8 ms·

Ibis: Federated Wikipedia alternative

209 points by mostcallmeyt 2y ago

schoen 2y ago
It's super-cool to see an alternative approach to dealing with Wikipedia content disputes. In the past, when there have been Wikipedia forks, they haven't generally tried to stay in sync with Wikipedia, at least not in both directions. Do we have an example of long-term forks of collaborative software or text editing projects that did manage to keep sharing productively in multiple directions? Maybe the BSDs to some extent? I wonder how much work people are willing to do to keep actively collaborating with people whom they have big ongoing disagreements with (at least in areas where those disagreements don't have an impact). Or can such collaboration be made relatively seamless with appropriate tooling?
woodruffw 2y ago
I don't have any particular trust (or distrust) in Wikipedia as an institution, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse: is there a reason to believe that a federated wiki would be more accountable, rather than less? (This isn't meant to be a jab; I like federated stuff. But I'm also not sure the order of operations is right here.)
- whatshisface 2y ago
  The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I only care if my mayor is accountable to me. Making mayors into presidential appointees would represent a slight increase in my influence in the city code of places I don't know the name of, but that's not a great trade for my influence in the city I live in.
  - SiempreViernes 2y ago
    Yeah, but the question here is how your mayor being accountable to you helps with the problem that everyone's president is not being held accountable? Exactly how does it help that there's a bunch of small Wikipedia mirrors with like four different pages each that differ from the main one.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      Imagine if there was only one soft drink brand, or a single giant book.
      - SiempreViernes 2y ago
        Why stop there? Imagine there's only one brain, and everyone had to share it! More seriously, are you talking about the company coal towns in the Appalachian mountains?
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people. Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
    - Gormo 2y ago
      The point of federation is that governance is distributed because each instance is autonomous. It's not about joining someone else's instance and having them still not be accountable to you -- it's about having a pluralistic pool of instances to choose from, so that you can find one that does fit your preferences, and having the ability to run your own instance if you don't find an existing one that does. The right of exit is often far more important than the right of voice, and federation offers a practical way to exercise the right of exit without surrendering access to the broader ecosystem. Democracy is not distributed governance. It's centralized governance that just allows for some form of (often performative and ineffective) input from those subject to its rules. If everyone involved has the capacity to choose or create their own "little fiefdom", that is a far better outcome than centralized democracy which offers little or no practical right of exit.
      - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
        I think you over estimate federation, I started and ran a federated wiki and it's attached company in ~2008-2014 for a particular niche because I am very pro-federation but it's not a panacea and can lead to generally worse alignment with reality. This is like a monolith vs micro services debate all over again and it shares a lot of the same issues and tradeoffs since we're talking about network efficiency, validation, throughput and error handling in systems generally. Federation fosters fragmentation and discovery issues that means unless you have a "reality reification" process a centralized but transparent and public system sees very little benefit from federation. Having a trusted (due to transparency, not perfection in data) and transparent centralized source that trends towards "true" is almost always more efficient than federation, but people seem to hate the idea of rules of governance, this makes sense, as anyone who for whatever reason disagrees with the content on wikipedia will push for fragmentation to push their position closer to the mainstream (which may very well be "more true" for a specific topic) even if the fragmentation damages accurate mapping to a shared reality in general. That's why good governance processes must include "dissent from dissenters in their own words". We must have a "good enough" in content and accuracy system that is the globally agreed on place for us to "fight" over propositions, this allows us to all be on the same page even if we disagree and to share a map of the disagreement space. Independence is not the same as governance, they are orthogonal and people who conflate this clearly haven't thought this through. Just look at denominations and churches for historical repercussions of the different approaches towards governance, excepting a very narrow subset of polity beliefs if you go to attend a "baptist church" or "bible church" you have NO CLUE what they believe or even if they are in fact a koolaid drinking death cult. I think this is good but it is very inefficient, so even in these types of denominations groups will join "conventions" to signal their belief... even then it's buyer beware. There are a lot of young earth creationists, flat earthers and corporate and political shills of various stripes who sounds plausible to those ignorant of the subject who HATE wikipedia. This hate is a sign of a generally healthy ecosystem. I think a lot of people and state actors are incentivized to denigrate anything "imperfect but auditable" as being bad, the simple fact is that humanity needs "Trusted" sources, not in the sense that they are perfect or accurate but in the sense that this platforms goal is "we're trying to align with reality as hard as possible" and we have a globally recognized and shared space to do so, which means dissenting voices will be observable in Talk pages and we ultimately have a jumping off point that has a "shared nomenclature/history" people can fight over. People assume small players are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Some people assume contrarians are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Big is not inherently more evil than small. Transparency is the core to error correction either way. Most federated systems as implemented today seem to reject transparency outright which is totally screwed up and worse than a "open" centralized system.