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Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative (ibis.wiki)

submitted 8 months ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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[-] sab@kbin.social 109 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'm not sure I see the benefit of this. The point that Wikipedia might eventually become corrupted is made moot by the permissive licensing of the information there. The main challenge of the Wiki format is with fact checking and ensuring quality, which is only made more complicated by having a federated platform.

ActivityPub is great for creating the social web. The added benefit of ActivityPub for non-social services is not obvious to me at all.

That said, it's a cool proof of concept, and I'm sure it can be useful for certain types of federated content management - I just don't see how it could ever make sense as a Wikipedia alternative.

[-] frefi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 50 points 8 months ago

I can definitely see it being a better alternative to that Fandom wiki site

[-] Zorque@kbin.social 32 points 8 months ago

Throwing shit at a wall would be a better alternative to the Fandom wiki site.

[-] sab@kbin.social 20 points 8 months ago

Then again, why would a fan page want to open for contributions from outside of that fan page? Why would the Star Wars wiki federate edits with the Startrek wiki? On which page of the wiki would this make sense?

I just don't get it.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 26 points 8 months ago

At minimum it means you don't have to create two separate accounts to make edits on both instances.

[-] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 8 months ago

This sounds like you want federation to replace openID.

[-] frefi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 8 months ago

I guess you don't have to get it. I just mentioned that site as an example because it is kind of garbage, but it's useful for fans.

And the federation between fandoms would be like how different articles are connected on Wikipedia. For example, there are actors that had roles both in the Star Trek universe and the Star Wars universe.

[-] Zorque@kbin.social 4 points 8 months ago

Lots of those fan wikis just link to other websites. It's entirely possible to do that.

If you're on a Star Trek wiki, why would you want to go to a page that's almost exclusively talking about Star Wars information in relation to some actor other?

[-] frefi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago

I was pointing out that the two fandoms are actually connected by some actors because the person I was responding to seemed to be unaware.

Maybe no one does this, but I've looked at character pages and clicked on actors' pages if I liked them and wanted to see what other work they've done.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 6 points 8 months ago

The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren't affected by Fandom's problems.

Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I'm not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.

[-] frefi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 months ago

[-] yessikg 1 points 8 months ago

Fanlore already exists as an alternative

[-] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 46 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more sense to make an ActivityPub plugin for the open-source MediaWiki software Wikipedia runs on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could expand on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format it. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MW plugins—Semantic MediaWiki in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis, like articles that could query and aggregate information from other federated articles rather than just linking to the text.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 32 points 8 months ago

Mediawiki is an extremely complicated project with 1.2 million lines of PHP. For me it was much easier to implement this project with technology Im already familiar with. But of someone wants to create a Mediawiki plugin I would be happy to see that.

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 12 points 8 months ago

Both projects could run and integrate with each other. I like it.

[-] imsodin@infosec.pub 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Looks like a federated wiki, which is great. And not a Wikipedia alternative. What makes wikipedia wikipedia is not the tech. Social and knowledge problems can't be solved with tech ;)
As much as Wikipedia has issues, as the ibis announcement states, it also works in many places. And federating it won't help with the issues of bad moderation, quite the contrary. And as much as I like nutomic (thanks for syncthing-android ;) ), I don't hear many good things about the lemmy moderation story. So I have my doubts. Lets hope I am wrong. Plus anyway, federated wikis is a great thing to have, ignoring the whole Wikipedia aspect.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I would be willing to change the title, maybe "Announcing Ibis, the federated Wiki" ?

[-] ripcord@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

That would work much, much better I think.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago

Actually its too complicated to change the title in Ibis due to federation. Plus I would have to rewrite the whole intro. But I will keep it in mind for the future.

[-] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 1 points 8 months ago

What's wrong with lemmy moderation? I haven't had issues.

[-] imsodin@infosec.pub 1 points 8 months ago

Honest question out of interest: Are you doing moderation on lemmy? I just remember reading about admins/mods complaining about the lack of tooling, sometimes plain functionality (removal of certain things) for effective moderation. I am not doing any myself so that's very 3rd-party-ish knowledge (if you even want to call it that).

[-] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 2 points 8 months ago

Ahh sorry I misunderstood. I thought you meant moderation is bad from the user's perspective, not from the mod's perspective.

[-] cupcakezealot 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

wikipedia is already a great non profit source of public knowledge though i don't see the benefit of fracturing it

i can see a benefit to using this to replace things like fandom wikia though

[-] Etterra@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

The moderators of Wikipedia are largely a small, insular community that don't always care about accuracy when it comes from anyone outside their clique.

[-] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 14 points 8 months ago

This is a cool idea, but I highly encourage you to target mobile first. Reference works will get a LOT of mobile traffic. More than 80% of Wikipedia’s traffic is mobile.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 points 8 months ago

I'm not good at frontend development or webdesign so I definitely need help in those areas.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 7 points 8 months ago

What are the articles written in? Wiki lang (or whatever it's called) is horrendous, IMO. Hopefully this is markdown? I couldn't find after a quick browse through codebase and I don't think it's mentioned in the blog post.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 10 points 8 months ago

Yes it uses markdown.

[-] nutsack@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

i was going to screenshot the mobile browser view but it looks like half the comments are ripping on it already

[-] spaduf@slrpnk.net 3 points 8 months ago

This is super exciting. I think one of the things a lot of people are missing here is the potential for wikis to augment existing fediverse communities. Reddit's killer feature has always been the massive treasure trove of information for hobbyists and niche interests. There is huge potential in the fediverse to take advantage of that sort of natural collaborative knowledge building process.