have I misunderstood? > 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. Others may document fictional universes from television series or videogames. If one instance is badly moderated or presents manipulated information, an alternative can easily be created. Yet all of them will be interconnected, and users can read and edit without leaving their home website. This is absurd. You are describing WWW, except for the "without leaving their home website" bit, but I don't know why that feature is so important to you. You can just replace that by "without leaving their home browser of choice".
- oefrha 3y ago
  My impression as well. I could be totally wrong, but it feels like the work of someone who’s got the fediverse hammer and who’s also too immersed in the social media one-place-to-consume-them-all mindset to realize the absurdity.
  - hirako2000 3y ago
    There are aspects of federation that are stricter than the web. It isn't that you are wrong as there is some overlap but here are a few properties that federation assures, that the web doesn't. The web is decentralized. What's served on the web isn't necessarily decentralized. - Server Decentralization: Federated systems use a decentralized network (www), and are themselves decentralized, meaning the servers that forms the federated network are decentralized, there is no single central authority controlling the network. multiple servers run by different individuals or organizations communicate with each other to share content and data, via: - Interoperability: different platforms can communicate and share data seamlessly, and also enables easier: - Privacy and Control as users are given alternative servers, which may operate very different policies, or can run their own if policies from this or that server don't fit their liking, compared to centralized platforms. all ultimately run on the same web but since users can choose which server to join or even host their own, they have more autonomy over their online presence and data. Analogy with selling buckets of paint: - Centralization of that service is a one stop shop re-selling exclusive delux white and blue paints. - Federation of that service is multiple shops, selling white and blue paints. By a maker not moved about the idea of shops selling to each others, not interested in making it exclusive and letting any shops offering other colors. - the web is all the streets
sebtron 3y ago
I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.
- omeid2 3y ago
  Moderation is not a feature; it is a limitation imposed by powers that be for you if you want to conduct business. Moderation is not a feature.
  - ithinkso 3y ago
    The only thing worse than moderation is the lack of moderation
    - Chris2048 3y ago
      Not moderating the moderators for their moderation is a lack of moderation.
      - joquarky 3y ago
        Perhaps Slashdot had the right idea.
        nequo 3y ago
        I had to look this up. I think you’re referring to metamoderation where users rate the ratings of comments: https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml Sounds like a great idea, I wonder why it hasn’t been adopted by other websites. Do you know if it had downsides for Slashdot?
        kirun 3y ago
        The problem is that if you get hit with hivemind moderation in M1, then you're likely to see it rated as fair in M2. This is encouraged by the "Troll" and "Flamebait" options which can be slapped on any dissenting opinion.
sschueller 3y ago
Ibis is a large hotel chain. I am not sure using this name is a good idea.
- creshal 3y ago
  Ibis is a bird.
- sn0wleppard 3y ago
  Well, it was also the name of a bird long before that
  - account42 3y ago
    I think GP's point is that the name will need to compete with existing much more popular uses in online search results and similar limited spaces, which makes it a bad choice even the the hotel chain doesn't have an exclusive claim to the name.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  It's also a bird; in ancient Egyptian mythology, Thoth had head of an ibis and was the god of writing, wisdom, knowledge, art, science, etc.
- cpcloud 3y ago
  Turns out people like naming things ibis: - The band: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225562259251 https://www.ebay.com/itm/225562259251 - The hotel chain: https://all.accor.com/brands/ibis.en.shtml https://all.accor.com/brands/ibis.en.shtml - The anime drawing program: https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US - The beer: https://ibisrice.com/ibis-pale-ale/ https://ibisrice.com/ibis-pale-ale/ - The whatever this is: https://ibis.ibo.org/ https://ibis.ibo.org/ - The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis-framework/ https://pypi.org/project/ibis-framework/ (disclaimer: I work on this library) - The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis/ https://pypi.org/project/ibis/ - The software for reverse mortgage management: https://www.ibisreverse.com/ https://www.ibisreverse.com/ - The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE
moi2388 3y ago
Maybe make it tender properly on iOS safari first?
outime 3y ago
Cannot take a project like this seriously in 2024 while looking like total garbage [1] on mobile. [1] https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg
- janfoeh 3y ago
  You believe the interesting, valuable part is the three lines of CSS it will take to improve rendering on baby internet browsers? Not the part where they federated a Wiki-style system?
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    When meeting somebody for the first time, it's generally a good idea to comb your hair and put on clean clothes. First impressions matter, and since the effort to make a good one would've been a mere "three lines of CSS," the fact that the project didn't bother with that is kind of off-putting.
    - janfoeh 3y ago
      > the fact that the project didn't bother with that is kind of off-putting. Didn't bother with that _yet_. Given the date on the front page, Ibis is apparently fresh out of the gates. Clothing and styling also provides social signalling and filtering, to stay with your analogy. If this were my early-stage project, I would welcome a little friction to select towards the helpful, the imaginative and the invested. To improve the signal/noise ratio. Maybe that's the case here. If it is, it seems to be working.
  - outime 3y ago
    I believe that if I have a new project and I want people to read about it and get interested, I must support mobile browsers (which nowadays produce more than half of the global website traffic) - more so if not doing it like in my example means not being able to read a single line at all. It's just basic accessibility what we're talking about here.
t-3 3y ago
Interesting. How does performance compare to other wikis? I'm thinking that something like this may be attractive for a browsable self-hosted private knowledge base with a "sync" server hosted on a VPS and local instances running on different machines which may or may not have persistent connections.
- manfre 3y ago
  You'd likely have a much easier time using a file based wiki with rsync.
- j_maffe 3y ago
  There's a lot of options for self-hostable wikis if that's what you're looking for. Decentralized has been done as well here: https://ipfs.kiwix.org/ https://ipfs.kiwix.org/
beders 3y ago
The issue you seem to be trying to solve is that of authenticity and change management. > The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information. That is incorrect. What you want is a block chain.
- janfoeh 3y ago
  [flagged]
hardwaresofton 3y ago
Hey if the devs are in here, check out your mobile styling/css, it’s a bit weird
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lakomen 3y ago
sigh unviewable on mobile phones. From the little I can make out it's also some bootstrap site.
- medstrom 3y ago
  Also unviewable on text terminals.
bawolff 3y ago
Reading through, this doesn't sound like a "federated wikipedia" It sounds more like they want to implement the github fork & pull-request model of version control where currently Wikipedia uses a more SVN type of version control. There are pros and cons to both models. However federation it is not. The mentioned controversies also seem entirely unrelated to which model you like.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  I'm for sure not a federation nor ActivityPub ninja, but as I understand it due to the broadcast nature of ActivityPub and this project's "send updates to the origin server as patches" approach, then it is the opposite of both github and Subversion in that there is not one canonical hostname, and any one hostname doesn't, itself, contain 100% of the content, same as infosec.social for sure doesn't contain 100% of Mastodon content but I can read infosec.social posts on my.mastodon.example by subscribing to feeds that interest me. I currently can't (that I know of) submit patches to their Toots as reply activity, but I don't believe there's anything in the spec that would prevent such a thing, either I'm keeping an eye on https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/architecture/blueprints/activity_pub/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/architecture/blueprints/activity_... <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201453> with acute interest because I'm totally open to not even being able to see the ways federation can make ecosystems more valuable due to my lack of hands-on experience with the kinds of problems it is solving
