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Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

ibis.wiki

51–60 of 266 posts

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#51
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…

>I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sincerely doubt that git's conflict resolution is going to be a good experience

CRDT adds automatic conflict resolution, wikis need at most, if any, manual conflict resolution, because their page editing has little need for concurrent real-time edits, it's a slower process (ironic given the meaning of wiki in Hawaiian). About git, OP tried to explain to non-wiki editors what wikis do under the hood, conflict reconciliation in wikis is vaguely similar to git but simpler, and the tech Ibis uses, paired to a design for independence prone to content rotting (every url of the federation can differ even in context about any page), makes me smell of just importing by hand or by trust edits from peers into the backing store.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#52
post #39

Interesting. How does performance compare to other wikis? I'm thinking that something like this may be attractive for a browsable self-hosted private knowledge base with a "sync" server hosted on a VPS and local instances running on different machines which may or may not have persistent connections.

You'd likely have a much easier time using a file based wiki with rsync.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#53
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…

I think it depends what you want. Diffs are better if you want to review changes and intelligently merge them.

CDRT is better if you want there to be just one document that everyone is editing at the same time, with merging being an automatic process and the rare non-sensical merge being acceptable.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#55
post #41
post #28

I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.

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.

It is not appropriate to advertise in most online spaces for much the same reasons it is not appropriate to barge into a restaurant and walk from table to table peddling your wares to the customers. Spam is not an acceptable "business", and discussion spaces are not a plaform for spam.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#56

If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.

A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.

> but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.

What do you think it would supplement?

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#58
post #33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this could be an alternative to fandom.com

There are already alternatives to Fandom. I volunteer with Miraheze.org, which hosts wikis without all of the ads, has been up since 2015, and has recently become a US nonprofit. We're currently geared towards more technical users, but we're trying to make more tooling to simplify wiki administration as we've taken on more users. I also hear wiki.gg is pretty good, but they're focused on gaming wikis. A lot of Fandom…

Or just self-host, Mediawiki is pretty easy to setup, even for a large wiki.

I hear the folks running the Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki are doing so with a server that costs less than $20 a month and they’re hitting serious traffic numbers.

Re: Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

#59
post #44

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.

Idk if it was the first. Microsoft encarta was a pretty big player in that space back in the day.

Was Encarta ever released online? I only remember the CD-ROM version.
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