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I don't know about accountability on the part of the participants, but in theory it ought to be harder to attack because success means coordinating a consistent (maliciously-altered) experience across infra maintained by a wider variety of people, some of whom might be harder to coerce than others. In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately. So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    Serious question: why are we talking about Wikipedia like it has the same shape of trust problem as the Web PKI? With Wikipedia, you or I or anybody else can go and edit out the obvious misinformation. That leaves subtle misinformation, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that. It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I could be off base here, but I see federation as a way of ensuring that those with privileged access can't leverage control over the whole platform. If they try, others will block the parts which have been corrupted, and the rest will carry on. If you're willing to win the hearts and minds of an army of pedantic nerds, it matters little whether you're on a federated platform or not: you're playing by the rules. So my thinking was: Of the types of privileged access that might be used to sidestep the nerds, which of these does Ibis prevent? So far as I can tell, it's misbehaving server admins (of the type that Musk might be capable of pushing around) but not misbehaving ISP or CA employees (of the type that a government might be capable of pushing around). If it's not actually a matter of who-are-the-bullies-and-what-are-their-capabilities? Then I'm sorry to have been distracting. It's just that I'd really like to use some sort of peer to peer assertion consensus/criticism engine which was more durable than the web. I was reacting to this not being that.
mzajc 2y ago
This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them. Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant. Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  >But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant. The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.
  - mzajc 2y ago
    I think this works much better for social media than it would for an encyclopedia - while a Mastodon user I'm interested in is likely on a single instance, a topic an encyclopedia would cover might be present on many instances, each hosting a different version. I don't think it's feasible to expect users to read every single one.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    The problem there was also that it attracted some pretty seriously incompatible ideologies. Like neonazis on gab.com and tankies on lemmy.ml for example. That was never going to end well. How are they supposed to come to an agreement on moderation :) And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned. Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out. Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3
iterance 2y ago
Federation of a wiki is... well, it's a bit strange, isn't it? Imagine if only one library at a time held a copy of a given book you need, and the only way to access that book was via an inter-library loan via library partnerships, or by visiting the library that has the book. This is assuredly the situation many academics are in for key reference texts, but it is not what I'd call ideal. It is in fact very fragile at times. There is a book I need right now, for example, but if I want to read it I will have to drive to see it... The library that has it won't send it for ILL. In a physical sense they "declined to federate." The difference between a wiki and a social media network is that anyone can spin up a template social media site; the fundamental user-side barrier to entry is pretty small. The same is not true of wikis - at least not high quality ones. Documentary standards, tone, quality, reviewership, consistency, policy, moderation, accountability, leadership, thoroughness, these are all qualities that take time and commitment to develop. They are hallmarks of centralization for a reason: arguably the innovation of human governance is centered around qualities like these. They take a long time to develop. As a counterpart to Wikipedia, well... fragmentation is often a death knell for efficient knowledge transfer. We are already losing massive swathes of our early Internet history due to fragmentation, attrition, and destruction. The thought that any piece of knowledge stored in a safehouse could go offline at once, without replication or warning, it scares me a bit. The thought that we don't really know who we're trusting as stewards of human knowledge in a federated model disturbs me too. You can have your issues with Wikipedia but at least you know who they are. You know their biases. That's not to say there aren't use cases for this... but man, this seems like an easy way to lose or destroy important parts of our shared history on accident.
exitb 2y ago
I get the concerns towards Wikipedia governance, but this feels almost like slacktivism. It’s been done numerous times, to slap ActivityPub onto a communication mode and call it a „federated foobar alternative”. It never works, it always fails to gain meaningful adoption. The federated hosts end up in disputes between themselves and their users. It’s mostly a miserable experience. There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
- bbor 2y ago
  Hmm when has it happened in the past? This is literally the Lemmy creator so it seems somewhat unique! But I could definitely just be behind the times. Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
  - Vivtek 2y ago
    There are one or two. https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub
    - rapnie 2y ago
      Also https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/ https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/
- input_sh 2y ago
  If by "never works" you mean "someone's side project whose monetization strategy is to put up a donation link never takes down an established business worth hundreds of millions in a fraction of the time it took for such business to establish itself as some sort of a monopoly", then yeah, no shit.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  Federation is the open source answer to microservices. Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.
foxhop 2y ago
If the maintainers are reading this is cool. I would start with an exporter/importer for pages from Wikipedia format into whatever format you use, it should also deal with the media. This is no small task but what you need.
- kemayo 2y ago
  It's legitimately a pain to do, because most Wikipedia articles use a bunch of templates. So for anything outside the most-simple of articles you suddenly have to implement a lot of the more painful bits of wikitext. Then if you want to import them back to Wikipedia, you've got to match those things back up or you'll get reverted for messing up the page... Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.
jll29 2y ago
It's legitimate to create alternatives to anything, and to re-think what has been done already. One thing that would be on my personal wish list for any Wikipedia alternative is ease of machine processing: the MediaWiki format/mark-up and the templates are horribly inconsistent and a nightmare to parse. This should be done better by any serious successor. Wikipedia has got the excuse "historically grown", any successor doesn't.