InsomniacL 3y ago
how does this solve the problem it claims to exist for? i.e stopping scandals & improving trust? if anything, this seems to be more prone to scandals and less trustworthy.
chris_wot 3y ago
This looks awful on an iPhone.
hammon 3y ago
[dead]
crotchfire 3y ago
The real wikipedia renders (perfectly!) without javascript. This does not render at all without javascript. Not an alternative.
- rajamaka 3y ago
  Not an alternative for you maybe, but a fine alternative for over 99% of the rest of the world running javascript in their browser.
  - justaj 3y ago
    99% of the users you're talking about won't see any benefit in switching to this alternative from Wikipedia anyway, so what's your point?
    - michaelcampbell 3y ago
      His point that the javascript-turner-offers are a vocal, but very small minority. The mobile issue here is big, and the fact that this effort is just another attempt following a long string of previous failures and has a small chance of success, but that's something different.
  - Chabsff 3y ago
    Wikipedia is one of the few initiatives where not being satisfied with 99% accessibility is absolutely warranted. If your goal is to dethrone it, you have to bite that bullet.
  - DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
    It also renders like garbage on mobile, which makes it useless for about 50% of the world. Not a great start.
- SPBS 3y ago
  It doesn't even run on mobile because the sidebar takes up all the space and the main content is squeezed to the side. Even more disappointing to learn that what is essentially a static webpage doesn't render without JavaScript. This is not going anywhere with that kind of attitude (not testing on mobile, relying 100% on JavaScript).
npteljes 3y ago
"There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now twice as old?" Ridiculous article. Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. I feel like these people have no idea what kind of effort is to run an organization, instead seeing the issues as part of the technical, or ideological underpinnings. It doesn't work that way, and I invite every hopeful to look up the list of alternative Wikis that have sprung up over the years.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    Dunning–Kruger effect might have something to do with it. People spotting issue in an established project, having an idea about how to improve it, but no actual experience in running such projects or even knowing the history and context of the established project. And the lack of this knowledge helping to overestimate their ability and perceived chance of success.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      True, but I think there's a social/group aspect to it too. A lot of projects start like this, people all thinking it's time to start fresh only to devolve into nothingness in a few weeks.
    - observationist 3y ago
      If someone has staked a claim over an article, regardless of its factual accuracy, it's almost impossible to fix problems. Look at any politicians, celebrities, topics that are contentious in the public sphere, and you'll find control over the topic has been taken. There is no sane recourse - you can find endless examples of years long discussions as people who know what they're talking about battle it out with empty headed wiki editors who simply want the clout, or don't know the first thing about rational discourse and insist on their weird, distorted views of reality. Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page. Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political.
extraduder_ire 3y ago
How long will it take before all of the content on wikipedia is kanged onto this site? I mean, the license explicitly allows that kind of thing.
- slily 3y ago
  If I were attempting to create a less "captured" Wikipedia alternative that's what I would do - start from there and try to keep it synchronized while hacking at it slowly, instead of taking a from-scratch approach.
  - jl6 3y ago
    There have been many Wikipedia forks, but all have failed, because 99% of the work is in doing uncontroversial stuff that most people are fine with, and 1% is in controversial "captured" areas. If you fork the whole thing in the hope that you can fix the 1%, you will have to find a way to do the 99% bit.
- dizhn 3y ago
  They should have done it already because that demo site looks sad.
  - account42 3y ago
    Right, you'd expect that there would be a complete initial import as well as semi-automatic updates of non-controversial changes.
- kemayo 3y ago
  The license does allow for it, but it's actually sort of tricky to do if you want to import it into a non-mediawiki system. Wikipedia makes really extensive use of templates in wikitext, which can be complicated nested things that can call out to Lua modules. You can easily take Wikipedia's HTML output and use it, but reusing the source of those articles requires a lot of work on either compatibility or translation.
account42 3y ago
> Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. As if the constant begging for donations they don't need and the shithole that is Fandom wans't enough to lower my opinion of ol Jimmy.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tiptup300 3y ago
I've been wanting to do this exact thing for a couple months, not for any of what their talking about. I ran a wiki for local music artists. I started it on an ancient version of mediawiki for use with an ancient extension that wasn't even used, so overall bad idea. It no longer works on a modern version of php so I'm having a lot of trouble getting it back up. But on that same note, a federation of local wikis, like for small towns/cities, artists that sort of thing, I think would be very cool.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  The idea of federating wikis is pretty old: https://www.dokuwiki.org/interwiki https://www.dokuwiki.org/interwiki
sharkjacobs 3y 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 article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I mean, it is a given…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- theamk 3y ago
  There is a non-zero amount of people who are unhappy with wikipedia's policy. The "rot in wikipedia" link gives some examples: "fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics" I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.
  - arp242 3y ago
    That article is upset alternative "medicine" quackery isn't taken serious. In particular it seems upset that it calls Gary "you can cure AIDS with a diet" Null's fraudulent bullshit exact that. It calls Stephen Barrett from quackwatch "a discredited former psychiatrist", which is a blatant brazen lie. That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism. I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      That article (http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wikipedia-rotten-to-the-core http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wi...) is a perfect example of radicalizing material. It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!" And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?" Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail. Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG! (trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) ) Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators! And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that. How can you tolerate this injustice!?! ___________________________________________________________________________ And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible. But then you look at the rest of the website: http://helenofdestroy.com http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?) And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity. And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl. You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn. Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.
alsetmusic 3y ago
On iPhone, page renders with main content in a cell shoved hard-right with only two to five characters visible per line. I wasn’t even able to evaluate the content. Came here to mention this and it sounds like I’m not missing much.
shuntress 3y ago
Wikipedia is genuinely a wonder of the world. Trying to extend, mirror, or bolster it is potentially beneficial. Trying to replace it is foolish.
nicechianti 3y ago
[dead]
user- 3y ago
