This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them.
Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.
I am also confused how this project improves upon Wikipedia's moderation issues. Especially calling Ibis "federated", is it more "federated" than Wikipedia is?
It's also not like Wikipedia is unusable because of these issues. As with any source of information it is necessary to be skeptical with wikipedia articles. Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.
And even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time now and contains millions of articles. With the scope and size of Wikipedia some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia also compiles their own backup collections.[1] If at any point Wikipedia becomes actually unusable anyone could use the existing article to produce a new alternative database.
> This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia
Are their issues really that valid?
> For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia's front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples
From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.
They seem like nitpicks to me.
I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.
A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues. In a single language like Vietnamese, where the majority of native speakers locate in a single country with heavy censorship and brainwashed by propaganda, articles about social, political matters and people can be very one-sided and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia. Change is extremely difficult due to the long term moderators, who obviously have agendas.
In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.
I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.
This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.
SE Asian countries are big on social hierarchy and social cohesion. In the West, we view this as these countries repressing their citizens, because that would have to be the situation for a Western country to behave like this. It's not so clear-cut there. SE Asia has a very strong, very ancient culture that is different to Western culture. We don't get to just say "you should do things our way".
One major difference is their attitude to authority: in the West if you disagree with your boss you are expected to say so, possibly in private. In SE Asia that would be unbelievably rude and disrespectful, even in private. This attitude flows out to government and leadership; criticising a leader is incredibly rude. They prioritise everyone getting along rather than The Truth [0].
SE Asia has no "free speech" media any more [1], partly for this reason. Their culture just doesn't prioritise this as value. I would expect their Wikipedia entries to reflect this, too.
[0] and given the shitshow of Western democracies lately, I'm not convinced our priorities are working so much better.
[1] you can argue this, it depends on your definition of any of the words in this sentence. But we can agree that the vast majority of media in SE Asia is directly controlled by government one way or another, and the remainder is indirectly controlled.
Your post raises an interesting point where 95+% of speakers of one language live in one country without anything resembling free speech. It is probably unavoidable. A better solution would be a parallel VN lang Wiki that is moderated by people offshore.
> A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues.
This is a wide brush stroke. Certainly on the English language version, there is a wide set of views offered for controversial topics. Do you make this claim only for VN land Wiki, or all Wikis?
I've taken a deeper look into the listed issues since writing my comment, and you're absolutely right:
- the named scandals occurred in 2012, 2005, and 2007 respectively, so more then a decade ago. For reference, the linked Ibis page was written about 7 months ago,
- the "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" article was written by a RT employee in 2018, and is hosted on a website that is no longer online. It doesn't make any compelling points against Wikipedia, and does not seem to take itself very seriously given the "red wikipedia with horns" image.
While centralizing moderation can be problematic, I'm not so convinced it actually is in Wikipedia's case.
Please see the recent grooming gangs article on the UK scandal of the same name. This is a good recent example of bad behaviour on wikipedia by activists looking to subvert the truth.
There are several articles on that topic. Perhaps it would be better if you were more explicit about which article or articles, and what the bad behaviour is.
I think this works much better for social media than it would for an encyclopedia - while a Mastodon user I'm interested in is likely on a single instance, a topic an encyclopedia would cover might be present on many instances, each hosting a different version. I don't think it's feasible to expect users to read every single one.
That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."
The problem there was also that it attracted some pretty seriously incompatible ideologies. Like neonazis on gab.com and tankies on lemmy.ml for example. That was never going to end well. How are they supposed to come to an agreement on moderation :)
And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned.
Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out.
Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3
Isn't wikipedia extremely progressive? That is largely the problem with it as far as I know: it is progressive to the point of denying child rape and the like. People editing their own page is light problems compared to dealing with fights over the Holocaust, the Catholic Church scandals or Islamic grooming gangs. Any new pedia should state how it solves this problem first and foremost.
They're not supposed to come to an agreement on moderation. The whole idea behind federation is that a company is not trying to navigate a middle ground between Nazis and chinese communists! :-)
Hmm yeah but the idea was not to duplicate moderation a thousand times. And then where is your community?
My problem is that the fediverse is tearing itself apart on tiny differences. Lots of instances have banned others from the same ideology because one little time someone said something one of the founders didn't agree with.
It's just not working like this. I think ideological choices should be made by the end user.
I think the instance should be agnostic like an internet browser. And moderation done by the groups the user subscribes to. That's the model that works. We had exactly this in Usenet which is just not really used anymore due to complex technical implementation.
In fediverse terminology your idea would be for accounts to seamlessly hop between instances (which are usenet groups), and a lot of other people think that would be a good change too. The only difficulty is engineering something where no individual server has authority over a login identity. It would all be so easy if browsers could sign POST requests with keypairs that the browser managed, but that's been resisted in web standards for decades.
Hmm no, I imagine they would stay on an instance (similar to the Usenet provider) and join groups or whatever they're called on mastodon, similar to the Usenet newsgroups.
And then the moderators would come from the management of each group, independently from which instance they're on. There would be no central authentication necessary. Just some way for moderators to prove their ownership, perhaps some kind of public key.
This way each group can do their own moderation. Of course some instances could decide not to carry some groups that go totally counter to them, but it should be a rare phenomenon. Similar to the old Usenet providers blocking binary groups (before that was the only thing Usenet was being used for anymore :) )
That’s what I don’t get about mastodon. Big servers use commonly shared block lists for others that don’t abide by their censorship rules. Now we’re back to something similar to what existed anyways - big powerful centralized social media separated from smaller ones that don’t benefit from networks.
> The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
I've always thought this is an inherent problem for all decentralized solutions. If one node or server or whatever it gets called grows big enough, it stops being decentralized.
