Crazy how many people can suddenly peer into the future when this post was made! I hope they can use this power for good, maybe save us from horrible tragedies in the future instead of wailing about a Wikipedia alternative. Great work nutomic! I hope folks pitch in to help this project you’ve begun.
I’m going to just say that I’m exteremely sceptical on how this will turn out, just because there has been quite a few Wikipedia forks that have not exactly worked out despite the best interests and the stated objectives they had.
Now - Wikipedia isn’t exactly an entity that doesn’t have glaring problems of its own, of course - but I’m just saying that the wiki model has been tried out a lot of times and screwed up many times in various weird ways.
There’s exactly two ways I can see Wikipedia forks to evolve: Crappily managed fork that is handled by an ideological dumbass that attracts a crowd that makes everything much worse (e.g. Conservapedia, Citizendium), or a fork that gets overrun by junk and forgotten by history, because, well, clearly it’s much more beneficial to contribute to Wikipedia anyway.
I was about to respond with a copy of the standard Usenet spam response form with the “sorry dude I don’t think this is going to work” ticked, but Google is shit and I can’t find a copy of that nonsense anymore, so there.
I’ve been scared to use that ever since they actually solved “Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money”.
Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.
What could possibly go wrong!
Oh very Thoth coded.
read the name as libs which is just normal wikipedia
Is it linked to the ongoing Drama on the french wikipedia ?
How does federation works with with “SEO” ? Wikipedia is always among the top result on search engine, how would peopel find about Ibis ?
I dont speak French and havent heard about that drama. But its about the problems pointed out in this article among others.
If Ibis gets popular it will get listed higher in search results. Same as Lemmy which is also slowly going up in results. Before that it will most likely spread through word of mouth.
Same as Lemmy which is also slowly going up in results
Huh. Searching for “Lemmy” on Google actually brings it up on the side now instead of Lemmy Kilmister like it did during the Reddit exodus. Neat.
I think it may have a problem on some screens.
Ran straight here to say don’t try on mobile!
Thank you for working on this in addition to Lemmy!
One of the main devs of Lemmy (@nutomic) just announced a federated wiki project called Ibis
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“Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be treated in completely different ways.”
Yay, now we’ll have a new wikipedia which will also present russian take on Ukraine invasion, Chinese take on Tianmen massacre and a flat-earthers corner for their “truth”. I think internet already covers that…
@nutomic An interesting initiative. Good luck!
I do notice one unfortunate difference from Wikipedia immediately: Wikipedia is functional with scripts blocked, Ibis Wiki is not. I’m sure that even Wikipedia nowadays has some functions that don’t work without scripts, but a wiki that won’t even display its landing page without scripts enabled, is dead while still in the gate.
Right, and what would also be nice is to be able to export articles in different formats, for example markdown, to conveniently read them in your favourite reader application.
The frontend is very primitive right now, but it could definitely be made to work without JS.
@nutomic I’d recommend that, albeit not everybody browses with scripts disabled, so not it’s not necessarily the automatic death knell I suggested.
But I’m curious to see how it goes.
I’m rather sceptical that this can work as a good alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s content moderation system is in my opinion both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. To create a better Wikipedia, you would have to somehow innovate in that regard. I don’t think federation helps in any way with this problem. I do though see potential in Ibis for niche wikis which are currently mostly hosted on fandom.org. If you could create distinct wiki’s for different topics and allow them to interconnect when it makes sense, Ibis might have a chance there.
I’m going to use your comment to tell people to download Indie Wiki Buddy. It’s a plug-in for your browser that redirects Fandom to independent alternatives. I highly recommend it.
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“Losing.”
Considering some of the ungodly biased wikipedia alternatives I see tossed around on Lemmy, I’m not too confident Ibis will end up any better.
Besides, first I’m hearing of Wikipedia losing trust.
Imagine it’s post-2001 and George Bush is saying we need to take away Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). You hear there is a controversy around this topic, so you look it up on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article may not even mention the controversy because it came from “fringe sources” or unreliable media, instead its rules mean they only share the message from approved media sources, and that means the article says Iraq definitely has WMDs and something must be done.
This is how it works now, and always had.
When I was in college in the second half of the 2000s, we were banned from using Wikipedia as a source due to the way it is built. Many complained but given how many controversies Wikipedia has found itself involved in which includes paid editors, state actors, only being able to use biased journalistic coverage to construct articles, refusing to use other media sources such as established bloggers…
Trusting Wikipedia at any point was the mistake. It’s not even the Wikimedia foundation that is the issue, it’s the structure of the site. If no approved journalists will speak the truth, your article will be nothing but lies and Wikipedia editors will dutifully write those lies down and lock down the article if you attempt to correct them using sources they personally dislike.
I’ve never had issues with Wikipedia not at least mentioning a controversy on a topic if one exists. Got any current examples?
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Never heard of any examples and certainly no one has provided any in this thread. Just been the usual muh western website is evil by default kind of stuff.