Wikipedia has a very slick website on mobile, desktop and mobile apps. This page doesn't even render on my phone properly. Probably should fix that before it can approach being an alternative
- 5900 3y ago
  It's unusable on mobile. Adding a basic responsive layout is essential and trivial compared to the problems Ibis is trying to solve.
jrm4 3y ago
This feels like a really good idea, really poorly explained, especially with the whole "going up against Wikipedia" thing (Wikipedia being arguably the best mostly-decentralized thing ever?) "Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth?
- kaibee 3y ago
  > "Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth? I read a comment here on HN recently, wish I could find it now (I think it was in one of the threads on the 'missing datatype (graphs)'). The gist was that we do large things pretty well: Operating Systems, standard libraries, etc and small things pretty well: single header file libs, specific open source projects, etc, but medium size things are missing. This seems to be the same kind of thing: you have enough complexity that coordination is hard(tm) but you don't have enough scale to build up an institutional inertia to overcome the bus-factor-of-one-ness that--- uhhh What I'm trying to say is that the support system around that project, like if you have a medium sized project, its going to have individual experts for the parts that make it up, but they're all single points of failure. If I had more time I would have written a shorter more coherent comment.
  - araes 3y ago
    It's known as the Valley of Death syndrome. [♪][♫][ꜘ] Especially common in the DoD where they're good at funding enormous numbers of SBIRs/STTRs, yet they never go anywhere, because all large money contracts are guaranteed to be vacuumed up by Lockheed / Raytheon / Northrup Grumman / Boeing / General Dynamics / Teledyne Brown / Honeywell / ect... And in most cases (in my opinion, not legally binding), they purposely, slowly build cripple-ware with planned obsolescence that results in equipment that's vestigial before it launches and immediately needs 'upgrade' contracts. [♪] DoD funding, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2023/07/defense-innovation-board-suggests-ways-to-bridge-the-valley-of-death/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2023/07/defense-i... [♫] VC investment, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-valley-curve.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-valley-curve.asp [ꜘ] US Biomanufacturing, https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/mind-gap-bridging-valley-death-us-biomanufacturing https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/mind-gap-bridging-...
abeppu 3y ago
So, I agree that I don't think a software project solves the problems the post starts out with. However, I wonder if the project can be used to solve other issues? For example, I think there's a spectrum of knowledge-base like solutions, but the middle of the spectrum is often poorly served: - wikipedia: global, canonical reference material. Is very good, and we almost all use it in some fashion. - confluence/notion/gh-wiki: team knowledge base. Often spotty, stale, neglected. - logseq/obsidian/org-mode: personal knowledge base, notes. Typically very idiosyncratic, sketchy, but can work very well for the people who put effort into it. What if a "federated wiki" was targeted at the team/personal level? I'm not saying this is Ibis in its present form, but imagine: - You keep your personal notes and knowledge store, in a way which is always implicitly contextualized against corresponding info (or lack of info) in the team knowledge store. - When you're noting something new, or modifying something, you always have an easy path to push your personal addition/edit to the shared store. - Ideally notes from everyone's work around or interaction with some X drives low-effort maintenance of the community reference of X.
- ambigious7777 3y ago
  git? not sure exactly what you're trying to say here, but you could do some stuff with git have a local repo of your own notes, a hosted repo serving as the communal ref. if you want to make updates, commit and push --, you can cherry pick the sections you want. i recall seeing something like mediawiki (but it stored articles as plaintext) a while back, you could use that for a web-based portal too
pradn 3y ago
Wikipedia is an amalgam of a large number of humans editing w/ some guardrails provided by the guidelines and tech (clean-up bots, edit alerts). If there's a human problem (corruption, bias), there's no tech solution that'll magically make all of it go away. The reason to make a new wiki or wiki-style technology is to serve a different informational niche, guided by different rules. There's a reason each video game has its own Wiki. You could fork Wikipedia to be more inclusionist, or have people from one particular political viewpoint - if that's your goal. But re-creating Wikipedia to do exactly what it's supposed to do - form a body of encyclopedic knowledge (subject to copyright laws, etc) - this doesn't make sense, and isn't a convincing argument for a new Wikipedia, even if its distributed.
mlinksva 3y ago
To be added to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...? Edit: added at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals#2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...
bdw5204 3y ago
There's probably an order of magnitude of people who don't edit Wikipedia because they're unhappy with Wikipedia's policies or its culture. I think the right Wikipedia alternative is probably viable and could maybe even be bigger and more successful than Wikipedia but alternatives generally fail because they can't get the critical mass of active editors necessary to keep the site updated especially on quickly changing topics where Wikipedia's approach is good enough for most people who'd be interested in editing on those topics. Forks (Infogalatic, Everipedia) typically become filled with outdated Wikipedia articles plus a few new articles about the creator's personal hobby horses. Just like features in open source software, articles in an open source online have to be maintained. The most successful alternative to Wikipedia is probably Conservapedia which is largely edited, I believe, by American right wing political activists and evangelical Christian homeschooled teens. Their articles reflect the changes in American right wing politics over the past 20 years or so meaning some are out of date with the current party line because they haven't been touched in years. That's one model of competing with Wikipedia but an encyclopedia consisting of outright partisan political propaganda and outright religious propaganda isn't useful to most people even most people who agree with its viewpoint[0]. Counterintuitively, I think Conservapedia has probably been successful because it rewrote everything from scratch. That also ensures you won't get dinged by Google under the duplicate content policy and basically delisted from search. I don't think federation is the right way to make a Wikipedia alternative viable because it is already an open source project run on open source software that anybody can fork. It's solving the wrong problem. The right problem to solve is getting a critical mass of editors who aren't just editing to push an agenda. That probably requires paid professional editors whose job is to maintain the encyclopedia. You can probably hire sufficiently smart people for $15 or so an hour because there are probably many smart people already working for that rate at McJobs[1]. That also makes your alternative appealing to current Wikipedia editors who are generally paid $0 to edit Wikipedia. If you're looking to hire expert editors, you'd probably have to pay more but you probably don't need experts. The downside of this is you have to have money to pay editors and probably to advertise that you're paying editors to create a competitor to Wikipedia. That also ensures you have enough editors to maintain the articles. I think Wikipedia alternative with paid editors would probably work as a relatively low risk but also low reward startup idea assuming there was sufficient funding behind it. [0]: Wikipedia does have its own biases and "neutral point of view" is now basically equated with "objectivity" but it is far less in your face about its biases than Conservapedia which reads more like the timeline of a Twitter account that follows all of the big right wing influencers to Wikipedia's Google News. [1]: Specifically, high school and college students. Also, many smart people who didn't go to college for whatever reason. They'd probably prefer writing over flipping burgers or running a checkout line.
bluey_bingo 3y ago
Does anyone remember Citizendium? They were going to give Wikipedia a run for its money.
31337Logic 3y ago
We don't need a Wikipedia alternative.
trenchgun 3y ago
Why?
sadpolishdev 3y ago
So, this one will be left or right wing politically controlled?