If one (or even a few) federated server in a decentralized system becomes big enough to be the one that everyone uses, them it's just centralization with extra steps and a lot of moralization and handwaving.
Do decentralized/federated systems in general have a way of preventing this from happening?
For a more relativistic approach, built on nostr, see wikifreedia.xyz, which allows everyone to maintain their own version of any article, fork, vote, and merge as needed.
Seems a bit bloated. I opened the front page and could only see a list of recently edited pages, with the count constantly ticking up. Trying to open any of them by clicking them didn't do anything, seems like the page was ground to a halt. Tried to search 'wikifreedia' to see if there's a wiki page explaining what the project is about, but could not get the search to go through.
> Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
I've always thought about modeling this as vote based system votes support claims.
Like, "Israel's IDF is committing genocide in Palestine" would be maybe supported by Wikipedia, but would have opposing votes by the US and Israel, and it's up to each client to decide who to trust.
Non controversial claims would be generally supported, and on controversial ones you could have them scored given your prior trust in voters and have the UI mention it's controversial and show the underlying votes if you want to dig into that.
Wikipedia generally avoids resolving disputes democratically, instead opting to establish consensus based on sources where possible.
With voting systems you end up walking the tightrope between making your system susceptible to Sybil attacks and sockpuppetry on one end, and giving well-established users undue voting rights on another.
Sybil and sockpuppetry is solvable by "following" (possibly truth-weighted, can nicely express negative weights). The downside is that there is no global truth view, only individual ones based on who you grant trustworthiness and how it recursively expands – but arguably this reflects reality better.
"No global truth view" also makes discoverability difficult. How do you know whom to follow? Just people you already know from elsewhere?
Then if you don't know any subject-matter experts, will your individual view of the wiki be devoid of subject-matter expertise?
That arguably reflects reality better, but also isn't terribly useful.
Edit: I guess the situation of an expert correcting an article written by laypeople is similar to an expert replying to a layperson's toot or whatever. So maybe you could solve this by letting people see new edits made by other people on top of their own edits, and giving them the option to block or accept the change, or even follow the user in question.
It would be neutral which is current status quo, not that bad?
The nice part is that it would work the other way around as well – from article/subject back to people who endorse or object it – in case you want to follow (attract/repel their pov).
In reality who to follow should be easy as it would be recursive – if you follow MIT and MIT follows ie. Noam Chomsky – you wouldn't have to directly follow Noam as your trust would already exist as transitive one from MIT etc.
The status quo is not neutral. It is extremely biased, particularly against spam, vandalism and low-quality content. Its defense against sybil attacks and sockpuppetry is a single global truth, collectively patrolled by all users.
If you tried to do a neutral wiki anyone can edit, it would be full of ads and porn.
It was deprecated to "essay" status a while ago, because it was quite controversial, but not because it was inaccurate.
Wikipedia is not involved in the business of publishing Truth. Wikipedia's articles are based on Verifiability, which means that the assertions can be backed up and traced to the reliable sources that are provided alongside them.
If there is a dichotomy or controversy about the "truth" of a fact, well, then, Wikipedia documents that controversy, according to the reliably-published information about it.
Wikipedia projects work within the languages they're published in, for better or worse. That means, a Vietnamese wiki will generally be run by and for people who speak Vietnamese, and will generally rely on sources published in that language. So if there is a consensus about a fact or assertion in Vietnamese-language sources, and it's agreed by people who speak Vietnamese, then it wouldn't be easy to break through that consensus, even if you had a sincerely held belief.
Which brings us to another Wikipedian axiom: WP:RGW.
People who edit Wikipedia shouldn't be concerned about "Righting Great Wrongs" through editing or discussion. If there is injustice in the world, it will likely be reflected in Wikipedia, despite striving to be a collegial utopia, it is not usually possible to change the world from activism there, and activist editors are eventually blocked and banned for being non-neutral.
It's not exactly democracy once you add weights penalising erroneous information and bad actors.
Science kind of works this way, you have papers to support, and lack of rebuttal is sort of understood as general acceptance, new evidence updates our beliefs about old information.
I think it should be feasible to encode this general agreement into something that can be put into a database. No one has succeeded I guess, and it seems a bit harder since "flatearther-12345" is initially the same as "actual_scientist" since it's hard to have verified identity and offer anonymity at the same time.
Yea but the list of sources accepted is itself editorialization. And furthermore the articles are unbalanced and incomplete on anything controversial, choosing to quote from sources supporting the view espoused and ignoring others.
That model doesn’t work because there are plenty of issues on which a vote by the US would increase my confidence in the truthfulness of a claim, but others where it would not make a difference, or even decrease my confidence.
I don't think it's impossible to encode that, but yeah, it means that the straightforward approach meets immediate edge cases that may render it broken.
Exactly, votes + who you trust-follow (ie. "MIT" with high degree, "Flat Earth Society" with high negative degree) – recursively; creates your own landscape of truth-weighted information.
I have a different approach — rather than keeping people apart in echo chambers, I force them all together in a centralized site where they have to see the best arguments for and against each claim
I get the concerns towards Wikipedia governance, but this feels almost like slacktivism. It’s been done numerous times, to slap ActivityPub onto a communication mode and call it a „federated foobar alternative”. It never works, it always fails to gain meaningful adoption. The federated hosts end up in disputes between themselves and their users. It’s mostly a miserable experience.
There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
Hmm when has it happened in the past? This is literally the Lemmy creator so it seems somewhat unique! But I could definitely just be behind the times.
Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
Federation is the open source answer to microservices.
Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.
If by "never works" you mean "someone's side project whose monetization strategy is to put up a donation link never takes down an established business worth hundreds of millions in a fraction of the time it took for such business to establish itself as some sort of a monopoly", then yeah, no shit.
