"There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now twice as old?"<p>Ridiculous article. Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. I feel like these people have no idea what kind of effort is to run an organization, instead seeing the issues as part of the technical, or ideological underpinnings. It doesn't work that way, and I invite every hopeful to look up the list of alternative Wikis that have sprung up over the years.
> 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.<p>This article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.
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.
<a href="https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation">https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation</a><p>> 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.<p>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<p>Also, as I understand federated things, the real hazard to usefulness is one of <i>discovery</i>. So how would I, owner of a hypothetical mdaniel.wiki, <i>discover</i> who has the best CRDT documents in their wiki such that I could subscribe to updates on those pages? A wiki of wikis?
This feels like a really good idea, really <i>poorly explained,</i> especially with the whole "going up against Wikipedia" thing (Wikipedia being arguably the best mostly-decentralized thing ever?)<p>"Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth?
Wikipedia is an amalgam of a large number of humans editing w/ some guardrails provided by the guidelines and tech (clean-up bots, edit alerts). If there's a human problem (corruption, bias), there's no tech solution that'll magically make all of it go away.<p>The reason to make a new wiki or wiki-style technology is to serve a different informational niche, guided by different rules. There's a reason each video game has its own Wiki. You could fork Wikipedia to be more inclusionist, or have people from one particular political viewpoint - if that's your goal.<p>But re-creating Wikipedia to do exactly what it's supposed to do - form a body of encyclopedic knowledge (subject to copyright laws, etc) - this doesn't make sense, and isn't a convincing argument for a new Wikipedia, even if its distributed.
Reading through, this doesn't sound like a "federated wikipedia"<p>It sounds more like they want to implement the github fork & pull-request model of version control where currently Wikipedia uses a more SVN type of version control.<p>There are pros and cons to both models. However federation it is not. The mentioned controversies also seem entirely unrelated to which model you like.
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?<p>For example, I think there's a spectrum of knowledge-base like solutions, but the middle of the spectrum is often poorly served:<p>- wikipedia: global, canonical reference material. Is very good, and we almost all use it in some fashion.<p>- confluence/notion/gh-wiki: team knowledge base. Often spotty, stale, neglected.<p>- 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.<p>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:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- Ideally notes from everyone's work around or interaction with some X drives low-effort maintenance of the community reference of X.
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.<p>What have I misunderstood?<p>> 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.<p>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".
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?<p>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.
Wikipedia has a very slick website on mobile, desktop and mobile apps.<p>This page doesn't even render on my phone properly. Probably should fix that before it can approach being an alternative
…they couldn’t think of a good Wikipedia scandal from within the last decade?<p>(The "why wikipedia is bad" bit at the start talks about things from 2005, 2007, and 2012.)<p>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 than in social media, anyway.
I've been wanting to do this exact thing for a couple months, not for any of what their talking about.<p>I ran a wiki for local music artists. I started it on an ancient version of mediawiki for use with an ancient extension that wasn't even used, so overall bad idea. It no longer works on a modern version of php so I'm having a lot of trouble getting it back up.<p>But on that same note, a federation of local wikis, like for small towns/cities, artists that sort of thing, I think would be very cool.
To be added to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...</a>?<p>Edit: added at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals#2024" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...</a>
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.
> Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger.<p>As if the constant begging for donations they don't need and the shithole that is Fandom wans't enough to lower my opinion of ol Jimmy.
how does this solve the problem it claims to exist for?<p>i.e stopping scandals & improving trust?<p>if anything, this seems to be more prone to scandals and less trustworthy.
Cannot take a project like this seriously in 2024 while looking like total garbage [1] on mobile.<p>[1] <a href="https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg</a>
On iPhone, page renders with main content in a cell shoved hard-right with only two to five characters visible per line. I wasn’t even able to evaluate the content. Came here to mention this and it sounds like I’m not missing much.
There's probably an order of magnitude of people who don't edit Wikipedia because they're unhappy with Wikipedia's policies or its culture. I think the right Wikipedia alternative is probably viable and could maybe even be bigger and more successful than Wikipedia but alternatives generally fail because they can't get the critical mass of active editors necessary to keep the site updated especially on quickly changing topics where Wikipedia's approach is good enough for most people who'd be interested in editing on those topics. Forks (Infogalatic, Everipedia) typically become filled with outdated Wikipedia articles plus a few new articles about the creator's personal hobby horses. Just like features in open source software, articles in an open source online have to be maintained.<p>The most successful alternative to Wikipedia is probably Conservapedia which is largely edited, I believe, by American right wing political activists and evangelical Christian homeschooled teens. Their articles reflect the changes in American right wing politics over the past 20 years or so meaning some are out of date with the current party line because they haven't been touched in years. That's one model of competing with Wikipedia but an encyclopedia consisting of outright partisan political propaganda and outright religious propaganda isn't useful to most people even most people who agree with its viewpoint[0]. Counterintuitively, I think Conservapedia has probably been successful <i>because</i> it rewrote everything from scratch. That also ensures you won't get dinged by Google under the duplicate content policy and basically delisted from search.<p>I don't think federation is the right way to make a Wikipedia alternative viable because it is already an open source project run on open source software that anybody can fork. It's solving the wrong problem. The right problem to solve is getting a critical mass of editors who aren't just editing to push an agenda. That probably requires paid professional editors whose job is to maintain the encyclopedia. You can probably hire sufficiently smart people for $15 or so an hour because there are probably many smart people already working for that rate at McJobs[1]. That also makes your alternative appealing to current Wikipedia editors who are generally paid $0 to edit Wikipedia. If you're looking to hire expert editors, you'd probably have to pay more but you probably don't need experts. The downside of this is you have to have money to pay editors and probably to advertise that you're paying editors to create a competitor to Wikipedia. That also ensures you have enough editors to maintain the articles. I think Wikipedia alternative with paid editors would probably work as a relatively low risk but also low reward startup idea assuming there was sufficient funding behind it.<p>[0]: Wikipedia does have its own biases and "neutral point of view" is now basically equated with "objectivity" but it is far less in your face about its biases than Conservapedia which reads more like the timeline of a Twitter account that follows all of the big right wing influencers to Wikipedia's Google News.<p>[1]: Specifically, high school and college students. Also, many smart people who didn't go to college for whatever reason. They'd probably prefer writing over flipping burgers or running a checkout line.
The issue you seem to be trying to solve is that of authenticity and change management.<p>> The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information.<p>That is incorrect.<p>What you want is a block chain.