Doesn't even display properly on mobile - can barely read the page.

https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation > applying all associated edits in order. Instances can synchronize their articles with each other, and follow each other to receive updates about articles. Edits are done with diffs which are generated on the backend, and allow for conflict resolution similar to git. I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sincerely doubt that git's conflict resolution is going to be a good experience Also, as I understand federated things, the real hazard to usefulness is one of discovery. So how would I, owner of a hypothetical mdaniel.wiki, discover who has the best CRDT documents in their wiki such that I could subscribe to updates on those pages? A wiki of wikis?

foul 3y ago
>I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sincerely doubt that git's conflict resolution is going to be a good experience CRDT adds automatic conflict resolution, wikis need at most, if any, manual conflict resolution, because their page editing has little need for concurrent real-time edits, it's a slower process (ironic given the meaning of wiki in Hawaiian). About git, OP tried to explain to non-wiki editors what wikis do under the hood, conflict reconciliation in wikis is vaguely similar to git but simpler, and the tech Ibis uses, paired to a design for independence prone to content rotting (every url of the federation can differ even in context about any page), makes me smell of just importing by hand or by trust edits from peers into the backing store.
bawolff 3y ago
I think it depends what you want. Diffs are better if you want to review changes and intelligently merge them. CDRT is better if you want there to be just one document that everyone is editing at the same time, with merging being an automatic process and the rare non-sensical merge being acceptable.
tux3 3y ago
Git conflict resolution isn't great, but it's also not much worse than MediaWiki's existing conflict resolution today. It doesn't matter all that much whether your servers are federated or served from a single domain, the time users spend with the page editor open is much longer than the latency of a federation request. A server somewhere might be horribly out of sync and cause a lot of conflicts, but presumably those are also the scuffy servers with low traffic that don't see a lot of edits per minute anyways. CRDT is cool, but it's deploying a very shiny new tech for a small problem that doesn't really need anything fancy.
viraptor 3y ago
CRDTs are cool for tiny concurrent edits. For example two people typing on one line. But it doesn't save you when you get large conflicting edits. No system can automatically merge instance A removing a sentence and instance B adding some words within the that sentence. It's still the user that will have to make a decision. And at that point, you're effectively looking at a git style 3-way merge.
kemayo 3y ago
Automatically merging updates between different variants of the article, in fact, seems like a terrible idea. This is because resolving conflicts between edits is easy, but making sure that (for lack of a better word) semantic conflicts don't make it through requires a manual review of changes. Your CRDT merge can be a technological marvel that will seamlessly stitch together different edits on a topic... that say wildly different things about it, resulting in a completely nonsensical article.
rakoo 3y ago
CRDTs make sure there is only one version, but that version might be garbage. Think taking all the lines from all conflicts in git. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes not. It's even worse than that: you don't know there was a conflict, so you don't know if there was a problem or not. It's trying to solve social problems with technology, it's never enough (but can bring us a good way there) Manual merging is mandatory to have human meaning, so might as well use it all the time.

bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago

If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.

lifthrasiir 3y ago
A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias It didn't? Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx : > As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    Most traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish in the book form. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.
    - ChrisKnott 3y ago
      Their significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though
      - lifthrasiir 3y ago
        Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.

kemayo 3y ago

…they couldn’t think of a good Wikipedia scandal from within the last decade? (The "why wikipedia is bad" bit at the start talks about things from 2005, 2007, and 2012.) Anyway, this might be pretty "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" since I work for the WMF, but I'm not really seeing much appeal from federation in this area. It certainly seems less relevant than in social media, anyway.

matricaria 3y ago
Just search for anything remotely political and you will find a lot of bias.
- kemayo 3y ago
  I'm not talking about whether there are scandals about Wikipedia. I'm saying it's weird what the article chose to use as a demonstration.
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    And Wikipedia does have an extensive list of its own controversies [1]. That doesn't mean Wikipedia is not to blame, but miraculously it did have a good track record compared to other online projects of the similar size and influence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I don't see how federation can help with that. At worst it's going to have hundreds of conflicting versions of a document, where each federated node disagree on which is the current master of the document, because each node is fighting for their bias, or it's going to be Wikipedia, where there is one promoted version of the document with whatever bias.
  - account42 3y ago

CynicusRex 3y ago

Horrible rendering on mobile. And screw those pyramid scheme (crypto“currency”) donation links.

tomgp 3y ago

Wikipedia is the worst possible system for making an encyclopaedia, except for all the others.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cmeacham98 3y ago

I clicked through, but the site is completely unusable on mobile, clearly hasn't even been tested let alone designed to work here.

hereonout2 3y ago
It also has no articles, one of the main ones listed is titled "Hello World". Looks like a toy weekend project by someone learning web development. A worthy endeavour no doubt but not sure why it's on the front page.
- kemayo 3y ago
  My understanding is that the person creating it is also the person who made Lemmy, which is a somewhat-successful federated reddit-alternative. Existing notability translates into more interest in otherwise uninteresting things.

buro9 3y ago

How does moderation work in this system, and if it results in multiple diverging pages on the same topic, how is any of it trusted? As much as it's a complicated mess, a centralised system with a broad army of moderators operating to similar standards, is the feature of Wikipedia. They may be wrong at times, but they're accountable somewhat collectively for that and so hold each other to account.

varjag 3y ago

Not sure how federation is going to increase the trustworthiness.

ulrikrasmussen 3y ago

I'm sorry, but aren't web sites already federated? I don't understand what the technical contribution is here. If we wanted to build a federated network of wikis (do we?), then links to articles are just links and identity is provided by OpenID Connect. What have I misunderstood? > 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. Others may document fictional universes from television series or videogames. If one instance is badly moderated or presents manipulated information, an alternative can easily be created. Yet all of them will be interconnected, and users can read and edit without leaving their home website. This is absurd. You are describing WWW, except for the "without leaving their home website" bit, but I don't know why that feature is so important to you. You can just replace that by "without leaving their home browser of choice".

oefrha 3y ago
My impression as well. I could be totally wrong, but it feels like the work of someone who’s got the fediverse hammer and who’s also too immersed in the social media one-place-to-consume-them-all mindset to realize the absurdity.
- hirako2000 3y ago
  There are aspects of federation that are stricter than the web. It isn't that you are wrong as there is some overlap but here are a few properties that federation assures, that the web doesn't. The web is decentralized. What's served on the web isn't necessarily decentralized. - Server Decentralization: Federated systems use a decentralized network (www), and are themselves decentralized, meaning the servers that forms the federated network are decentralized, there is no single central authority controlling the network. multiple servers run by different individuals or organizations communicate with each other to share content and data, via: - Interoperability: different platforms can communicate and share data seamlessly, and also enables easier: - Privacy and Control as users are given alternative servers, which may operate very different policies, or can run their own if policies from this or that server don't fit their liking, compared to centralized platforms. all ultimately run on the same web but since users can choose which server to join or even host their own, they have more autonomy over their online presence and data. Analogy with selling buckets of paint: - Centralization of that service is a one stop shop re-selling exclusive delux white and blue paints. - Federation of that service is multiple shops, selling white and blue paints. By a maker not moved about the idea of shops selling to each others, not interested in making it exclusive and letting any shops offering other colors. - the web is all the streets

sebtron 3y ago

I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.

omeid2 3y ago
Moderation is not a feature; it is a limitation imposed by powers that be for you if you want to conduct business. Moderation is not a feature.
- ithinkso 3y ago
  The only thing worse than moderation is the lack of moderation
  - Chris2048 3y ago
    Not moderating the moderators for their moderation is a lack of moderation.
    - joquarky 3y ago
      Perhaps Slashdot had the right idea.
      - nequo 3y ago
        I had to look this up. I think you’re referring to metamoderation where users rate the ratings of comments: https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml Sounds like a great idea, I wonder why it hasn’t been adopted by other websites. Do you know if it had downsides for Slashdot?
        kirun 3y ago
        The problem is that if you get hit with hivemind moderation in M1, then you're likely to see it rated as fair in M2. This is encouraged by the "Troll" and "Flamebait" options which can be slapped on any dissenting opinion.

sschueller 3y ago

Ibis is a large hotel chain. I am not sure using this name is a good idea.