I don't have any particular trust (or distrust) in Wikipedia as an institution, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse: is there a reason to believe that a federated wiki would be more accountable, rather than less?
(This isn't meant to be a jab; I like federated stuff. But I'm also not sure the order of operations is right here.)
The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I only care if my mayor is accountable to me. Making mayors into presidential appointees would represent a slight increase in my influence in the city code of places I don't know the name of, but that's not a great trade for my influence in the city I live in.
When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people.
Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
I don't know about accountability on the part of the participants, but in theory it ought to be harder to attack because success means coordinating a consistent (maliciously-altered) experience across infra maintained by a wider variety of people, some of whom might be harder to coerce than others.
In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately.
So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
Serious question: why are we talking about Wikipedia like it has the same shape of trust problem as the Web PKI? With Wikipedia, you or I or anybody else can go and edit out the obvious misinformation. That leaves subtle misinformation, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that.
It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
I could be off base here, but I see federation as a way of ensuring that those with privileged access can't leverage control over the whole platform. If they try, others will block the parts which have been corrupted, and the rest will carry on.
If you're willing to win the hearts and minds of an army of pedantic nerds, it matters little whether you're on a federated platform or not: you're playing by the rules.
So my thinking was: Of the types of privileged access that might be used to sidestep the nerds, which of these does Ibis prevent? So far as I can tell, it's misbehaving server admins (of the type that Musk might be capable of pushing around) but not misbehaving ISP or CA employees (of the type that a government might be capable of pushing around).
If it's not actually a matter of who-are-the-bullies-and-what-are-their-capabilities? Then I'm sorry to have been distracting. It's just that I'd really like to use some sort of peer to peer assertion consensus/criticism engine which was more durable than the web. I was reacting to this not being that.
If you're skeptical about Wikipedia, you can easily create your own fork of Wikipedia: the data and code is open source after all. In the end, it’s all about whether you can keep a community alive and kicking. No one gives a damn about whether a wiki is built on ActivityPub.
There are many examples: Larry Sanger, who was mentioned in the article, created Citizendium after breaking from Wikipedia.[0] He was then involved with Everipedia, a for-profit venture built the original code base which later morphed into crypto nonsense.[1]
There are many examples of other wikis too. Some are focused[2][3], some are fun[4][5], some are revisionist[6][7][8], and some meet the requirements of totalitarian regimes[9][10].
If Wikipedia’s not your style, grab the code, rally a crowd, and make the encyclopedia you want to see—just know it’s the people, not the platform, that make it thrive.
A social problem is by definition one with a social solution. If we can find a technical solution to a problem, it turns into a technical problem. Wikipedia is itself a technology. It's not outrageous to suggest that new technologies can improve on it.
Just because something is based on technology does not mean that any problem is has is solvable with different technology. This is a lesson that it seems we need to learn over and over. The hard part of a system designed to squish together the brains of millions of humans and somehow wring truth out of the chaos is a fundamentally messy human system whose issues aren't solved by putting all those messy humans on a new platform.
But, if it is successful, I suspect it will drag us farther towards a "post-truth" society, where every niche political view literally has its own encyclopedia by which it understands the world.
What we need is something more like: a hybrid of Wikipedia as it exists now, and Community Notes. Try to build in some mechanisms to keep the forces of partisanship at bay.
If the top "scandals" in the article are considered reasons to change, just wait until the alt-crew get a hold of wikipedia. Medical, political, science, education, religion discussions would all be even more crazy when people can point to some wiki gospel as proof. We'd find the list of scandals grows a thousandfold.
Wikipedia is amazing, if imperfect. Make it better, don't try to break it by splintering it into some weird "whatever you think is right" solution. That's already what we have in social media. Truth is already federated enough.
Edit: what would convince me more is some demonstration article/cluster of articles and maybe some math proof that shows how this is better, through faster convergence on truth, defence against rando's etc. I think even getting a definition of "better" would be a bit of a battle!
I read this and I immediately understand that this project is being written by a man who isn't practical, isn't bothered with reality, and is solely focused on "How things should be and how everybody should act this way" rather than understanding how the world actually is.
Actually, a lot of people use Lemmy, and there's pretty decent content on it in the communities. I post Linux stuff mostly and my threads get a lot of comments. Or I'll ask questions like "What are everybody's cool not so well known websites" and get a ton of feedback. Accounts are accessible via Mastodon as well, it isn't ideal, but, it's some kind of start.
So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
That seems like a very cynical take. Is it a stated goal or expectation of the author that more than what you deem "nobody" will use this over a centralized wiki? Is that what you're criticizing, or is it just handwaving the project away the same way one could say Linux distributions (see: year of the linux desktop) and other things "nobody uses" don't matter and are disjointed from reality?
I have the same problem with this that I do with "federated forums" or "federated forges"—what does it even mean for an encyclopedia to be federated? In fact, they already are—if I want to go look up information about Minecraft, I can use the federated internet to go to minecraft.wiki.
So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?
As with all Wikipedia competitors, this misses two key points
Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. Scandals aside over decades hundreds of thousands of people have built out the content and continue to do so - that is not easy to emulate.
Also for all the scandals, the toughest problems in WP early days were spammers and trolls. Moderation is a niche community problem (which till you have a community is moot). Stopping bot armies and countless trolls is a day 1 issue.
One good thing about Wikipedia is that it is pretty open with regards to internal affairs. If you want to criticize Wikipedia, there is no better source than Wikipedia itself.
If you truly never believe anything anyone has ever told you until you prove it yourself, I'm amazed you've somehow learned to type in English on a website with accounts.
