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Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

ibis.wiki

21–30 of 266 posts

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#21
post #9

…they couldn’t think of a good Wikipedia scandal from within the last decade? (The "why wikipedia is bad" bit at the start talks about things from 2005, 2007, and 2012.) Anyway, this might be pretty "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" since I work for the WMF, but I'm not really seeing much appeal from federation in this area. It certainly seems less relevant…

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

Truthiness is not bias.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.

We used them for further research or quick look up of facts you should know. That seems to be how people use Wikipedia.

That's how people should use Wikipedia, but people generally don't do so in my understanding.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#24
How does moderation work in this system, and if it results in multiple diverging pages on the same topic, how is any of it trusted?

As much as it's a complicated mess, a centralised system with a broad army of moderators operating to similar standards, is the feature of Wikipedia. They may be wrong at times, but they're accountable somewhat collectively for that and so hold each other to account.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#25

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.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#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 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. Others may document fictional universes from television series or videogames. If one instance is badly moderated or presents manipulated information, an alternative can easily be created. Yet all of them will be interconnected, and users can read and edit without leaving their home website.

This is absurd. You are describing WWW, except for the "without leaving their home website" bit, but I don't know why that feature is so important to you. You can just replace that by "without leaving their home browser of choice".

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#29
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias became much less relevant in general, but being one of the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia came to be used as a volatile source of information even though it didn't strive to be one.

We used them for further research or quick look up of facts you should know. That seems to be how people use Wikipedia.

We used to copy articles out of them for homework. The more things change…
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