- richardw 2y ago
  That seems to be the same goal for https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page Do you mean something different, e.g. not just structured data?
  - kemayo 2y ago
    For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification
    - aspenmayer 2y ago
      There’s also this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
      - kemayo 2y ago
        For context, the parser I'm talking about in my first post is Parsoid on that list.
- kemayo 2y ago
  The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.
richardw 2y ago
If the top "scandals" in the article are considered reasons to change, just wait until the alt-crew get a hold of wikipedia. Medical, political, science, education, religion discussions would all be even more crazy when people can point to some wiki gospel as proof. We'd find the list of scandals grows a thousandfold. Wikipedia is amazing, if imperfect. Make it better, don't try to break it by splintering it into some weird "whatever you think is right" solution. That's already what we have in social media. Truth is already federated enough. Edit: what would convince me more is some demonstration article/cluster of articles and maybe some math proof that shows how this is better, through faster convergence on truth, defence against rando's etc. I think even getting a definition of "better" would be a bit of a battle!
highwayman47 2y ago
What does this term “federated” being thrown around in tech lately mean?
- rrgok 2y ago
  Good question. I too don't understand it.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Meaning it's like email. I can have my own domain name - @example.com , not just Gmail, and they talk to each other so people on Gmail can send email outside of Gmail, and people can send emails into Gmail.
- poszlem 2y ago
  It means that each federated technology creates a federation of "self-governing" entities, for example Mastodon servers. The meaning is very similar to the political meaning of the word.
somat 2y ago
I don't intend to be mean but isn't the federated wikipedia, the web. Wikipedias whole value function, don't get me wrong it's a great value function, is that it is a curated centralized web.
anthk 2y ago
The only wiki I like it's the rational wiki.
sureglymop 2y ago
ActivityPub federation, while maybe a little complicated, seems to be well thought through. I think many platforms would benefit from implementing that. Especially git forges, though I think someone is already working on that.
Levitating 2y ago
How ironic that the link to the mentioned article by Helen Buyniski "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" is the victim of link rot. You can find the article reposted here: https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/49-wikipedia-rotten-to-the-core?utm_source=publication-search https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/49-wikipedia-rotten-to...
- timmytokyo 2y ago
  Fascinating that the first person cited on this site's announcement page is Helen Buyniski, a "journalist" for Russian state media and a COVID conspiracy theorist. It's almost as if this project has an agenda.
pona-a 2y ago
See previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045 163 points | 252 comments
kemayo 2y ago
It'd be more convincing if the "problems with Wikipedia" section referenced anything from the last decade. (Also, one of the three things that apparently warranted being called out as an example was pretty petty -- the ArbCom member's on-wiki job didn't have anything to do with how they misrepresented their credentials.)
nightpool 2y ago
I have the same problem with this that I do with "federated forums" or "federated forges"—what does it even mean for an encyclopedia to be federated? In fact, they already are—if I want to go look up information about Minecraft, I can use the federated internet to go to minecraft.wiki. So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
This alternative doesn't load with NoScript on, so I think I'll pass.
- meitham 2y ago
  The article says the Frontend is web assembly written by rust
fny 2y ago
Social problems demand social solutions. If you're skeptical about Wikipedia, you can easily create your own fork of Wikipedia: the data and code is open source after all. In the end, it’s all about whether you can keep a community alive and kicking. No one gives a damn about whether a wiki is built on ActivityPub. There are many examples: Larry Sanger, who was mentioned in the article, created Citizendium after breaking from Wikipedia.[0] He was then involved with Everipedia, a for-profit venture built the original code base which later morphed into crypto nonsense.[1] There are many examples of other wikis too. Some are focused[2][3], some are fun[4][5], some are revisionist[6][7][8], and some meet the requirements of totalitarian regimes[9][10]. If Wikipedia’s not your style, grab the code, rally a crowd, and make the encyclopedia you want to see—just know it’s the people, not the platform, that make it thrive. [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page [1]: https://rosettacode.org/ https://rosettacode.org/ [2]: https://citizendium.org/ https://citizendium.org/ [3]: https://iq.wiki/ https://iq.wiki/ [4]: https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page [5]: https://edramatica.com/Main_Page https://edramatica.com/Main_Page [6]: https://www.metapedia.org/ https://www.metapedia.org/ [7]: https://www.conservapedia.com/ https://www.conservapedia.com/ [8]: https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page [9]: https://www.qiuwenbaike.cn https://www.qiuwenbaike.cn [10]: https://ruwiki.ru https://ruwiki.ru
- f33d5173 2y ago
  A social problem is by definition one with a social solution. If we can find a technical solution to a problem, it turns into a technical problem. Wikipedia is itself a technology. It's not outrageous to suggest that new technologies can improve on it.
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    Just because something is based on technology does not mean that any problem is has is solvable with different technology. This is a lesson that it seems we need to learn over and over. The hard part of a system designed to squish together the brains of millions of humans and somehow wring truth out of the chaos is a fundamentally messy human system whose issues aren't solved by putting all those messy humans on a new platform.
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blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
How does this overcome power struggles and bias? That’s the most important question for me, as bias in Wikipedia is rampant these days, and even acknowledged by its founder.
ErrantX 2y ago