We trust people all the time for many reasons. Authority, past experience, logic (why would they lie about something in context), etc. and we get by alright. Knowing it's another conscious, mortal human existing in society makes it much easier to know when someone is likely being truthful.
Obviously there are all sorts of caveats to that. The main difference is that LLMs don't lie. They don't tell the truth either. They just generate stuff with no meaning. There's no way to ever put any trust in that, the same way I wouldn't trust my ice maker to make sure my dog gets enough water while I'm on vacation.
> 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.
Doesn't MediaWiki (and other common wikis) support this kind of thing already via the InterWiki-links system? You can set up a MediaWiki install such that [[geology:Mountain]] and [[poetry:Mountain]] go to the appropriate places. What does Ibis add that's not accounted for by this?
Besides, these days you also have https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8502 - which includes links to the concept of "mountain" as represented in hundreds of sites. (You can use a browser-extension known as Entity-Explosion to make your browser aware of these links, giving you the ability to browse from any of the listed sites to any other with just a few clicks.)
Some sort of federation has already been discussed in the Wikimedia universe [1]. It aims to operate at a lower level, federating structured data between different specialized wikibases [2]. AFAIK it has not (yet?) seen much development and/or traction.
ActivityPub style federation opens up some interesting technical possibilities for exchanging data but if the main motivation is to "fix" the consensus/moderation processes of Wikipedia one should start with outlining how that would work.
It's legitimate to create alternatives to anything, and to re-think what has been done already.
One thing that would be on my personal wish list for any Wikipedia alternative is ease of machine processing: the MediaWiki format/mark-up and the templates are horribly inconsistent and a nightmare to parse. This should be done better by any serious successor. Wikipedia has got the excuse "historically grown", any successor doesn't.
For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself.
The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.
It'd be more convincing if the "problems with Wikipedia" section referenced anything from the last decade. (Also, one of the three things that apparently warranted being called out as an example was pretty petty -- the ArbCom member's on-wiki job didn't have anything to do with how they misrepresented their credentials.)
Sounds great. I want an openly opinionated wikipedia where a supposed fact is acknowledged as known to possibly exist even when the source is not known (but this should be indicated), where it is Ok to mention an opinion (also labelled) and where nobody deletes "unimportant" pages/facts others write.
It's super-cool to see an alternative approach to dealing with Wikipedia content disputes.
In the past, when there have been Wikipedia forks, they haven't generally tried to stay in sync with Wikipedia, at least not in both directions. Do we have an example of long-term forks of collaborative software or text editing projects that did manage to keep sharing productively in multiple directions? Maybe the BSDs to some extent?
I wonder how much work people are willing to do to keep actively collaborating with people whom they have big ongoing disagreements with (at least in areas where those disagreements don't have an impact). Or can such collaboration be made relatively seamless with appropriate tooling?
Fascinating that the first person cited on this site's announcement page is Helen Buyniski, a "journalist" for Russian state media and a COVID conspiracy theorist. It's almost as if this project has an agenda.
Federation of a wiki is... well, it's a bit strange, isn't it? Imagine if only one library at a time held a copy of a given book you need, and the only way to access that book was via an inter-library loan via library partnerships, or by visiting the library that has the book. This is assuredly the situation many academics are in for key reference texts, but it is not what I'd call ideal. It is in fact very fragile at times. There is a book I need right now, for example, but if I want to read it I will have to drive to see it... The library that has it won't send it for ILL. In a physical sense they "declined to federate."
The difference between a wiki and a social media network is that anyone can spin up a template social media site; the fundamental user-side barrier to entry is pretty small. The same is not true of wikis - at least not high quality ones. Documentary standards, tone, quality, reviewership, consistency, policy, moderation, accountability, leadership, thoroughness, these are all qualities that take time and commitment to develop. They are hallmarks of centralization for a reason: arguably the innovation of human governance is centered around qualities like these. They take a long time to develop.
As a counterpart to Wikipedia, well... fragmentation is often a death knell for efficient knowledge transfer. We are already losing massive swathes of our early Internet history due to fragmentation, attrition, and destruction. The thought that any piece of knowledge stored in a safehouse could go offline at once, without replication or warning, it scares me a bit. The thought that we don't really know who we're trusting as stewards of human knowledge in a federated model disturbs me too. You can have your issues with Wikipedia but at least you know who they are. You know their biases.
That's not to say there aren't use cases for this... but man, this seems like an easy way to lose or destroy important parts of our shared history on accident.
Meaning it's like email. I can have my own domain name - @example.com , not just Gmail, and they talk to each other so people on Gmail can send email outside of Gmail, and people can send emails into Gmail.
It means that each federated technology creates a federation of "self-governing" entities, for example Mastodon servers. The meaning is very similar to the political meaning of the word.
How does this overcome power struggles and bias? That’s the most important question for me, as bias in Wikipedia is rampant these days, and even acknowledged by its founder.
If the maintainers are reading this is cool. I would start with an exporter/importer for pages from Wikipedia format into whatever format you use, it should also deal with the media. This is no small task but what you need.
It's legitimately a pain to do, because most Wikipedia articles use a bunch of templates. So for anything outside the most-simple of articles you suddenly have to implement a lot of the more painful bits of wikitext. Then if you want to import them back to Wikipedia, you've got to match those things back up or you'll get reverted for messing up the page...
Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.
This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them.
Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.
I am also confused how this project improves upon Wikipedia's moderation issues. Especially calling Ibis "federated", is it more "federated" than Wikipedia is?
It's also not like Wikipedia is unusable because of these issues. As with any source of information it is necessary to be skeptical with wikipedia articles. Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.