If you think a centralized organization governed by legalism is opaque, just wait until you see a thousand islands of anarchy.
No I think it would actually be great. You could peek at two opposing views on the same article, for example. I’m sure some “instances” would be ripe with disinformation but what’s it to you? Idiots are already lapping up disinformation like candy. It’s not like wikipedia isn’t filled with it already…
You could peek at two opposing views on the same article, for example.
Post-truth as a service.
Wikipedia information is often made up of media reports and paid studies so we’re already there.
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Post-truth as a service.
If you read through this page you might even conclude that Wikipedia itself is “post-truth”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies
At any point in time you could be reading a defaced or propagandized version of an article.
Not only is the noise ratio low, this seems like a good lesson in “encyclopedias are not primary sources nor arbiters nor authorities on information.” Yes, people use Wikipedia that way anyway. No, baking in an even lower trust system does not seem like it’s actually a fix to any of Wikipedia’s problems.
I don’t need opposing views on subjects, I need the most accurate one that’s the best researched and sourced.
Good thing Wikipedia articles are always the best researched and sourced!
In 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published an article in the Journal of Holocaust Research in which they said they had discovered a “systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history” on the English-language Wikipedia.[367] Analysing 25 Wikipedia articles and almost 300 back pages (including talk pages, noticeboards and arbitration cases), Grabowski and Klein stated they have shown how a small group of editors managed to impose a fringe narrative on Polish-Jewish relations, informed by Polish nationalist propaganda and far removed from evidence-driven historical research. In addition to the article on the Warsaw concentration camp, the authors conclude that the activities of the editors’ group had an effect on several articles, such as History of the Jews in Poland, Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust and Jew with a coin. Nationalist editing on these and other articles allegedly included content ranging “from minor errors to subtle manipulations and outright lies”, examples of which the authors offer.[367]
- 367: Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust”. The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. ISSN 2578-5648. S2CID 257188267.
So? Is your alternative free of mistakes and bias?
I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.
What’s the alternative you’re suggesting that would be comparably comprehensive but regularly more reliable…?
I mean, much more often than not, and for the majority of the time, they are.
You don’t see this statement as dogmatic? How do you feel confident in this other than just a feeling?
The majority of the time the articles would require actual expertise to make that evaluation with confidence. An individual can take a few minutes to verify the sources, but for so many topics it’s not realistic to rule out omissions of sources that should be well-known, or even rule out that a source given provides an important broader context somewhere nearby that should be mentioned in the article but isn’t. Can you be sure that the author is trustworthy on this subject? It’s not enough to just check a single page mentioned in a book while ignoring the rest of the book and any context surrounding the author.
An expert on a very specialized topic could weigh with accuracy in on whether the wikipedia articles on their subject is well-researched and sourced, but that still won’t mean they can extrapolate their conclusion to other articles.
I don’t think they’re suggesting wikipedia currently is “best researched and sourced,” just that a federated alternative wouldn’t automatically solve that issue.
So you’re saying it would rely on each person to stay objective and use good critical thinking, instead of accepting the first thing they read and fall down an echo-chamber rabbit hole? Wikipedia definitely doesn’t always get it right, but it does try to use a form of institutionalized objectivity.
So you’re saying it would rely on each person to stay objective and use good critical thinking, instead of accepting the first thing they read and fall down an echo-chamber rabbit hole?
This is such a rich statement to make from a social media site of all places. My guy have you even looked at what some of the instances on Lemmy believe in? How is a federated wiki site any different?
but it does try to use a form of institutionalized objectivity.
By all means use wikipedia if you wish. As I’ve already pointed out in another comment, Wikipedia is often edited by bad or nationalist actors that do go undetected for a while.
…isn’t the good idea here to not enhance visibility of disinformation?
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We’re talking about the fediverse here. It’s such a niche place and there are already wildly opposing views and information existing on Lemmy itself.
And that’s not even mentioning the situation on bigger social media platforms and the broader web!
btw is this compatible with Markdown or WikiText?
It uses Markdown because it has the best library support.
for a prospective dev (for contributing & who is learning…) what should one look into if they wanted to add support for another markup language? like typst! or uhh pandoc so whatever markup language one writes in it can be put in the appropriate format!
YAY! Amazing!
This is almost entirely misdirected. The success of Wikipedia is from its human structures, the technical structure is close to meaningless. To propose a serious alternative you’d have to approach it from a social direction, how are you going to build a moderation incentive structures that forces your ideal outcomes?
Federation isn’t a magic bullet for moderation, alone it creates fractal moderation problems.
When you’re a hammer, all problems look like nails. That’s most engineers’ perspective to social problems.
Source: am engineer
The majestic bin chicken reaching new heights.
All the best with the project!
Yeah, no, wouldn’t touch that from a longstick, specially from the political slant it’s coming from. Wikipedia itself already has enough problems, Ibis is just asking to be a misinformation hub.
