@nutomic ok, but did anyone think to test this on an iPhone before making it live?
Nope
It’s not even alpha, just a barely working project. Just give it some time.
Android does not work either. At a guess, desktops seem highly likely to be affected as well.
Damn man that looks cool and also congratulations about your daughter .
@nutomic Looks like an interesting project!
Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the front end?
And will you be able to follow Ibis pages (or perhaps edit them?) from Mastodon? Or potentially even Lemmy?
Sure if someone implements those things. I personally already invested a lot of time in the project and wont be able to do everything on my own.
@nutomic That last question was me trying to get my head around how this works.
Will each page have a username, in the same way each Lemmy group has a username, which can be followed from Mastodon?
If you follow that username from Mastodon, will you see a series of posts? If so, will they contain page edits or something else?
What happens if you tag that account in a post from Mastodon? Or reply to one of those posts?
The readme has some basic description how the federation works. Viewing articles from other platforms should be easy to get working. Edits from other platforms would also be possible, but would require changes so that they can generate diffs and resolve conflicts. So not exactly easy.
Yea being able to do it on lemmy would be cool
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
The abuse potential this has feels quite concerning. You’ve just given kiwifarms a decentralized tool to host its stalking profiles on people.
Gabe, KiwiFarm started from the forum section of CWC Wiki (in fact, the name KiwiFarms itself is a corruption of “CWC Wiki Forums”), which was hosted on MediaWiki, so “not letting KiwiFarms host their own wiki” is a ship that has long since sailed.
I really fail to see how this has more abuse potential than hosting an independent wiki on MediaWiki, even if the content they host there is… not very nice, to say the least. If anything, there is more control against abuse since they would just be defederated.
I’m honestly curious about what abuse potential this has compared to other federated platforms, because “it could be used to host dox” is a complaint that I’ve heard about Lemmy as well.
Every tool a can be abused… If we were not making tools based on their harm potential wed still be in the cave. People said the same thing about Gab and mastodon.
Oooh this is cool
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.
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…
…isn’t the good idea here to not enhance visibility of disinformation?
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!
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.
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.
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.
So? Is your alternative free of mistakes and bias?
You could peek at two opposing views on the same article, for example.
Post-truth as a service.
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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.
Wikipedia information is often made up of media reports and paid studies so we’re already there.
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.
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.
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.
When working on lemmy is too relaxing so you need another project to keep you busy :D
I was waiting for someone else to create a project like this. But it didnt happen so I had to write it myself when things became a bit calmer with Lemmy.
You call this calm? :D
But I know the feeling. I didn’t really want to run a lemmy but reddit made it intolerable not to and here we are. I should be working on my main project >_<
Nowadays I can easily handle all Github notifications within less than an hour. After the Reddit blackout there were so many notifications that I couldnt even read all the issues, let alone respond. So I had to unsubscribe from issue notifications for some months.
Well, I was more referring to all the drama around lemmy lately due to lacking mod tools etc
Right but that’s already over. And anyway Ibis was mostly finished since some weeks, just needed some minor work to push it over the finishing line.
With all due respect, but that’s not over. There’s still a significant lack of mod tooling on lemmy.
I mean the drama about it is over. We are constantly working to improve mod tools but it takes time.
There’s Jerboa as well, lol
Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
Oh very Thoth coded.
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.
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.
Half the comments in this thread are the exact same as when we started working on a reddit alternative lol. “I don’t see why you’re doing this, reddit works fine for me.”
Also I’m pretty stunned that more people aren’t aware of wikipedia’s many scandals and issues. I suppose if you use a site every day and don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, you don’t seek these things out.
I suppose if you use a site every day and don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, you don’t seek these things out.
This ignorance is just more reason to continue working on the fediverse to help break these walls down, you are on the right path. o7
You just have to prove them wrong then like you did with lemmy great work .
Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you… edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website’s UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you’re browsing from?
This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia’s content moderation problems, but it doesn’t do much against that that wouldn’t also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others’ pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you’d have to make a new account to edit things.
I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you’d know that all the options were wikis that haven’t been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki’s admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.
I don’t know. I’m happy this exists. I think it’s interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.
I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics, but I don’t really see it as much of a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Interwiki links have been a thing for a long time, but they’re not really used that much. They also are used by specialized shortcut syntax instead of using a more intuitive domain name syntax. So let’s say you have a wiki for the Flash TV show and you want to link to an article in the Flash comic wiki. This would be great for that. Maybe have “search related wikis” as an option to search some hand picked wikis?
But for going head-to-head with Wikipedia, I don’t really see it so much. Part of the success of Wikipedia is that it forces editors to work in a single namespace, debate the contents, use a common set of policies, and so on. There is also a lot of policy, process, human knowledge, and institution built up over the years geared solely towards writing an encyclopedia. If you go to Wikipedia, it may not be perfect, but it will have gone through that process. Trying to wade through hundreds of wikis to find a decent article does not sound like a treat, especially if effort gets spread across multiple wikis.
Like with Lemmy, I am excited to see where this goes. And nutomic, congratulations with your daughter!
I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics
This.
I dont know how many people here are aware of Fandom, formerly known as Wikia. Basically what they are trying to do is collecting niche topic wikis in order to profit as much as possible. Very much criticized over the years by contributors for their practices.
Ibis could be the answer for niche wikis who dont want to be associated with Fandom/Wikia.
Fandom was exactly what I was thinking of. Just maybe without having more ads than content. That I’m not a fan of, especially for volunteer supplied content.
Extra thought on search: add a weighting option so individual servers can be searched, but don’t come up as high in the rankings. So keeping with the superhero theme, have the Flash comic wiki with a 1 weighting and the more general DC comic and Arrowverse wikis with 0.8 weightings.
Based on how …certain… Lemmy instances have handled themselves, the intention to deal with “Wikipedia content moderation” here is almost certainly not to make a freer version of Wikipedia, but to make heavily censored content enclaves with the same obvious editorial restrictions concerning certain topics you find on certain large instances.
A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!