And even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time now and contains millions of articles. With the scope and size of Wikipedia some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia also compiles their own backup collections.[1] If at any point Wikipedia becomes actually unusable anyone could use the existing article to produce a new alternative database.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
> This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia
Are their issues really that valid?
> For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia's front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples
From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.
They seem like nitpicks to me.
I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.
A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues. In a single language like Vietnamese, where the majority of native speakers locate in a single country with heavy censorship and brainwashed by propaganda, articles about social, political matters and people can be very one-sided and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia. Change is extremely difficult due to the long term moderators, who obviously have agendas.
In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.
I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.
This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.
SE Asian countries are big on social hierarchy and social cohesion. In the West, we view this as these countries repressing their citizens, because that would have to be the situation for a Western country to behave like this. It's not so clear-cut there. SE Asia has a very strong, very ancient culture that is different to Western culture. We don't get to just say "you should do things our way".
One major difference is their attitude to authority: in the West if you disagree with your boss you are expected to say so, possibly in private. In SE Asia that would be unbelievably rude and disrespectful, even in private. This attitude flows out to government and leadership; criticising a leader is incredibly rude. They prioritise everyone getting along rather than The Truth [0].
SE Asia has no "free speech" media any more [1], partly for this reason. Their culture just doesn't prioritise this as value. I would expect their Wikipedia entries to reflect this, too.
[0] and given the shitshow of Western democracies lately, I'm not convinced our priorities are working so much better.
[1] you can argue this, it depends on your definition of any of the words in this sentence. But we can agree that the vast majority of media in SE Asia is directly controlled by government one way or another, and the remainder is indirectly controlled.
Your post raises an interesting point where 95+% of speakers of one language live in one country without anything resembling free speech. It is probably unavoidable. A better solution would be a parallel VN lang Wiki that is moderated by people offshore.
This is a wide brush stroke. Certainly on the English language version, there is a wide set of views offered for controversial topics. Do you make this claim only for VN land Wiki, or all Wikis?I've taken a deeper look into the listed issues since writing my comment, and you're absolutely right:
- the named scandals occurred in 2012, 2005, and 2007 respectively, so more then a decade ago. For reference, the linked Ibis page was written about 7 months ago,
- the "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" article was written by a RT employee in 2018, and is hosted on a website that is no longer online. It doesn't make any compelling points against Wikipedia, and does not seem to take itself very seriously given the "red wikipedia with horns" image.
While centralizing moderation can be problematic, I'm not so convinced it actually is in Wikipedia's case.
It is kind of bizarre that they are using those scandals.
I'm fully on team wikipedia, but i could certainly come up with more recent & better scandals than that.
Ultimately though, wikipedia isn't perfect. The important part is to learn from past mistakes and fix them - not to make no mistakes ever.
How about this one?
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
Please see the recent grooming gangs article on the UK scandal of the same name. This is a good recent example of bad behaviour on wikipedia by activists looking to subvert the truth.
There are several articles on that topic. Perhaps it would be better if you were more explicit about which article or articles, and what the bad behaviour is.
>But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.
I think this works much better for social media than it would for an encyclopedia - while a Mastodon user I'm interested in is likely on a single instance, a topic an encyclopedia would cover might be present on many instances, each hosting a different version. I don't think it's feasible to expect users to read every single one.
That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."
The problem there was also that it attracted some pretty seriously incompatible ideologies. Like neonazis on gab.com and tankies on lemmy.ml for example. That was never going to end well. How are they supposed to come to an agreement on moderation :)
And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned.
Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out.
Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3
Isn't wikipedia extremely progressive? That is largely the problem with it as far as I know: it is progressive to the point of denying child rape and the like. People editing their own page is light problems compared to dealing with fights over the Holocaust, the Catholic Church scandals or Islamic grooming gangs. Any new pedia should state how it solves this problem first and foremost.
They're not supposed to come to an agreement on moderation. The whole idea behind federation is that a company is not trying to navigate a middle ground between Nazis and chinese communists! :-)
Hmm yeah but the idea was not to duplicate moderation a thousand times. And then where is your community?
My problem is that the fediverse is tearing itself apart on tiny differences. Lots of instances have banned others from the same ideology because one little time someone said something one of the founders didn't agree with.
It's just not working like this. I think ideological choices should be made by the end user.
I think the instance should be agnostic like an internet browser. And moderation done by the groups the user subscribes to. That's the model that works. We had exactly this in Usenet which is just not really used anymore due to complex technical implementation.
In fediverse terminology your idea would be for accounts to seamlessly hop between instances (which are usenet groups), and a lot of other people think that would be a good change too. The only difficulty is engineering something where no individual server has authority over a login identity. It would all be so easy if browsers could sign POST requests with keypairs that the browser managed, but that's been resisted in web standards for decades.
Hmm no, I imagine they would stay on an instance (similar to the Usenet provider) and join groups or whatever they're called on mastodon, similar to the Usenet newsgroups.
And then the moderators would come from the management of each group, independently from which instance they're on. There would be no central authentication necessary. Just some way for moderators to prove their ownership, perhaps some kind of public key.
This way each group can do their own moderation. Of course some instances could decide not to carry some groups that go totally counter to them, but it should be a rare phenomenon. Similar to the old Usenet providers blocking binary groups (before that was the only thing Usenet was being used for anymore :) )
That’s what I don’t get about mastodon. Big servers use commonly shared block lists for others that don’t abide by their censorship rules. Now we’re back to something similar to what existed anyways - big powerful centralized social media separated from smaller ones that don’t benefit from networks.
> The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
I've always thought this is an inherent problem for all decentralized solutions. If one node or server or whatever it gets called grows big enough, it stops being decentralized.
If one (or even a few) federated server in a decentralized system becomes big enough to be the one that everyone uses, them it's just centralization with extra steps and a lot of moralization and handwaving.
