Get gamers involved, they’ve been starving for a replacement to the max-enshitified fandom wikia
Yeah I think that’s where the potential is, not Wikipedia
Sounds good, please share the announcement in relevant places.
Y’know, I was just going to mention Fandom. I have no idea how well this will work for Wikipedia, but I know something like this can work great for games.
Fandom is straight up harmful to game communities, and I think federation makes a lot of sense with per-game / series / etc. instances.
I’ll look at this a bit more later, quite interesting idea.
Death to fextra!
Guess I’m out of the loop. What happened with/to fandom wikia?
Mr. Wikipedia wanted to make money off wikipedia but couldn’t because it was a nonprofit, so made Wikia to profit off of.
Worst they could do on Wikipedia is e-beg and then spam the email of anyone who actually sends them money (fucking assholes) but the limits are off for Wikia they can absolutely cake that as shit full of ads and spyware as they can fit.
They sold out and now is an advertising mess.
What a fantastic idea!
Looks very broken on mobile.
The problem I see with federated wikis is potential creation of echo chambers. Current Wikipedia is often a political tug-of-war between different ideological crowds. For instance, on Russian Wikipedia, Russian Civil War article is an infamous point of struggle between communist and monarchist sympathizers, who often have to settle at something resembling a compromise.
If both sides had their own wikis, each would have very biased interpretation of events. A person who identifies as either communist or monarchist would visit only the corresponding wiki, only seeing narrative that fits into their current world view, never being exposed to opposing opinions.
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Could this not also be seen as advantageous? If one wants to get nuanced understandings, they could read from multiple wikis written with multiple perspectives, without the tug of war. Presently, as a centralized platform, there’s the back and forth you mentioned with neither side being satisfied.
Assuming people cite their sources and more reputable instances are more developed, this allows for sharing lesser heard perspectives. A flat-earth wiki isn’t going to dominate, because you can’t get valid sources for that.
Overall, cautiously optimistic. I like the idea, and think that as a framework, this is a great thing! It remains to be seen what will come of this, though.
Interesting project and good luck on this.
Did you not consider something like Codeberg to host this? Many open source devs do not trust MS or their stewardship of Github, and considering the aim of this project is against American control of information, surely this really needs serious consideration.
Many open source devs do not want to use Github at all now.
That is true but most developers are still on Github, which hasn’t been affected by enshittification yet. I also have to keep using Github because of Lemmy, so I don’t want to switch back and forth between two separate platforms.
However once Gitea starts federation we definitely want to migrate Lemmy to a selfhosted instance, and probably Ibis too.
They sunset Atom to push VS code despite assurances they wouldn’t.
Co-pilot slurping open source code and spitting out code without license attribution. One example of this was when it spat out Quake 2 code and comment verbatim.
Enshittification started, you just ain’t ready to see it yet. MS has a track record and will continue.
2 git hosts is just 2 tabs and by the time federation happens, you’ve already got vendor lock in because of all the issues. I doubt migration of those will be straightforward.
The fact is that we can’t rely on any single website to hold the whole world’s knowledge, because it can be corrupted sooner or later. The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information. This is where ActivityPub comes in, the protocol used by Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube and many other federated social media projects.
Thank god Lemmy has no malicious users/bad actors/spam issues…
Interesting idea anyway. I would be a bit more worried that when important information is siloed onto instances, each instance becomes a point of failure, and thus can be corrupted or lost.
Good luck :)
If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.
Thank god Lemmy has no malicious users/bad actors/spam issues…
It reminds me of that conservative wiki that went to create a version without wokeness or something.
I suspect you mean Conservapedia. It is exactly what it sounds like: a shitty right-wing rag.
On the flipside is RationalWiki, which is basically neoliberal Americentric “reality has a liberal bias” made manifest. It’s also pretty shit.
A mirror would accomplish the main stated aim of backing up information just as well if not better.
Whereas as you implied, allowing multiple sources of information seems vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, and even more simply bias.
Right? Right now with Wikimedia, everything is hosted in one place and moderated in one place. Having everything spread about in various instances with varying degrees of moderation and rules, and the option to block other instances is not great for information quality and sharing.
Wikipedia has strict notability requirements, which is what spawned the popularity wikia/fandom which is a pretty terrible user experience.
Wikipedia also has an infamously pro-neoliberal bias.
The neoliberal bias also fucks with the notability requirements. The amount of citation loops on anything even remotely political is absurd.