creshal 3y ago
Ibis is a bird.
sn0wleppard 3y ago
Well, it was also the name of a bird long before that
- account42 3y ago
  I think GP's point is that the name will need to compete with existing much more popular uses in online search results and similar limited spaces, which makes it a bad choice even the the hotel chain doesn't have an exclusive claim to the name.
meepmorp 3y ago
It's also a bird; in ancient Egyptian mythology, Thoth had head of an ibis and was the god of writing, wisdom, knowledge, art, science, etc.
cpcloud 3y ago
Turns out people like naming things ibis: - The band: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225562259251 https://www.ebay.com/itm/225562259251 - The hotel chain: https://all.accor.com/brands/ibis.en.shtml https://all.accor.com/brands/ibis.en.shtml - The anime drawing program: https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US - The beer: https://ibisrice.com/ibis-pale-ale/ https://ibisrice.com/ibis-pale-ale/ - The whatever this is: https://ibis.ibo.org/ https://ibis.ibo.org/ - The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis-framework/ https://pypi.org/project/ibis-framework/ (disclaimer: I work on this library) - The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis/ https://pypi.org/project/ibis/ - The software for reverse mortgage management: https://www.ibisreverse.com/ https://www.ibisreverse.com/ - The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE

moi2388 3y ago

Maybe make it tender properly on iOS safari first?

outime 3y ago

Cannot take a project like this seriously in 2024 while looking like total garbage [1] on mobile. [1] https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg

janfoeh 3y ago
You believe the interesting, valuable part is the three lines of CSS it will take to improve rendering on baby internet browsers? Not the part where they federated a Wiki-style system?
- meepmorp 3y ago
  When meeting somebody for the first time, it's generally a good idea to comb your hair and put on clean clothes. First impressions matter, and since the effort to make a good one would've been a mere "three lines of CSS," the fact that the project didn't bother with that is kind of off-putting.
  - janfoeh 3y ago
    > the fact that the project didn't bother with that is kind of off-putting. Didn't bother with that _yet_. Given the date on the front page, Ibis is apparently fresh out of the gates. Clothing and styling also provides social signalling and filtering, to stay with your analogy. If this were my early-stage project, I would welcome a little friction to select towards the helpful, the imaginative and the invested. To improve the signal/noise ratio. Maybe that's the case here. If it is, it seems to be working.
- outime 3y ago
  I believe that if I have a new project and I want people to read about it and get interested, I must support mobile browsers (which nowadays produce more than half of the global website traffic) - more so if not doing it like in my example means not being able to read a single line at all. It's just basic accessibility what we're talking about here.

t-3 3y ago

Interesting. How does performance compare to other wikis? I'm thinking that something like this may be attractive for a browsable self-hosted private knowledge base with a "sync" server hosted on a VPS and local instances running on different machines which may or may not have persistent connections.

manfre 3y ago
You'd likely have a much easier time using a file based wiki with rsync.
j_maffe 3y ago
There's a lot of options for self-hostable wikis if that's what you're looking for. Decentralized has been done as well here: https://ipfs.kiwix.org/ https://ipfs.kiwix.org/

beders 3y ago

The issue you seem to be trying to solve is that of authenticity and change management. > The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information. That is incorrect. What you want is a block chain.

janfoeh 3y ago
[flagged]

hardwaresofton 3y ago

Hey if the devs are in here, check out your mobile styling/css, it’s a bit weird

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lakomen 3y ago

sigh unviewable on mobile phones. From the little I can make out it's also some bootstrap site.

medstrom 3y ago
Also unviewable on text terminals.

bawolff 3y ago

Reading through, this doesn't sound like a "federated wikipedia" It sounds more like they want to implement the github fork & pull-request model of version control where currently Wikipedia uses a more SVN type of version control. There are pros and cons to both models. However federation it is not. The mentioned controversies also seem entirely unrelated to which model you like.

mdaniel 3y ago
I'm for sure not a federation nor ActivityPub ninja, but as I understand it due to the broadcast nature of ActivityPub and this project's "send updates to the origin server as patches" approach, then it is the opposite of both github and Subversion in that there is not one canonical hostname, and any one hostname doesn't, itself, contain 100% of the content, same as infosec.social for sure doesn't contain 100% of Mastodon content but I can read infosec.social posts on my.mastodon.example by subscribing to feeds that interest me. I currently can't (that I know of) submit patches to their Toots as reply activity, but I don't believe there's anything in the spec that would prevent such a thing, either I'm keeping an eye on https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/architecture/blueprints/activity_pub/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/architecture/blueprints/activity_... <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201453> with acute interest because I'm totally open to not even being able to see the ways federation can make ecosystems more valuable due to my lack of hands-on experience with the kinds of problems it is solving

InsomniacL 3y ago

how does this solve the problem it claims to exist for? i.e stopping scandals & improving trust? if anything, this seems to be more prone to scandals and less trustworthy.

chris_wot 3y ago

This looks awful on an iPhone.

hammon 3y ago

[dead]

crotchfire 3y ago

The real wikipedia renders (perfectly!) without javascript. This does not render at all without javascript. Not an alternative.

rajamaka 3y ago
Not an alternative for you maybe, but a fine alternative for over 99% of the rest of the world running javascript in their browser.
- justaj 3y ago
  99% of the users you're talking about won't see any benefit in switching to this alternative from Wikipedia anyway, so what's your point?
  - michaelcampbell 3y ago
    His point that the javascript-turner-offers are a vocal, but very small minority. The mobile issue here is big, and the fact that this effort is just another attempt following a long string of previous failures and has a small chance of success, but that's something different.
- Chabsff 3y ago
  Wikipedia is one of the few initiatives where not being satisfied with 99% accessibility is absolutely warranted. If your goal is to dethrone it, you have to bite that bullet.
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  It also renders like garbage on mobile, which makes it useless for about 50% of the world. Not a great start.
SPBS 3y ago
It doesn't even run on mobile because the sidebar takes up all the space and the main content is squeezed to the side. Even more disappointing to learn that what is essentially a static webpage doesn't render without JavaScript. This is not going anywhere with that kind of attitude (not testing on mobile, relying 100% on JavaScript).