Do decentralized/federated systems in general have a way of preventing this from happening?
For a more relativistic approach, built on nostr, see wikifreedia.xyz, which allows everyone to maintain their own version of any article, fork, vote, and merge as needed.
Seems a bit bloated. I opened the front page and could only see a list of recently edited pages, with the count constantly ticking up. Trying to open any of them by clicking them didn't do anything, seems like the page was ground to a halt. Tried to search 'wikifreedia' to see if there's a wiki page explaining what the project is about, but could not get the search to go through.
So move the moderation decisions onto the end user? Somehow this doesn’t feel like progress.
> Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
I've always thought about modeling this as vote based system votes support claims.
Like, "Israel's IDF is committing genocide in Palestine" would be maybe supported by Wikipedia, but would have opposing votes by the US and Israel, and it's up to each client to decide who to trust. Non controversial claims would be generally supported, and on controversial ones you could have them scored given your prior trust in voters and have the UI mention it's controversial and show the underlying votes if you want to dig into that.
Wikipedia generally avoids resolving disputes democratically, instead opting to establish consensus based on sources where possible.
With voting systems you end up walking the tightrope between making your system susceptible to Sybil attacks and sockpuppetry on one end, and giving well-established users undue voting rights on another.
Sybil and sockpuppetry is solvable by "following" (possibly truth-weighted, can nicely express negative weights). The downside is that there is no global truth view, only individual ones based on who you grant trustworthiness and how it recursively expands – but arguably this reflects reality better.
"No global truth view" also makes discoverability difficult. How do you know whom to follow? Just people you already know from elsewhere?
Then if you don't know any subject-matter experts, will your individual view of the wiki be devoid of subject-matter expertise?
That arguably reflects reality better, but also isn't terribly useful.
Edit: I guess the situation of an expert correcting an article written by laypeople is similar to an expert replying to a layperson's toot or whatever. So maybe you could solve this by letting people see new edits made by other people on top of their own edits, and giving them the option to block or accept the change, or even follow the user in question.
It would be neutral which is current status quo, not that bad?
The nice part is that it would work the other way around as well – from article/subject back to people who endorse or object it – in case you want to follow (attract/repel their pov).
In reality who to follow should be easy as it would be recursive – if you follow MIT and MIT follows ie. Noam Chomsky – you wouldn't have to directly follow Noam as your trust would already exist as transitive one from MIT etc.
The status quo is not neutral. It is extremely biased, particularly against spam, vandalism and low-quality content. Its defense against sybil attacks and sockpuppetry is a single global truth, collectively patrolled by all users.
If you tried to do a neutral wiki anyone can edit, it would be full of ads and porn.
It's neutral in the sense that it's not trust-weight-filtered by observer.
It can be created yes, just like any web page can be created, but won't surface for anybody because nobody will endorse it.
If it's endorsed by sybil accounts – it'll be visible to sybils and their followers – ie. nobody real.
To rephrase it – following somebody means it alters your view and nothing else – it's uni-directional (but recursive).
Wikipedia has an explainer called "Verifiability, Not Truth". It was quite popular to reference this during disputes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
It was deprecated to "essay" status a while ago, because it was quite controversial, but not because it was inaccurate.
Wikipedia is not involved in the business of publishing Truth. Wikipedia's articles are based on Verifiability, which means that the assertions can be backed up and traced to the reliable sources that are provided alongside them.
If there is a dichotomy or controversy about the "truth" of a fact, well, then, Wikipedia documents that controversy, according to the reliably-published information about it.
Wikipedia projects work within the languages they're published in, for better or worse. That means, a Vietnamese wiki will generally be run by and for people who speak Vietnamese, and will generally rely on sources published in that language. So if there is a consensus about a fact or assertion in Vietnamese-language sources, and it's agreed by people who speak Vietnamese, then it wouldn't be easy to break through that consensus, even if you had a sincerely held belief.
Which brings us to another Wikipedian axiom: WP:RGW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tendentious_editing#...
People who edit Wikipedia shouldn't be concerned about "Righting Great Wrongs" through editing or discussion. If there is injustice in the world, it will likely be reflected in Wikipedia, despite striving to be a collegial utopia, it is not usually possible to change the world from activism there, and activist editors are eventually blocked and banned for being non-neutral.
It's a nice claim, but ultimately Wikipedia is publishing its own truth based on the sources it allows or doesn't.
It's not exactly democracy once you add weights penalising erroneous information and bad actors.
Science kind of works this way, you have papers to support, and lack of rebuttal is sort of understood as general acceptance, new evidence updates our beliefs about old information. I think it should be feasible to encode this general agreement into something that can be put into a database. No one has succeeded I guess, and it seems a bit harder since "flatearther-12345" is initially the same as "actual_scientist" since it's hard to have verified identity and offer anonymity at the same time.
Obligatory - Wikipedia is not a democracy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_...
(Or the related / more in depth "Polling is not a substitute for discussion" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_s...)
Yea but the list of sources accepted is itself editorialization. And furthermore the articles are unbalanced and incomplete on anything controversial, choosing to quote from sources supporting the view espoused and ignoring others.
That model doesn’t work because there are plenty of issues on which a vote by the US would increase my confidence in the truthfulness of a claim, but others where it would not make a difference, or even decrease my confidence.
I don't think it's impossible to encode that, but yeah, it means that the straightforward approach meets immediate edge cases that may render it broken.
Exactly, votes + who you trust-follow (ie. "MIT" with high degree, "Flat Earth Society" with high negative degree) – recursively; creates your own landscape of truth-weighted information.
This requires web-of-trust/friend-to-friend or similar system, and despite numerous attempts none of such things had ever succeeded so far.
