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Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

ibis.wiki

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Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#111
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share details/sources for this claim? I haven't experienced any of this toxicity while editing there myself.

I think AARoads might be a good example. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/wikipedia-road-highway-... To me the main argument for decentralized wikis is when a community wants to capture deep subject focused knowledge. It's why I created https://wiki.osdev.org . Wikipedia is great but at it's core it will always be an Encyclopedia with a large breadth of knowledge. Specialization in a field is best handled elsewhe…

Wikipedia's notability requirements in particular are quite arbitrary. It doesn't make sens for an online encyclopedia that isn't limited by physical space restrictions to not document everything. If you must, layer curation of what is notable on top of that.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#112

Ibis is a large hotel chain. I am not sure using this name is a good idea.

Turns out people like naming things ibis:

- The band: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225562259251

- The hotel chain: https://all.accor.com/brands/ibis.en.shtml

- The anime drawing program: https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US

- The beer: https://ibisrice.com/ibis-pale-ale/

- The whatever this is: https://ibis.ibo.org/

- The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis-framework/ (disclaimer: I work on this library)

- The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis/

- The software for reverse mortgage management: https://www.ibisreverse.com/

- The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#113
post #107

How long will it take before all of the content on wikipedia is kanged onto this site? I mean, the license explicitly allows that kind of thing.

They should have done it already because that demo site looks sad.

Right, you'd expect that there would be a complete initial import as well as semi-automatic updates of non-controversial changes.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#114
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is not a feature; it is a limitation imposed by powers that be for you if you want to conduct business. Moderation is not a feature.

Moderation is fine, but it must not be confused with censorship. Moderation is when stuff is filtered out for you, because you don't want to see it. If you got to see it by mistake, you would agree that you didn't want to see that - maybe because it was factually wrong, maybe because it was disgusting, maybe because it was just irrelevant. Doesn't matter. All moderation is justified in terms of what the user wants to…

The distinction you are trying to make is impossible to make in practice.

I don't want to see holocaust denial bullshit. Others might not have a problem with seeing it. Every sufficiently large space will contain at least one person who wants to post it and is therefore OK with seeing it. Is it moderation or censorship when a space I share with those people decides not to carry such content? The mods may not want to see it, and as it happens I don't want to either, but I've not actually /told/ them I don't want to. They've simply assumed on my behalf.

The same applies to any subject you might pick, no matter how controversial.

There's no per-person per-subject way to opt-in or opt-out that can possibly scale. I don't want to have to supply every online space with an exhaustive list of horrible things I don't want to see; and flagging after the fact doesn't solve this either since I also don't want to see those things even once before I get a chance to express my desire to not see them. Those cookie opt-out boxes with giant lists of vendors that everyone loves to hate? Imagine that but everywhere and for every subject. That's what exhaustively expressing my preferences would look like.

One approach that does scale is to allow the owner of a space to make filtering decisions on my behalf, and if my preferences don't match theirs in a way that is important to me, well, I can go elsewhere or make my own space. This is what we have now. But it's still someone deciding for me what they do not want me to see; they may or may not have my best interests in mind, but in your proposed classification, this is censorship.

Worse, though, some people /really/ want to parade stuff I don't want to see in front of my eyeballs - they believe the problem is that they are simply not shouting loudly, frequently enough, and if they were just allowed to preach to me one more time, I would convert. Compare the person elsewhere in this comments thread arguing for their right do "do business" everywhere currently moderated. Those folk are strongly motivated to make arguments containing combinations of words that will result in their bullshit being paraded in front of my eyeballs yet again. They will try feeding different combinations of syllables to the owner, the moderation team and/or anyone who might exert pressure on them, in the hope of rules being relaxed. One such possible combination of syllables is "This is censorship! I am being censored!" It may even be true, for whatever definition you prefer! Regardless, it will be attempted. For some, it's their hobby and/or job. They devote all available time to doing this. Slow drips of water, given sufficient time, wear down stone. If I don't push back even a little, all spaces I frequent will become filled with content I do not want to see. Is this censorship? Am I a censor?

Personally I see the moderation/censorship divide as one of those irregular verbs English is so full of, conjugated approximately like so: I am making my preferences known; you are moderating; he/she/it is a censor. The "our glorious homeland / their barbarous wastes" image frequently seen on social media is another good analogy for what frequently happens.

At the end of the day, though, call the practice what you will, but despite our best wishes, entirely uncensored spaces do not look like a university agora filled with enlightened folk freely exchanging valuable ideas for the benefit of mankind. They look like 4chan's /b/. I am glad such spaces exist, but I would be very sad indeed if every place on the internet was like that.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#115

The real wikipedia renders (perfectly!) without javascript. This does not render at all without javascript. Not an alternative.

I thought it was just me - I even tried different mobile browsers. You’d think before you wrote a whole article about how bad Wikipedia is you’d at least make your site work on mobile. (And I have js turned on - the site is just one long column of unreadable text)

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#116

"There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now twice as old?" Ridiculous article. Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. I feel like these people have no idea what kind of effort is to run an organization, instead seeing the…

I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.

Dunning–Kruger effect might have something to do with it. People spotting issue in an established project, having an idea about how to improve it, but no actual experience in running such projects or even knowing the history and context of the established project. And the lack of this knowledge helping to overestimate their ability and perceived chance of success.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#117
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of decent editors who have stopped contributing due to toxic, non-productive people. This could be a way for them to continue contributing in a less toxic environment. The problem with Wikipedia is not consumption of content, but the contribution of content.

Wikipedia has a similar problem to Stackoverflow, though nowhere near as bad, where the active community members really care about rules and have a whole established process and tooling for efficiently dealing with new contributions that don't necessarily meet that bar. It all sounds utterly reasonable from the point of view of the community, who is most exposed to very low-quality content, spam, and vandalism. But n…

The problem with this, with Wikipedia specifically is the good faith part.

It isn't adherence to strict rules that is the problem. It's the massively toxic little kingdoms that have become established among power users/moderators.

Like it or don't. Them is the facts.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#118

The real wikipedia renders (perfectly!) without javascript. This does not render at all without javascript. Not an alternative.

Not an alternative for you maybe, but a fine alternative for over 99% of the rest of the world running javascript in their browser.

It also renders like garbage on mobile, which makes it useless for about 50% of the world. Not a great start.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just search for anything remotely political and you will find a lot of bias.

I don't see how federation can help with that. At worst it's going to have hundreds of conflicting versions of a document, where each federated node disagree on which is the current master of the document, because each node is fighting for their bias, or it's going to be Wikipedia, where there is one promoted version of the document with whatever bias.

> At worst it's going to have hundreds of conflicting versions of a document, where each federated node disagree on which is the current master of the document, because each node is fighting for their bias

Sounds like an improvement over one dominant group being able to declare their viewpoint as The Truth(tm).

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#120
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems mentioned aren't even real problems: - jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught, and edits were reviewed for appropriateness. System worked as it was supposed to - college drop out on arbcom (for those not in the know, arbcom is kind of like an internal court to solve user disputes. They are not allowed to solve content disputes or say what an article should say, only user behaviour problems). How is that a…

There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of decent editors who have stopped contributing due to toxic, non-productive people. This could be a way for them to continue contributing in a less toxic environment. The problem with Wikipedia is not consumption of content, but the contribution of content.

It could be, in the same way that drinking a cup of tea every morning could make me make rich somehow. Why do you expect a federated system to be better in this respect?
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