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Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

ibis.wiki

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Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#151

Post by kemayo »

mdaniel wrote: post #2

https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation > applying all associated edits in order. Instances can synchronize their articles with each other, and follow each other to receive updates about articles. Edits are done with diffs which are generated on the backend, and allow for conflict resolution similar to git. I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sinc…

Automatically merging updates between different variants of the article, in fact, seems like a terrible idea. This is because resolving conflicts between edits is easy, but making sure that (for lack of a better word) semantic conflicts don't make it through requires a manual review of changes.

Your CRDT merge can be a technological marvel that will seamlessly stitch together different edits on a topic... that say wildly different things about it, resulting in a completely nonsensical article.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#152

Post by kemayo »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #27

I'm sorry, but aren't web sites already federated? I don't understand what the technical contribution is here. If we wanted to build a federated network of wikis (do we?), then links to articles are just links and identity is provided by OpenID Connect. What have I misunderstood? > Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be tr…

I think the bit that makes it "federated" is that they want to use ActivityPub to synchronize articles between servers.

Based on https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation I think the practical impact of this would be that it'd be easy to have your personal Ibis instance be a fork of some big mainstream one, where the only difference is that e.g. your version of the Pigeons article explains that birds aren't real, but everything else is automatically kept in sync.

I'm not convinced this is particularly worthwhile, or much of an improvement over the existing "run a wiki" workflow.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#153

Post by kemayo »

hereonout2 wrote: post #25
cmeacham98 wrote: post #23

I clicked through, but the site is completely unusable on mobile, clearly hasn't even been tested let alone designed to work here.

It also has no articles, one of the main ones listed is titled "Hello World". Looks like a toy weekend project by someone learning web development. A worthy endeavour no doubt but not sure why it's on the front page.

My understanding is that the person creating it is also the person who made Lemmy, which is a somewhat-successful federated reddit-alternative. Existing notability translates into more interest in otherwise uninteresting things.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#154

Post by [deleted] »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #142

> 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 article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.

[deleted]

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#155

Post by kemayo »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #91

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.

The license does allow for it, but it's actually sort of tricky to do if you want to import it into a non-mediawiki system. Wikipedia makes really extensive use of templates in wikitext, which can be complicated nested things that can call out to Lua modules.

You can easily take Wikipedia's HTML output and use it, but reusing the source of those articles requires a lot of work on either compatibility or translation.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#157

Post by nick238 »

lenerdenator wrote: post #146
agumonkey wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "Blackjack and Hookers" reflex, from Futurama when Bender gets thrown out of the amusement park on the Moon and says "I'll start my own theme park... with blackjack!... and hookers!... in fact, forget the park!" EDIT: Basically that's how these projects turn out. Having a theme park was never the point; blackjack and hookers were the point. Having a federated Wikipedia alternative isn't the point; having an encyc…

Wikipedia + Blackjack + Hookers - Wikipedia = https://www.conservapedia.com/

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#158

Post by theamk »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #142

> 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 article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.

There is a non-zero amount of people who are unhappy with wikipedia's policy. The "rot in wikipedia" link gives some examples: "fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics"

I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#159

Post by fsckboy »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #142

> 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 article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.

sort of like you didn't even try to explain or make any argument why it might not be true?

Humans are selfish, fallible, lazy, unreliable, etc. what is every Shakespeare play about? what is the bible about? What is Greek mythology about? What are Aesop's fables about?

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#160

Post by BobaFloutist »

tux3 wrote: post #82
chris_wot wrote: post #63

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…

It's the ancient mass-internet-moderation problem. I have yet to see a system that, even with the best of intentions, is able to do both of the following:

1. Be sufficiently hardened and responsive to mass bad-faith attacks, from trolling to toxicity to coups. 2. Be gentle, welcoming, and patient with newcomers, making it easy to join the community and learn the norms.

Most systems fall somewhere imperfect on the spectrum between the two, with rare exceptions going almost entirely to one extreme or the other.

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