I have a different approach — rather than keeping people apart in echo chambers, I force them all together in a centralized site where they have to see the best arguments for and against each claim
Building this to clean up online discourse: https://rational.app
Anyone want to join me? Reply or find my email in my profile
I get the concerns towards Wikipedia governance, but this feels almost like slacktivism. It’s been done numerous times, to slap ActivityPub onto a communication mode and call it a „federated foobar alternative”. It never works, it always fails to gain meaningful adoption. The federated hosts end up in disputes between themselves and their users. It’s mostly a miserable experience.
There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
Hmm when has it happened in the past? This is literally the Lemmy creator so it seems somewhat unique! But I could definitely just be behind the times.
Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
There are one or two.
https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub
Also https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/
Federation is the open source answer to microservices.
Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.
If by "never works" you mean "someone's side project whose monetization strategy is to put up a donation link never takes down an established business worth hundreds of millions in a fraction of the time it took for such business to establish itself as some sort of a monopoly", then yeah, no shit.
I don't have any particular trust (or distrust) in Wikipedia as an institution, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse: is there a reason to believe that a federated wiki would be more accountable, rather than less?
(This isn't meant to be a jab; I like federated stuff. But I'm also not sure the order of operations is right here.)
The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I only care if my mayor is accountable to me. Making mayors into presidential appointees would represent a slight increase in my influence in the city code of places I don't know the name of, but that's not a great trade for my influence in the city I live in.
Yeah, but the question here is how your mayor being accountable to you helps with the problem that everyone's president is not being held accountable?
Exactly how does it help that there's a bunch of small Wikipedia mirrors with like four different pages each that differ from the main one.
Imagine if there was only one soft drink brand, or a single giant book.
When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people.
Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
I don't know about accountability on the part of the participants, but in theory it ought to be harder to attack because success means coordinating a consistent (maliciously-altered) experience across infra maintained by a wider variety of people, some of whom might be harder to coerce than others.
In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately.
So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
Serious question: why are we talking about Wikipedia like it has the same shape of trust problem as the Web PKI? With Wikipedia, you or I or anybody else can go and edit out the obvious misinformation. That leaves subtle misinformation, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that.
It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
I could be off base here, but I see federation as a way of ensuring that those with privileged access can't leverage control over the whole platform. If they try, others will block the parts which have been corrupted, and the rest will carry on.
If you're willing to win the hearts and minds of an army of pedantic nerds, it matters little whether you're on a federated platform or not: you're playing by the rules.
So my thinking was: Of the types of privileged access that might be used to sidestep the nerds, which of these does Ibis prevent? So far as I can tell, it's misbehaving server admins (of the type that Musk might be capable of pushing around) but not misbehaving ISP or CA employees (of the type that a government might be capable of pushing around).
If it's not actually a matter of who-are-the-bullies-and-what-are-their-capabilities? Then I'm sorry to have been distracting. It's just that I'd really like to use some sort of peer to peer assertion consensus/criticism engine which was more durable than the web. I was reacting to this not being that.
Social problems demand social solutions.
If you're skeptical about Wikipedia, you can easily create your own fork of Wikipedia: the data and code is open source after all. In the end, it’s all about whether you can keep a community alive and kicking. No one gives a damn about whether a wiki is built on ActivityPub.
There are many examples: Larry Sanger, who was mentioned in the article, created Citizendium after breaking from Wikipedia.[0] He was then involved with Everipedia, a for-profit venture built the original code base which later morphed into crypto nonsense.[1]
There are many examples of other wikis too. Some are focused[2][3], some are fun[4][5], some are revisionist[6][7][8], and some meet the requirements of totalitarian regimes[9][10].
If Wikipedia’s not your style, grab the code, rally a crowd, and make the encyclopedia you want to see—just know it’s the people, not the platform, that make it thrive.
[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page
[1]: https://rosettacode.org/
[2]: https://citizendium.org/
[3]: https://iq.wiki/
[4]: https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page
[5]: https://edramatica.com/Main_Page
[6]: https://www.metapedia.org/
[7]: https://www.conservapedia.com/
[8]: https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
[9]: https://www.qiuwenbaike.cn
[10]: https://ruwiki.ru
A social problem is by definition one with a social solution. If we can find a technical solution to a problem, it turns into a technical problem. Wikipedia is itself a technology. It's not outrageous to suggest that new technologies can improve on it.
Just because something is based on technology does not mean that any problem is has is solvable with different technology. This is a lesson that it seems we need to learn over and over. The hard part of a system designed to squish together the brains of millions of humans and somehow wring truth out of the chaos is a fundamentally messy human system whose issues aren't solved by putting all those messy humans on a new platform.
I believe this effort is well-intentioned.
But, if it is successful, I suspect it will drag us farther towards a "post-truth" society, where every niche political view literally has its own encyclopedia by which it understands the world.
My take: Wikipedia's problem is that it was not set up to moderate factual disputes or identify truth. See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
What we need is something more like: a hybrid of Wikipedia as it exists now, and Community Notes. Try to build in some mechanisms to keep the forces of partisanship at bay.
See previous discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045
163 points | 252 comments
If the top "scandals" in the article are considered reasons to change, just wait until the alt-crew get a hold of wikipedia. Medical, political, science, education, religion discussions would all be even more crazy when people can point to some wiki gospel as proof. We'd find the list of scandals grows a thousandfold.
Wikipedia is amazing, if imperfect. Make it better, don't try to break it by splintering it into some weird "whatever you think is right" solution. That's already what we have in social media. Truth is already federated enough.
Edit: what would convince me more is some demonstration article/cluster of articles and maybe some math proof that shows how this is better, through faster convergence on truth, defence against rando's etc. I think even getting a definition of "better" would be a bit of a battle!
