@nutomic ok, but did anyone think to test this on an iPhone before making it live?
Nope
Android does not work either. At a guess, desktops seem highly likely to be affected as well.
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I think it may have a problem on some screens.
Ran straight here to say don’t try on mobile!
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.
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
I’m not sure this really has potential to kick off outside of niche wikis. But maybe that’s still good enough.
Though I hope this isn’t taking too much of your time from Lemmy development! :)
There are many opinions about practically everything - even within STEM. I’m sure some will want an alternative wiki if Wikipedia doesn’t state the opinion that they agree with.
He can do what he wants with his time you should’nt “hope” things from others.
It can get a bit boring working on the same project for so many years. Having a different project gives me more motivation.
Fair enough - I can definitely understand that
You don’t have to explain what you do with your time to others then that’s all you are ever gonna be doing .
Damn man that looks cool and also congratulations about your daughter .
But… wikimedia is already self hostable.
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.
I don’t think something like this exists yet(?), so it’ll be cool to see how this will be like.
Which also means that marxist.wiki/article/communism will be completely different from libertarian.wiki/article/communism. I think I will take Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability over a “wikipedia” destined to just devolve into islands of “alternative facts”
@Quacksalber @Alsephina Wikipedia is already filled with a LOT of fake information and biased
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Wikipedia’s attempt at impartiability
Reading the links in this post alone will tell you wikipedia is already one of those biased islands lol
Are you of the opinion that people don’t already use internet resources, libraries, interviews and other educational avenues to inform themselves? Many here seem to be needing an education on how to use Wikipedia responsively, they seem to think that one is unable to engage with a wikipedia article critically. I just checked the article for BP, as one of the blogs linked here claimed that over 44% of BP’s wikipedia page was corporate speak. The ‘controversies’ section is one third to half the wikipedia page in length. As a jumping-off point for further study, it is perfectly adequate.
But then again, you could say this about Lemmy and Reddit too.
Lemmy took 5 years to get to this point. Let’s give this a few years and see how it turns out.
I am okay with bias in my social media.
Far less so in my encyclopedia.
You won’t find any encyclopedia (or anything really) you can use then since everything is biased towards something. Wikipedia has a massive neoliberal bias for example. And a heavily biased leadership as linked in this post.
I would love to read both a marxist.wiki/article/communism and a libertarian.wiki/article/communism - opinions are great, fine & dandy, but at the end of the day, I don’t want a marxist/grasshopper vs. a libertarian/grasshopper, and I DEFINITELY do not want a conservative/vaccine vs. a liberal/vaccine each feeding misinformation from a slightly different and both-sides-incorrect approach. The enormous EFFORTS that go into finding neutral and balanced information are worthwhile, imho, as is having a central repository that would not need to be individually updated hundreds or thousands of times.
A mirroring/backup process would just as easily perform the same stated goal of preserving human knowledge - and these are already done. Arguably the federation model works best for social media, a bit less so I am told for Mastodon, but I think would not work well at all for an encyclopedia style.
But don’t mind me, I am simply grieving the death of facts and reason over here… - the fact that we would even want to contemplate different “alternative (sets of) facts” at all means that we already have lost something that was once good. :-(
Wikipedia is hilariously biased, especially on any politics or history topics.
here are extensive lists of complaints of bias, from both left- and right- wing alternatives:
…are these people writing about the same website?! 😂
So like Fandom without the ads or miraheze, but fediverse-adapted
Promising…
That’s exactly what i was thinking. It replace fandom.
Cheers to this new alternative together, fellow crab brother…
As an academic I love this. On Wikipedia there’s actually fights among different expert disciplines going on. It is better to allow different instances operated by different discipline summarize knowledge from their own perspective.
To be fair, those are good faith arguments with the goal being to determine the real, objective truth. Hopefully.
That is not how this tool would be used, in the hands of people not trained in the art of socratic discourse. Just imagine how the situation in Gaza would end up being described.
Avoiding conflict is not always a useful aim.
I can respect your comment. The problem with Wikipedia’s scholarly articlesI wanted to raise was that some group of researchers (or businesses) wash away others’ views. In other times, mathematicians try to satisfy everyone from different disciplines, and write a very abstract article that covers everyone’s view yet is too academic and hardly readable to most readers who actually need Wikipedia.
The goal of academic research is to inform the best and brightest of the real information. For e.g. academic extensions to how nuclear power works, or for engineers to have a working basis to build a viable power plant, and so on.
The goal of an encyclopedia though is arguably different: to make people “feel” informed, without necessarily being so? Or at least to serve as a starting point for further studies, maybe?
Science marches ever onwards, and eventually that gets collected into textbooks, and even later into encyclopedias. Or maybe now we’re working from a new model where it could skip that middle step? But science still seems leagues ahead of explanations to the masses, and whereas in science the infighting is purposeful and helpful (to a degree), the infighting of making something explainable in a clearer manner to more people is also purposeful and helpful, though federating seems to me to be giving up on making a centralized repository of knowledge, i.e. the very purpose of an “encyclopedia”?
Science reporting must be decentralized, but encyclopedias have a different purpose and so should not be, maybe? At least not at the level of Wikipedia.
If you’re correct, to me the usefulness of Wikipedia is actually different from that of encyclopedia, and the pattern I’m arguing goes against that.
Wikimedia isn’t written in Rust, so it’s useless /s
@13 @nutomic @vis4valentine how helpful is sarcasm huh
Oooh this is cool
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.
Oh very Thoth coded.
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
Guess I’m out of the loop. What happened with/to fandom wikia?
They sold out and now is an advertising mess.
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.
Death to fextra!
What a fantastic idea!
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 it 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.
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 :)
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
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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
Don’t you need to be funny to be a comedian?
I mean it is kind of true. Education and liberalism are also correlated.
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)
“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
Neoliberalism =/= liberalism and especially not leftism (or just “the opposite of conservatism”), which I assume is what Colbert means
“The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.”
- Malcolm X
Damn i need to read more x quotes
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.
If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.
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.
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.
One of the main devs of Lemmy (@nutomic) just announced a federated wiki project called Ibis
“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…
Would have preferred a federated wiki in Lemmy, but still cool.
Adding such functionality in Lemmy would be very complicated because Lemmy itself is already quite a complicated project. So it would require test coverage, pass code review, have a stable API and so on. Its better to experiment with this in a new project so I can write some quick and dirty code to get the basic functionality working. If it proves successful it can be integrated with Lemmy later.
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.
