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Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative (from Lemmy dev @Nutomic) (ibis.wiki)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I'm still skeptical of federation. Like this shit is so clunky:

You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]

But anyway

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 sounds more like a federated Wikia ("Fandom") alternative, not really a Wikipedia alternative. But even as a Wikipedia alternative, I don't think a decentralized Wikipedia is the best way to go. There will be too much formatting inconsistency between the various wikis, as you can see across existing wikis.

Anyway, plugging ProleWiki. It's kind of a general encyclopedia, but still focused on communism so I hesitate to call it a Wikipedia alternative either.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah I'm pretty skeptical as well tbh. I mean fine, you've made sort of a Wikia/fandom wiki but federated, that part I think is interesting and good, being able to have community wikis that can interlink in a more organized fashion...

But as far as the general interest/wikipedia use case, it's going to be so messy to have 12 (or 120 or 1200) different articles on Donald Trump, or any other topic. Wikipedia isn't particularly well maintained in terms of quality already, though it has plenty of critical mass for it to stay mostly up to date, and I don't think fragmenting it into a bunch of different sites with competing articles, different formatting, different quality standards, etc. will really be an improvement. I mean I'd use a ProleWiki style Ibis instance I guess, but god if you think the struggle sessions on here are bad imagine a fediverse wikipedia

Oh and on the technical level, you will be hosting the data of any encyclopedia you federate with. So it will probably descend into the same federation/defederation, blocklist/allowlist drama that lemmy and mastodon always seem to.

I feel like the first step to make this useful for general knowledge is to have an instance that's just a mirror of Wikipedia. Then build from there. Maybe have something analagous to crossposting so that other instances can crib wikipedia articles as a baseline, but make their own revisions and ultimately maintain their own version of the page.

Also specifically the kickstarting federation of new servers using the search bar is really pretty shit yeah