As with all Wikipedia competitors, this misses two key points Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. Scandals aside over decades hundreds of thousands of people have built out the content and continue to do so - that is not easy to emulate. Also for all the scandals, the toughest problems in WP early days were spammers and trolls. Moderation is a niche community problem (which till you have a community is moot). Stopping bot armies and countless trolls is a day 1 issue.
- ComplexSystems 2y ago
  > Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. This is much less of an issue now that there are LLMs, even with the occasional hallucination.
  - lionkor 2y ago
    LLMs do not write information dense content
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      I have no experience with LLMs. Can you ask them to write in a dense style? Does it work?
      - lionkor 2y ago
        By design they just approximate human language, they don't really have a concept of information or how information-dense something is. they're good for writing emails.
  - ErrantX 2y ago
    Actually writing the content is usually the easiest part. 98% of writing these articles is research. Current LLMs are nowhere near good enough.
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openrisk 2y ago
Some sort of federation has already been discussed in the Wikimedia universe [1]. It aims to operate at a lower level, federating structured data between different specialized wikibases [2]. AFAIK it has not (yet?) seen much development and/or traction. ActivityPub style federation opens up some interesting technical possibilities for exchanging data but if the main motivation is to "fix" the consensus/moderation processes of Wikipedia one should start with outlining how that would work. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation [2] https://wikiba.se/ https://wikiba.se/
groceryheist 2y ago
This is the latest in a long line of attempts to make a non-centralized Wikipedia. A Wikipedia (not me) maintains a record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHaeB%2FTimeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHaeB%2FTimeline_of_dist...
zozbot234 2y ago
> 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. Doesn't MediaWiki (and other common wikis) support this kind of thing already via the InterWiki-links system? You can set up a MediaWiki install such that [[geology:Mountain]] and [[poetry:Mountain]] go to the appropriate places. What does Ibis add that's not accounted for by this? Besides, these days you also have https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8502 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8502 - which includes links to the concept of "mountain" as represented in hundreds of sites. (You can use a browser-extension known as Entity-Explosion to make your browser aware of these links, giving you the ability to browse from any of the listed sites to any other with just a few clicks.)
qwerty456127 2y ago
Sounds great. I want an openly opinionated wikipedia where a supposed fact is acknowledged as known to possibly exist even when the source is not known (but this should be indicated), where it is Ok to mention an opinion (also labelled) and where nobody deletes "unimportant" pages/facts others write.
nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
The problem with wikipedia is capture. How does this solve issues like with the recent scandal involving the article on grooming gangs in the UK? Wikipedia and anything that replaced it will simply be a target for aggressive activists.
SuperHeavy256 2y ago
[flagged]
- mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
  Actually, a lot of people use Lemmy, and there's pretty decent content on it in the communities. I post Linux stuff mostly and my threads get a lot of comments. Or I'll ask questions like "What are everybody's cool not so well known websites" and get a ton of feedback. Accounts are accessible via Mastodon as well, it isn't ideal, but, it's some kind of start. So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  That seems like a very cynical take. Is it a stated goal or expectation of the author that more than what you deem "nobody" will use this over a centralized wiki? Is that what you're criticizing, or is it just handwaving the project away the same way one could say Linux distributions (see: year of the linux desktop) and other things "nobody uses" don't matter and are disjointed from reality?
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
I believe this effort is well-intentioned. But, if it is successful, I suspect it will drag us farther towards a "post-truth" society, where every niche political view literally has its own encyclopedia by which it understands the world. My take: Wikipedia's problem is that it was not set up to moderate factual disputes or identify truth. See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... What we need is something more like: a hybrid of Wikipedia as it exists now, and Community Notes. Try to build in some mechanisms to keep the forces of partisanship at bay.
rapnie 2y ago
Federated Wiki by Ward Cunningham deserves a mention here: http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federated-wiki http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federat...
lemiffe 2y ago
Ibis is a hotel chain, not the best name to pick in my opinion
linmob 2y ago
To me, looking at Ibis as a piece of software, it seems way more attractive as an alternative to wikia/fandom, niche wikis about a topic. It seems to be selfhostable without massive resources and more modern, than, e.g., MediaWiki. (Also, say about Lemmy what you want, but using it feels lean and quick.) It's especially attractive if the topic you are targetting also has some fediverse presence.
shortformblog 2y ago
Citing a litany of stuff that happened as far back as 15 years ago and raised alarm bells way back when is a sign that the governance model of Wikimedia works, not that it’s broken. Governance is not about bad things happening; it’s about having set practices in place to manage the organization, including having ground rules when things go wrong. That this project tries selling these warmed-over scandals as basic reasons for its existence shows that it’s not serious. Every online collective eventually fosters corruption. The difference between this group and Wikimedia is that you know what you’re dealing with when it comes to Wikimedia. EDIT: Since the link is broken on the site, I will make the case that the cited “investigative journalist,” Helen Buyniski, is less than convincing, using her role to criticize Wikipedia’s stance on alternative medicine, just as an example: https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014407/http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wikipedia-rotten-to-the-core https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014407/http://helenofdes... Citing an apparent conspiracy theorist does not a convincing case make.
paulnpace 2y ago
I hope it attracts more developers and I look forward to seeing it evolve!
Log_out_ 2y ago
The hotel chain has a wiki?