npteljes 3y ago

"There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now twice as old?" Ridiculous article. Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. I feel like these people have no idea what kind of effort is to run an organization, instead seeing the issues as part of the technical, or ideological underpinnings. It doesn't work that way, and I invite every hopeful to look up the list of alternative Wikis that have sprung up over the years.

agumonkey 3y ago
I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.
- npteljes 3y ago
  Dunning–Kruger effect might have something to do with it. People spotting issue in an established project, having an idea about how to improve it, but no actual experience in running such projects or even knowing the history and context of the established project. And the lack of this knowledge helping to overestimate their ability and perceived chance of success.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    True, but I think there's a social/group aspect to it too. A lot of projects start like this, people all thinking it's time to start fresh only to devolve into nothingness in a few weeks.
  - observationist 3y ago
    If someone has staked a claim over an article, regardless of its factual accuracy, it's almost impossible to fix problems. Look at any politicians, celebrities, topics that are contentious in the public sphere, and you'll find control over the topic has been taken. There is no sane recourse - you can find endless examples of years long discussions as people who know what they're talking about battle it out with empty headed wiki editors who simply want the clout, or don't know the first thing about rational discourse and insist on their weird, distorted views of reality. Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page. Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political.

extraduder_ire 3y ago

How long will it take before all of the content on wikipedia is kanged onto this site? I mean, the license explicitly allows that kind of thing.

slily 3y ago
If I were attempting to create a less "captured" Wikipedia alternative that's what I would do - start from there and try to keep it synchronized while hacking at it slowly, instead of taking a from-scratch approach.
- jl6 3y ago
  There have been many Wikipedia forks, but all have failed, because 99% of the work is in doing uncontroversial stuff that most people are fine with, and 1% is in controversial "captured" areas. If you fork the whole thing in the hope that you can fix the 1%, you will have to find a way to do the 99% bit.
dizhn 3y ago
They should have done it already because that demo site looks sad.
- account42 3y ago
  Right, you'd expect that there would be a complete initial import as well as semi-automatic updates of non-controversial changes.
kemayo 3y ago
The license does allow for it, but it's actually sort of tricky to do if you want to import it into a non-mediawiki system. Wikipedia makes really extensive use of templates in wikitext, which can be complicated nested things that can call out to Lua modules. You can easily take Wikipedia's HTML output and use it, but reusing the source of those articles requires a lot of work on either compatibility or translation.

account42 3y ago

> Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. As if the constant begging for donations they don't need and the shithole that is Fandom wans't enough to lower my opinion of ol Jimmy.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tiptup300 3y ago

I've been wanting to do this exact thing for a couple months, not for any of what their talking about. I ran a wiki for local music artists. I started it on an ancient version of mediawiki for use with an ancient extension that wasn't even used, so overall bad idea. It no longer works on a modern version of php so I'm having a lot of trouble getting it back up. But on that same note, a federation of local wikis, like for small towns/cities, artists that sort of thing, I think would be very cool.

pgeorgi 3y ago
The idea of federating wikis is pretty old: https://www.dokuwiki.org/interwiki https://www.dokuwiki.org/interwiki

sharkjacobs 3y 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 article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.

edgyquant 3y ago
I mean, it is a given…
deleted 3y ago
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theamk 3y ago
There is a non-zero amount of people who are unhappy with wikipedia's policy. The "rot in wikipedia" link gives some examples: "fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics" I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.
- arp242 3y ago
  That article is upset alternative "medicine" quackery isn't taken serious. In particular it seems upset that it calls Gary "you can cure AIDS with a diet" Null's fraudulent bullshit exact that. It calls Stephen Barrett from quackwatch "a discredited former psychiatrist", which is a blatant brazen lie. That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism. I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    That article (http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wikipedia-rotten-to-the-core http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wi...) is a perfect example of radicalizing material. It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!" And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?" Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail. Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG! (trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) ) Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators! And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that. How can you tolerate this injustice!?! ___________________________________________________________________________ And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible. But then you look at the rest of the website: http://helenofdestroy.com http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?) And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity. And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl. You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn. Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.

alsetmusic 3y ago

On iPhone, page renders with main content in a cell shoved hard-right with only two to five characters visible per line. I wasn’t even able to evaluate the content. Came here to mention this and it sounds like I’m not missing much.

shuntress 3y ago

Wikipedia is genuinely a wonder of the world. Trying to extend, mirror, or bolster it is potentially beneficial. Trying to replace it is foolish.

nicechianti 3y ago

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user- 3y ago

Wikipedia has a very slick website on mobile, desktop and mobile apps. This page doesn't even render on my phone properly. Probably should fix that before it can approach being an alternative

5900 3y ago
It's unusable on mobile. Adding a basic responsive layout is essential and trivial compared to the problems Ibis is trying to solve.

jrm4 3y ago

This feels like a really good idea, really poorly explained, especially with the whole "going up against Wikipedia" thing (Wikipedia being arguably the best mostly-decentralized thing ever?) "Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth?