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” - Stephen Colbert
Neoliberalism is stuff like putting children to work in the coal mines and also includes modern day conservatives (especially the nazi ones, a lot of people don’t realize how the nazi regime was more or less liberalism taken to its conclusion, which is why it took a war for them to face any opposition from the liberal world order, and even then it was only because they bit the hand that fed them)
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Don’t you need to be funny to be a comedian?
Comedians often speak truths. Often when others don’t. I disagree with colberts take here but dismissing a point cuz of where is comes from is wrong.
eg carlin, Hicks
I mean it is kind of true. Education and liberalism are also correlated.
“In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.” - Phil Ochs
Is this implying being right of center is bad? You know what that would mean, right?
You would have to start a long conversation about the overton window, and what left vs right even means to both you and i before tackling this question, friend.
Fair enough
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“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.”
- Malcolm X
As much as I appreciate Malcolm X, this quote is very much a product of its time.
Not at all. We’ve seen this our whole lives, and are currently seeing it with the liberal response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine too. They only support emancipatory movements in theory, but in practice are the same as conservatives: they stop when those people are taking direct action for emancipation, specially when it threatens their own positions.
"…who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” - MLK
Liberals didn’t like Mandela’s use of force to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and they wouldn’t approve of it if it happened now either. The same way they aren’t approving of Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas in their war against the apartheid colony “israel”.
I’ve seen fairly universal support from liberal voters both irl and online for Palestine, but not from our politicians.
Damn i need to read more x quotes
Neoliberalism =/= liberalism and especially not leftism (or just “the opposite of conservatism”), which I assume is what Colbert means
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Nope
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Android does not work either. At a guess, desktops seem highly likely to be affected as well.
Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
read the name as libs which is just normal wikipedia
You are underestimating, by a mile, the editorial effort that goes into fighting scam and spam, vandalism and lies. Wikipedia does have a support structure to do that, I doubt instance admins have the same kind of resources.
That structure is extremely corrupted though. And Lemmy shows that volunteers can handle this kind of stuff. Though Ibis will definitely need a lot of mod tools.
Of course no single site is perfect. Editors may always have ulterior motives. That is what the editing history is for. But with a federated wiki, the only thing you’ll get is multiple different versions that all present their oen little “truths” and at that point you can just go back and search the entire internet for blogs, just like the website you sent me is a blog.
I think thats better than having our single “truth” controlled by a corrupt organization from a different country, different language and different culture. With federation there can be independent wikis for my local country or city.
You can already do that. How does federation help?
By allowing users to interact between different wiki instances. Just like you can interact with Lemmy instances from KBin.
That page starts by complaining that alternative medicine is represented negatively. Going to skip the rest of the blog lol
How could the bias be so widespread they wonder!
Also, any such wiki has to be allow-list only by default. Any open wiki is vandalized with spam and hate speech almost immediately. Open federation would make this trivial.
Interesting project! Can you explain the vision a bit more - I understand that every instance can have their own version of an article, but how would a user know which version of an article is most relevant to them to read (and maybe even contribute to)?
Thats a good question. Obviously the first place to look for articles would be those hosted by your local instance. Then the instance admin could also maintain an article with links to relevant articles. And I suppose later there could be some software features for discovery, but I havent thought about that yet.
Additionally my daughter will be born within a few weeks, so there won’t be any time for programming.
Congratulations! I hope nothing but the best comrade!
Where are you reading this?
Follow the link in the post
I did. It loads an empty page
Update: it just says “Loading…” And it never loads
Oh very Thoth coded.
This serves well as a statement.
It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.
All the more reason to push this project forward, as a redundancy.
When Wikipedia collapses, it will be too late to create an alternative from scratch.
It is not well known but there have been numerous scandals which put this trust into question. For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia’s front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.
I don’t really understand how decentralization would address the trust and legitimacy problems of Wikipedia. I do see value in adding community wikis to Lemmy, however.
Wikipedia got as bad as it did because neoliberals had gotten into positions of power and kicked everyone else out. They weren’t the people who made the site (it was one guy who did like 90% of the articles) but they are the ones who made it the shithole that it is today.
Besides still needing to establish that a) wikipedia is bad today (as opposed to just flawed), you also need to establish b) what about this would entice people over from wikipedia and c) if it did succeed, then why wouldn’t whoever got into positions of power with wikipedia get into the same positions of power on the biggest instances?
What could possibly go wrong!