209 points by mostcallmeyt 2y ago

It's super-cool to see an alternative approach to dealing with Wikipedia content disputes. In the past, when there have been Wikipedia forks, they haven't generally tried to stay in sync with Wikipedia, at least not in both directions. Do we have an example of long-term forks of collaborative software or text editing projects that did manage to keep sharing productively in multiple directions? Maybe the BSDs to some extent? I wonder how much work people are willing to do to keep actively collaborating with people whom they have big ongoing disagreements with (at least in areas where those disagreements don't have an impact). Or can such collaboration be made relatively seamless with appropriate tooling?

woodruffw 2y ago

I don't have any particular trust (or distrust) in Wikipedia as an institution, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse: is there a reason to believe that a federated wiki would be more accountable, rather than less? (This isn't meant to be a jab; I like federated stuff. But I'm also not sure the order of operations is right here.)

whatshisface 2y ago
The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I only care if my mayor is accountable to me. Making mayors into presidential appointees would represent a slight increase in my influence in the city code of places I don't know the name of, but that's not a great trade for my influence in the city I live in.
- SiempreViernes 2y ago
  Yeah, but the question here is how your mayor being accountable to you helps with the problem that everyone's president is not being held accountable? Exactly how does it help that there's a bunch of small Wikipedia mirrors with like four different pages each that differ from the main one.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    Imagine if there was only one soft drink brand, or a single giant book.
    - SiempreViernes 2y ago
      Why stop there? Imagine there's only one brain, and everyone had to share it! More seriously, are you talking about the company coal towns in the Appalachian mountains?
- pessimizer 2y ago
  When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people. Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    The point of federation is that governance is distributed because each instance is autonomous. It's not about joining someone else's instance and having them still not be accountable to you -- it's about having a pluralistic pool of instances to choose from, so that you can find one that does fit your preferences, and having the ability to run your own instance if you don't find an existing one that does. The right of exit is often far more important than the right of voice, and federation offers a practical way to exercise the right of exit without surrendering access to the broader ecosystem. Democracy is not distributed governance. It's centralized governance that just allows for some form of (often performative and ineffective) input from those subject to its rules. If everyone involved has the capacity to choose or create their own "little fiefdom", that is a far better outcome than centralized democracy which offers little or no practical right of exit.
    - fellowniusmonk 2y ago
      I think you over estimate federation, I started and ran a federated wiki and it's attached company in ~2008-2014 for a particular niche because I am very pro-federation but it's not a panacea and can lead to generally worse alignment with reality. This is like a monolith vs micro services debate all over again and it shares a lot of the same issues and tradeoffs since we're talking about network efficiency, validation, throughput and error handling in systems generally. Federation fosters fragmentation and discovery issues that means unless you have a "reality reification" process a centralized but transparent and public system sees very little benefit from federation. Having a trusted (due to transparency, not perfection in data) and transparent centralized source that trends towards "true" is almost always more efficient than federation, but people seem to hate the idea of rules of governance, this makes sense, as anyone who for whatever reason disagrees with the content on wikipedia will push for fragmentation to push their position closer to the mainstream (which may very well be "more true" for a specific topic) even if the fragmentation damages accurate mapping to a shared reality in general. That's why good governance processes must include "dissent from dissenters in their own words". We must have a "good enough" in content and accuracy system that is the globally agreed on place for us to "fight" over propositions, this allows us to all be on the same page even if we disagree and to share a map of the disagreement space. Independence is not the same as governance, they are orthogonal and people who conflate this clearly haven't thought this through. Just look at denominations and churches for historical repercussions of the different approaches towards governance, excepting a very narrow subset of polity beliefs if you go to attend a "baptist church" or "bible church" you have NO CLUE what they believe or even if they are in fact a koolaid drinking death cult. I think this is good but it is very inefficient, so even in these types of denominations groups will join "conventions" to signal their belief... even then it's buyer beware. There are a lot of young earth creationists, flat earthers and corporate and political shills of various stripes who sounds plausible to those ignorant of the subject who HATE wikipedia. This hate is a sign of a generally healthy ecosystem. I think a lot of people and state actors are incentivized to denigrate anything "imperfect but auditable" as being bad, the simple fact is that humanity needs "Trusted" sources, not in the sense that they are perfect or accurate but in the sense that this platforms goal is "we're trying to align with reality as hard as possible" and we have a globally recognized and shared space to do so, which means dissenting voices will be observable in Talk pages and we ultimately have a jumping off point that has a "shared nomenclature/history" people can fight over. People assume small players are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Some people assume contrarians are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Big is not inherently more evil than small. Transparency is the core to error correction either way. Most federated systems as implemented today seem to reject transparency outright which is totally screwed up and worse than a "open" centralized system.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I don't know about accountability on the part of the participants, but in theory it ought to be harder to attack because success means coordinating a consistent (maliciously-altered) experience across infra maintained by a wider variety of people, some of whom might be harder to coerce than others. In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately. So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  Serious question: why are we talking about Wikipedia like it has the same shape of trust problem as the Web PKI? With Wikipedia, you or I or anybody else can go and edit out the obvious misinformation. That leaves subtle misinformation, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that. It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I could be off base here, but I see federation as a way of ensuring that those with privileged access can't leverage control over the whole platform. If they try, others will block the parts which have been corrupted, and the rest will carry on. If you're willing to win the hearts and minds of an army of pedantic nerds, it matters little whether you're on a federated platform or not: you're playing by the rules. So my thinking was: Of the types of privileged access that might be used to sidestep the nerds, which of these does Ibis prevent? So far as I can tell, it's misbehaving server admins (of the type that Musk might be capable of pushing around) but not misbehaving ISP or CA employees (of the type that a government might be capable of pushing around). If it's not actually a matter of who-are-the-bullies-and-what-are-their-capabilities? Then I'm sorry to have been distracting. It's just that I'd really like to use some sort of peer to peer assertion consensus/criticism engine which was more durable than the web. I was reacting to this not being that.