kaibee 3y ago
> "Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth? I read a comment here on HN recently, wish I could find it now (I think it was in one of the threads on the 'missing datatype (graphs)'). The gist was that we do large things pretty well: Operating Systems, standard libraries, etc and small things pretty well: single header file libs, specific open source projects, etc, but medium size things are missing. This seems to be the same kind of thing: you have enough complexity that coordination is hard(tm) but you don't have enough scale to build up an institutional inertia to overcome the bus-factor-of-one-ness that--- uhhh What I'm trying to say is that the support system around that project, like if you have a medium sized project, its going to have individual experts for the parts that make it up, but they're all single points of failure. If I had more time I would have written a shorter more coherent comment.
- araes 3y ago
  It's known as the Valley of Death syndrome. [♪][♫][ꜘ] Especially common in the DoD where they're good at funding enormous numbers of SBIRs/STTRs, yet they never go anywhere, because all large money contracts are guaranteed to be vacuumed up by Lockheed / Raytheon / Northrup Grumman / Boeing / General Dynamics / Teledyne Brown / Honeywell / ect... And in most cases (in my opinion, not legally binding), they purposely, slowly build cripple-ware with planned obsolescence that results in equipment that's vestigial before it launches and immediately needs 'upgrade' contracts. [♪] DoD funding, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2023/07/defense-innovation-board-suggests-ways-to-bridge-the-valley-of-death/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2023/07/defense-i... [♫] VC investment, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-valley-curve.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-valley-curve.asp [ꜘ] US Biomanufacturing, https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/mind-gap-bridging-valley-death-us-biomanufacturing https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/mind-gap-bridging-...

abeppu 3y ago

So, I agree that I don't think a software project solves the problems the post starts out with. However, I wonder if the project can be used to solve other issues? For example, I think there's a spectrum of knowledge-base like solutions, but the middle of the spectrum is often poorly served: - wikipedia: global, canonical reference material. Is very good, and we almost all use it in some fashion. - confluence/notion/gh-wiki: team knowledge base. Often spotty, stale, neglected. - logseq/obsidian/org-mode: personal knowledge base, notes. Typically very idiosyncratic, sketchy, but can work very well for the people who put effort into it. What if a "federated wiki" was targeted at the team/personal level? I'm not saying this is Ibis in its present form, but imagine: - You keep your personal notes and knowledge store, in a way which is always implicitly contextualized against corresponding info (or lack of info) in the team knowledge store. - When you're noting something new, or modifying something, you always have an easy path to push your personal addition/edit to the shared store. - Ideally notes from everyone's work around or interaction with some X drives low-effort maintenance of the community reference of X.

ambigious7777 3y ago
git? not sure exactly what you're trying to say here, but you could do some stuff with git have a local repo of your own notes, a hosted repo serving as the communal ref. if you want to make updates, commit and push --, you can cherry pick the sections you want. i recall seeing something like mediawiki (but it stored articles as plaintext) a while back, you could use that for a web-based portal too

pradn 3y ago

Wikipedia is an amalgam of a large number of humans editing w/ some guardrails provided by the guidelines and tech (clean-up bots, edit alerts). If there's a human problem (corruption, bias), there's no tech solution that'll magically make all of it go away. The reason to make a new wiki or wiki-style technology is to serve a different informational niche, guided by different rules. There's a reason each video game has its own Wiki. You could fork Wikipedia to be more inclusionist, or have people from one particular political viewpoint - if that's your goal. But re-creating Wikipedia to do exactly what it's supposed to do - form a body of encyclopedic knowledge (subject to copyright laws, etc) - this doesn't make sense, and isn't a convincing argument for a new Wikipedia, even if its distributed.

mlinksva 3y ago

To be added to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...? Edit: added at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals#2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...

bdw5204 3y ago

There's probably an order of magnitude of people who don't edit Wikipedia because they're unhappy with Wikipedia's policies or its culture. I think the right Wikipedia alternative is probably viable and could maybe even be bigger and more successful than Wikipedia but alternatives generally fail because they can't get the critical mass of active editors necessary to keep the site updated especially on quickly changing topics where Wikipedia's approach is good enough for most people who'd be interested in editing on those topics. Forks (Infogalatic, Everipedia) typically become filled with outdated Wikipedia articles plus a few new articles about the creator's personal hobby horses. Just like features in open source software, articles in an open source online have to be maintained. The most successful alternative to Wikipedia is probably Conservapedia which is largely edited, I believe, by American right wing political activists and evangelical Christian homeschooled teens. Their articles reflect the changes in American right wing politics over the past 20 years or so meaning some are out of date with the current party line because they haven't been touched in years. That's one model of competing with Wikipedia but an encyclopedia consisting of outright partisan political propaganda and outright religious propaganda isn't useful to most people even most people who agree with its viewpoint[0]. Counterintuitively, I think Conservapedia has probably been successful because it rewrote everything from scratch. That also ensures you won't get dinged by Google under the duplicate content policy and basically delisted from search. I don't think federation is the right way to make a Wikipedia alternative viable because it is already an open source project run on open source software that anybody can fork. It's solving the wrong problem. The right problem to solve is getting a critical mass of editors who aren't just editing to push an agenda. That probably requires paid professional editors whose job is to maintain the encyclopedia. You can probably hire sufficiently smart people for $15 or so an hour because there are probably many smart people already working for that rate at McJobs[1]. That also makes your alternative appealing to current Wikipedia editors who are generally paid $0 to edit Wikipedia. If you're looking to hire expert editors, you'd probably have to pay more but you probably don't need experts. The downside of this is you have to have money to pay editors and probably to advertise that you're paying editors to create a competitor to Wikipedia. That also ensures you have enough editors to maintain the articles. I think Wikipedia alternative with paid editors would probably work as a relatively low risk but also low reward startup idea assuming there was sufficient funding behind it. [0]: Wikipedia does have its own biases and "neutral point of view" is now basically equated with "objectivity" but it is far less in your face about its biases than Conservapedia which reads more like the timeline of a Twitter account that follows all of the big right wing influencers to Wikipedia's Google News. [1]: Specifically, high school and college students. Also, many smart people who didn't go to college for whatever reason. They'd probably prefer writing over flipping burgers or running a checkout line.

bluey_bingo 3y ago

Does anyone remember Citizendium? They were going to give Wikipedia a run for its money.

31337Logic 3y ago

We don't need a Wikipedia alternative.

trenchgun 3y ago

Why?

sadpolishdev 3y ago

So, this one will be left or right wing politically controlled?