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Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

ibis.wiki

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Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#181

Post by chuckadams »

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…

I have corrected typos on Wikipedia and seen them reverted immediately without comment. Decided pretty quickly it wasn't worth the effort anymore.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#182

Post by rakoo »

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…

CRDTs make sure there is only one version, but that version might be garbage. Think taking all the lines from all conflicts in git. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes not. It's even worse than that: you don't know there was a conflict, so you don't know if there was a problem or not. It's trying to solve social problems with technology, it's never enough (but can bring us a good way there)

Manual merging is mandatory to have human meaning, so might as well use it all the time.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#183

Post by dghlsakjg »

rglullis wrote: post #180
dghlsakjg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized organizations (institutions?) are not at all immune to corruption and malevolent inside actors. One look at the world of decentralized crypto-currency more than proves that corruption is not limited to institutions. Corruption seems inherent to humans, the difference is that institutions are well aware of this, and frequently set up controls and systems to balance power and fight the most obvious forms…

No one (reasonable) ever said that decentralization makes us immune to corruption. The argument is that decentralization reduces concentration of power and the potential damage that inevitably will occur when anyone in a position of power fails or tries to abuse the power they have.

Again, look at crypto-currency, there have been more than ample examples that prove that a single person can aggregate power and wield it in self-interested ways.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#184

Post by arp242 »

theamk wrote: post #158
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.

That article is upset alternative "medicine" quackery isn't taken serious. In particular it seems upset that it calls Gary "you can cure AIDS with a diet" Null's fraudulent bullshit exact that. It calls Stephen Barrett from quackwatch "a discredited former psychiatrist", which is a blatant brazen lie.

That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism.

I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#185

Post by rglullis »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #183
rglullis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one (reasonable) ever said that decentralization makes us immune to corruption. The argument is that decentralization reduces concentration of power and the potential damage that inevitably will occur when anyone in a position of power fails or tries to abuse the power they have.

Again, look at crypto-currency, there have been more than ample examples that prove that a single person can aggregate power and wield it in self-interested ways.

It's the opposite: despite all the scams that have occurred in cryptocurrency, the overall system still continues to work.

Rug-pulls are inevitable, what matters is whether people are left with power to move on or if they are trapped into the corrupt system. How many people managed to leave the banking system after the crash of 2008?

See also: Reddit. Despite all the protests, the absolute majority of people went back to it and accepted the conditions.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#186

Post by vkou »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #172
ChrisKnott wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just picked a random political article to which I have no significant connection[0]; I don't notice "a lot of bias"...? For me Wikipedia is consistently amongst the least biased sources on the internet. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Labour_Party

Compare the first paragraphs of these two articles. Remember that Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign...

But... It was a misogynistic harassment campaign. Some maybe well-meaning useful idiots also hitched their horse to it (and most have not even been tarnished by it), but that was the main thrust of that adventure.

Is Wikipedia supposed to describe World War II as a 'small disagreement over national borders and ethnic purity', lest it be accused of partiality? A spade's a spade, a war's a war, a harassment campaign is... A harassment campaign.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#187

Post by brnt »

nick238 wrote: post #157
lenerdenator wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This is a useful resource but for other reasons than the authors intend.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#188

Post by abeppu »

So, I agree that I don't think a software project solves the problems the post starts out with. However, I wonder if the project can be used to solve other issues?

For example, I think there's a spectrum of knowledge-base like solutions, but the middle of the spectrum is often poorly served:

- wikipedia: global, canonical reference material. Is very good, and we almost all use it in some fashion.

- confluence/notion/gh-wiki: team knowledge base. Often spotty, stale, neglected.

- logseq/obsidian/org-mode: personal knowledge base, notes. Typically very idiosyncratic, sketchy, but can work very well for the people who put effort into it.

What if a "federated wiki" was targeted at the team/personal level? I'm not saying this is Ibis in its present form, but imagine:

- You keep your personal notes and knowledge store, in a way which is always implicitly contextualized against corresponding info (or lack of info) in the team knowledge store.

- When you're noting something new, or modifying something, you always have an easy path to push your personal addition/edit to the shared store.

- Ideally notes from everyone's work around or interaction with some X drives low-effort maintenance of the community reference of X.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#189

Post by arp242 »

chris_wot wrote: post #63
bawolff wrote: 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.

A decentralized wiki with little to no oversight sounds like a significantly more toxic environment to me. All those assholes and bad faith editors will be on your new decentralized network too.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#190

Post by throw4847285 »

rglullis wrote: post #180
dghlsakjg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized organizations (institutions?) are not at all immune to corruption and malevolent inside actors. One look at the world of decentralized crypto-currency more than proves that corruption is not limited to institutions. Corruption seems inherent to humans, the difference is that institutions are well aware of this, and frequently set up controls and systems to balance power and fight the most obvious forms…

No one (reasonable) ever said that decentralization makes us immune to corruption. The argument is that decentralization reduces concentration of power and the potential damage that inevitably will occur when anyone in a position of power fails or tries to abuse the power they have.

I don't think concentration of power is the root of corruption. Corruption is usually distributed across an entire system, and even if there is a boss at the top, they're reliant on a lot of other people to stay in power (see Tammany Hall). What corruption needs is mechanisms which can be exploited to ensure that a system designed for the public good can be used to enrich individuals.
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