mzajc 2y ago

This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them. Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant. Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.

whatshisface 2y ago
>But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant. The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.
- mzajc 2y ago
  I think this works much better for social media than it would for an encyclopedia - while a Mastodon user I'm interested in is likely on a single instance, a topic an encyclopedia would cover might be present on many instances, each hosting a different version. I don't think it's feasible to expect users to read every single one.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."
- wkat4242 2y ago
  The problem there was also that it attracted some pretty seriously incompatible ideologies. Like neonazis on gab.com and tankies on lemmy.ml for example. That was never going to end well. How are they supposed to come to an agreement on moderation :) And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned. Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out. Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3

iterance 2y ago

Federation of a wiki is... well, it's a bit strange, isn't it? Imagine if only one library at a time held a copy of a given book you need, and the only way to access that book was via an inter-library loan via library partnerships, or by visiting the library that has the book. This is assuredly the situation many academics are in for key reference texts, but it is not what I'd call ideal. It is in fact very fragile at times. There is a book I need right now, for example, but if I want to read it I will have to drive to see it... The library that has it won't send it for ILL. In a physical sense they "declined to federate." The difference between a wiki and a social media network is that anyone can spin up a template social media site; the fundamental user-side barrier to entry is pretty small. The same is not true of wikis - at least not high quality ones. Documentary standards, tone, quality, reviewership, consistency, policy, moderation, accountability, leadership, thoroughness, these are all qualities that take time and commitment to develop. They are hallmarks of centralization for a reason: arguably the innovation of human governance is centered around qualities like these. They take a long time to develop. As a counterpart to Wikipedia, well... fragmentation is often a death knell for efficient knowledge transfer. We are already losing massive swathes of our early Internet history due to fragmentation, attrition, and destruction. The thought that any piece of knowledge stored in a safehouse could go offline at once, without replication or warning, it scares me a bit. The thought that we don't really know who we're trusting as stewards of human knowledge in a federated model disturbs me too. You can have your issues with Wikipedia but at least you know who they are. You know their biases. That's not to say there aren't use cases for this... but man, this seems like an easy way to lose or destroy important parts of our shared history on accident.

exitb 2y ago

I get the concerns towards Wikipedia governance, but this feels almost like slacktivism. It’s been done numerous times, to slap ActivityPub onto a communication mode and call it a „federated foobar alternative”. It never works, it always fails to gain meaningful adoption. The federated hosts end up in disputes between themselves and their users. It’s mostly a miserable experience. There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.

bbor 2y ago
Hmm when has it happened in the past? This is literally the Lemmy creator so it seems somewhat unique! But I could definitely just be behind the times. Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
- Vivtek 2y ago
  There are one or two. https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub
  - rapnie 2y ago
    Also https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/ https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/
input_sh 2y ago
If by "never works" you mean "someone's side project whose monetization strategy is to put up a donation link never takes down an established business worth hundreds of millions in a fraction of the time it took for such business to establish itself as some sort of a monopoly", then yeah, no shit.
AlienRobot 2y ago
Federation is the open source answer to microservices. Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.

foxhop 2y ago

If the maintainers are reading this is cool. I would start with an exporter/importer for pages from Wikipedia format into whatever format you use, it should also deal with the media. This is no small task but what you need.

kemayo 2y ago
It's legitimately a pain to do, because most Wikipedia articles use a bunch of templates. So for anything outside the most-simple of articles you suddenly have to implement a lot of the more painful bits of wikitext. Then if you want to import them back to Wikipedia, you've got to match those things back up or you'll get reverted for messing up the page... Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.

jll29 2y ago

It's legitimate to create alternatives to anything, and to re-think what has been done already. One thing that would be on my personal wish list for any Wikipedia alternative is ease of machine processing: the MediaWiki format/mark-up and the templates are horribly inconsistent and a nightmare to parse. This should be done better by any serious successor. Wikipedia has got the excuse "historically grown", any successor doesn't.

richardw 2y ago
That seems to be the same goal for https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page Do you mean something different, e.g. not just structured data?
- kemayo 2y ago
  For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    There’s also this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
    - kemayo 2y ago
      For context, the parser I'm talking about in my first post is Parsoid on that list.
kemayo 2y ago
The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.

richardw 2y ago

If the top "scandals" in the article are considered reasons to change, just wait until the alt-crew get a hold of wikipedia. Medical, political, science, education, religion discussions would all be even more crazy when people can point to some wiki gospel as proof. We'd find the list of scandals grows a thousandfold. Wikipedia is amazing, if imperfect. Make it better, don't try to break it by splintering it into some weird "whatever you think is right" solution. That's already what we have in social media. Truth is already federated enough. Edit: what would convince me more is some demonstration article/cluster of articles and maybe some math proof that shows how this is better, through faster convergence on truth, defence against rando's etc. I think even getting a definition of "better" would be a bit of a battle!

highwayman47 2y ago

What does this term “federated” being thrown around in tech lately mean?

rrgok 2y ago
Good question. I too don't understand it.
fragmede 2y ago
Meaning it's like email. I can have my own domain name - @example.com , not just Gmail, and they talk to each other so people on Gmail can send email outside of Gmail, and people can send emails into Gmail.
poszlem 2y ago
It means that each federated technology creates a federation of "self-governing" entities, for example Mastodon servers. The meaning is very similar to the political meaning of the word.

somat 2y ago

I don't intend to be mean but isn't the federated wikipedia, the web. Wikipedias whole value function, don't get me wrong it's a great value function, is that it is a curated centralized web.

anthk 2y ago

The only wiki I like it's the rational wiki.

sureglymop 2y ago

ActivityPub federation, while maybe a little complicated, seems to be well thought through. I think many platforms would benefit from implementing that. Especially git forges, though I think someone is already working on that.

Levitating 2y ago

How ironic that the link to the mentioned article by Helen Buyniski "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" is the victim of link rot. You can find the article reposted here: https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/49-wikipedia-rotten-to-the-core?utm_source=publication-search https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/49-wikipedia-rotten-to...

timmytokyo 2y ago
Fascinating that the first person cited on this site's announcement page is Helen Buyniski, a "journalist" for Russian state media and a COVID conspiracy theorist. It's almost as if this project has an agenda.

pona-a 2y ago

See previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045 163 points | 252 comments

kemayo 2y ago

It'd be more convincing if the "problems with Wikipedia" section referenced anything from the last decade. (Also, one of the three things that apparently warranted being called out as an example was pretty petty -- the ArbCom member's on-wiki job didn't have anything to do with how they misrepresented their credentials.)

nightpool 2y ago

I have the same problem with this that I do with "federated forums" or "federated forges"—what does it even mean for an encyclopedia to be federated? In fact, they already are—if I want to go look up information about Minecraft, I can use the federated internet to go to minecraft.wiki. So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

This alternative doesn't load with NoScript on, so I think I'll pass.

meitham 2y ago
The article says the Frontend is web assembly written by rust

fny 2y ago

Social problems demand social solutions. If you're skeptical about Wikipedia, you can easily create your own fork of Wikipedia: the data and code is open source after all. In the end, it’s all about whether you can keep a community alive and kicking. No one gives a damn about whether a wiki is built on ActivityPub. There are many examples: Larry Sanger, who was mentioned in the article, created Citizendium after breaking from Wikipedia.[0] He was then involved with Everipedia, a for-profit venture built the original code base which later morphed into crypto nonsense.[1] There are many examples of other wikis too. Some are focused[2][3], some are fun[4][5], some are revisionist[6][7][8], and some meet the requirements of totalitarian regimes[9][10]. If Wikipedia’s not your style, grab the code, rally a crowd, and make the encyclopedia you want to see—just know it’s the people, not the platform, that make it thrive. [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page [1]: https://rosettacode.org/ https://rosettacode.org/ [2]: https://citizendium.org/ https://citizendium.org/ [3]: https://iq.wiki/ https://iq.wiki/ [4]: https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page [5]: https://edramatica.com/Main_Page https://edramatica.com/Main_Page [6]: https://www.metapedia.org/ https://www.metapedia.org/ [7]: https://www.conservapedia.com/ https://www.conservapedia.com/ [8]: https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page [9]: https://www.qiuwenbaike.cn https://www.qiuwenbaike.cn [10]: https://ruwiki.ru https://ruwiki.ru

f33d5173 2y ago
A social problem is by definition one with a social solution. If we can find a technical solution to a problem, it turns into a technical problem. Wikipedia is itself a technology. It's not outrageous to suggest that new technologies can improve on it.
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  Just because something is based on technology does not mean that any problem is has is solvable with different technology. This is a lesson that it seems we need to learn over and over. The hard part of a system designed to squish together the brains of millions of humans and somehow wring truth out of the chaos is a fundamentally messy human system whose issues aren't solved by putting all those messy humans on a new platform.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

How does this overcome power struggles and bias? That’s the most important question for me, as bias in Wikipedia is rampant these days, and even acknowledged by its founder.

ErrantX 2y ago

As with all Wikipedia competitors, this misses two key points Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. Scandals aside over decades hundreds of thousands of people have built out the content and continue to do so - that is not easy to emulate. Also for all the scandals, the toughest problems in WP early days were spammers and trolls. Moderation is a niche community problem (which till you have a community is moot). Stopping bot armies and countless trolls is a day 1 issue.

ComplexSystems 2y ago
> Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. This is much less of an issue now that there are LLMs, even with the occasional hallucination.
- lionkor 2y ago
  LLMs do not write information dense content
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    I have no experience with LLMs. Can you ask them to write in a dense style? Does it work?
    - lionkor 2y ago
      By design they just approximate human language, they don't really have a concept of information or how information-dense something is. they're good for writing emails.
- ErrantX 2y ago
  Actually writing the content is usually the easiest part. 98% of writing these articles is research. Current LLMs are nowhere near good enough.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

openrisk 2y ago

Some sort of federation has already been discussed in the Wikimedia universe [1]. It aims to operate at a lower level, federating structured data between different specialized wikibases [2]. AFAIK it has not (yet?) seen much development and/or traction. ActivityPub style federation opens up some interesting technical possibilities for exchanging data but if the main motivation is to "fix" the consensus/moderation processes of Wikipedia one should start with outlining how that would work. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation [2] https://wikiba.se/ https://wikiba.se/

groceryheist 2y ago

This is the latest in a long line of attempts to make a non-centralized Wikipedia. A Wikipedia (not me) maintains a record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHaeB%2FTimeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHaeB%2FTimeline_of_dist...

zozbot234 2y ago

> 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. Doesn't MediaWiki (and other common wikis) support this kind of thing already via the InterWiki-links system? You can set up a MediaWiki install such that [[geology:Mountain]] and [[poetry:Mountain]] go to the appropriate places. What does Ibis add that's not accounted for by this? Besides, these days you also have https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8502 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8502 - which includes links to the concept of "mountain" as represented in hundreds of sites. (You can use a browser-extension known as Entity-Explosion to make your browser aware of these links, giving you the ability to browse from any of the listed sites to any other with just a few clicks.)

qwerty456127 2y ago

Sounds great. I want an openly opinionated wikipedia where a supposed fact is acknowledged as known to possibly exist even when the source is not known (but this should be indicated), where it is Ok to mention an opinion (also labelled) and where nobody deletes "unimportant" pages/facts others write.

nobodywillobsrv 2y ago

The problem with wikipedia is capture. How does this solve issues like with the recent scandal involving the article on grooming gangs in the UK? Wikipedia and anything that replaced it will simply be a target for aggressive activists.

SuperHeavy256 2y ago

[flagged]

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
Actually, a lot of people use Lemmy, and there's pretty decent content on it in the communities. I post Linux stuff mostly and my threads get a lot of comments. Or I'll ask questions like "What are everybody's cool not so well known websites" and get a ton of feedback. Accounts are accessible via Mastodon as well, it isn't ideal, but, it's some kind of start. So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
lucb1e 2y ago
That seems like a very cynical take. Is it a stated goal or expectation of the author that more than what you deem "nobody" will use this over a centralized wiki? Is that what you're criticizing, or is it just handwaving the project away the same way one could say Linux distributions (see: year of the linux desktop) and other things "nobody uses" don't matter and are disjointed from reality?

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

I believe this effort is well-intentioned. But, if it is successful, I suspect it will drag us farther towards a "post-truth" society, where every niche political view literally has its own encyclopedia by which it understands the world. My take: Wikipedia's problem is that it was not set up to moderate factual disputes or identify truth. See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... What we need is something more like: a hybrid of Wikipedia as it exists now, and Community Notes. Try to build in some mechanisms to keep the forces of partisanship at bay.

rapnie 2y ago

Federated Wiki by Ward Cunningham deserves a mention here: http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federated-wiki http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federat...

lemiffe 2y ago

Ibis is a hotel chain, not the best name to pick in my opinion

linmob 2y ago

To me, looking at Ibis as a piece of software, it seems way more attractive as an alternative to wikia/fandom, niche wikis about a topic. It seems to be selfhostable without massive resources and more modern, than, e.g., MediaWiki. (Also, say about Lemmy what you want, but using it feels lean and quick.) It's especially attractive if the topic you are targetting also has some fediverse presence.

shortformblog 2y ago

Citing a litany of stuff that happened as far back as 15 years ago and raised alarm bells way back when is a sign that the governance model of Wikimedia works, not that it’s broken. Governance is not about bad things happening; it’s about having set practices in place to manage the organization, including having ground rules when things go wrong. That this project tries selling these warmed-over scandals as basic reasons for its existence shows that it’s not serious. Every online collective eventually fosters corruption. The difference between this group and Wikimedia is that you know what you’re dealing with when it comes to Wikimedia. EDIT: Since the link is broken on the site, I will make the case that the cited “investigative journalist,” Helen Buyniski, is less than convincing, using her role to criticize Wikipedia’s stance on alternative medicine, just as an example: https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014407/http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wikipedia-rotten-to-the-core https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014407/http://helenofdes... Citing an apparent conspiracy theorist does not a convincing case make.

paulnpace 2y ago

I hope it attracts more developers and I look forward to seeing it evolve!

Log_out_ 2y ago

The hotel chain has a wiki?