> I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years.
I read this and I immediately understand that this project is being written by a man who isn't practical, isn't bothered with reality, and is solely focused on "How things should be and how everybody should act this way" rather than understanding how the world actually is.
No one uses Lemmy, man.
Actually, a lot of people use Lemmy, and there's pretty decent content on it in the communities. I post Linux stuff mostly and my threads get a lot of comments. Or I'll ask questions like "What are everybody's cool not so well known websites" and get a ton of feedback. Accounts are accessible via Mastodon as well, it isn't ideal, but, it's some kind of start.
So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
That seems like a very cynical take. Is it a stated goal or expectation of the author that more than what you deem "nobody" will use this over a centralized wiki? Is that what you're criticizing, or is it just handwaving the project away the same way one could say Linux distributions (see: year of the linux desktop) and other things "nobody uses" don't matter and are disjointed from reality?
I don't intend to be mean but isn't the federated wikipedia, the web.
Wikipedias whole value function, don't get me wrong it's a great value function, is that it is a curated centralized web.
I have the same problem with this that I do with "federated forums" or "federated forges"—what does it even mean for an encyclopedia to be federated? In fact, they already are—if I want to go look up information about Minecraft, I can use the federated internet to go to minecraft.wiki.
So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?
As with all Wikipedia competitors, this misses two key points
Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. Scandals aside over decades hundreds of thousands of people have built out the content and continue to do so - that is not easy to emulate.
Also for all the scandals, the toughest problems in WP early days were spammers and trolls. Moderation is a niche community problem (which till you have a community is moot). Stopping bot armies and countless trolls is a day 1 issue.
Out of genuine curiosity, what are the scandals?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
One good thing about Wikipedia is that it is pretty open with regards to internal affairs. If you want to criticize Wikipedia, there is no better source than Wikipedia itself.
As always, there is an article about it :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controvers...
> Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article.
This is much less of an issue now that there are LLMs, even with the occasional hallucination.
One must always assume anything an LLM outputs is false until proven otherwise, not the opposite.
Ok, but that criterion is true for human-generated output as well.
If you truly never believe anything anyone has ever told you until you prove it yourself, I'm amazed you've somehow learned to type in English on a website with accounts.
We trust people all the time for many reasons. Authority, past experience, logic (why would they lie about something in context), etc. and we get by alright. Knowing it's another conscious, mortal human existing in society makes it much easier to know when someone is likely being truthful.
Obviously there are all sorts of caveats to that. The main difference is that LLMs don't lie. They don't tell the truth either. They just generate stuff with no meaning. There's no way to ever put any trust in that, the same way I wouldn't trust my ice maker to make sure my dog gets enough water while I'm on vacation.
False. Please prove otherwise.
Actually writing the content is usually the easiest part.
98% of writing these articles is research. Current LLMs are nowhere near good enough.
LLMs do not write information dense content
I have no experience with LLMs. Can you ask them to write in a dense style? Does it work?
> 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.
Doesn't MediaWiki (and other common wikis) support this kind of thing already via the InterWiki-links system? You can set up a MediaWiki install such that [[geology:Mountain]] and [[poetry:Mountain]] go to the appropriate places. What does Ibis add that's not accounted for by this?
Besides, these days you also have https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8502 - which includes links to the concept of "mountain" as represented in hundreds of sites. (You can use a browser-extension known as Entity-Explosion to make your browser aware of these links, giving you the ability to browse from any of the listed sites to any other with just a few clicks.)
The problem with wikipedia is capture. How does this solve issues like with the recent scandal involving the article on grooming gangs in the UK?
Wikipedia and anything that replaced it will simply be a target for aggressive activists.
Some sort of federation has already been discussed in the Wikimedia universe [1]. It aims to operate at a lower level, federating structured data between different specialized wikibases [2]. AFAIK it has not (yet?) seen much development and/or traction.
ActivityPub style federation opens up some interesting technical possibilities for exchanging data but if the main motivation is to "fix" the consensus/moderation processes of Wikipedia one should start with outlining how that would work.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation
[2] https://wikiba.se/
It's legitimate to create alternatives to anything, and to re-think what has been done already.
One thing that would be on my personal wish list for any Wikipedia alternative is ease of machine processing: the MediaWiki format/mark-up and the templates are horribly inconsistent and a nightmare to parse. This should be done better by any serious successor. Wikipedia has got the excuse "historically grown", any successor doesn't.
That seems to be the same goal for https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
Do you mean something different, e.g. not just structured data?
For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification
There’s also this page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
For context, the parser I'm talking about in my first post is Parsoid on that list.
The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.
It'd be more convincing if the "problems with Wikipedia" section referenced anything from the last decade. (Also, one of the three things that apparently warranted being called out as an example was pretty petty -- the ArbCom member's on-wiki job didn't have anything to do with how they misrepresented their credentials.)
Sounds great. I want an openly opinionated wikipedia where a supposed fact is acknowledged as known to possibly exist even when the source is not known (but this should be indicated), where it is Ok to mention an opinion (also labelled) and where nobody deletes "unimportant" pages/facts others write.
It's super-cool to see an alternative approach to dealing with Wikipedia content disputes.
In the past, when there have been Wikipedia forks, they haven't generally tried to stay in sync with Wikipedia, at least not in both directions. Do we have an example of long-term forks of collaborative software or text editing projects that did manage to keep sharing productively in multiple directions? Maybe the BSDs to some extent?
I wonder how much work people are willing to do to keep actively collaborating with people whom they have big ongoing disagreements with (at least in areas where those disagreements don't have an impact). Or can such collaboration be made relatively seamless with appropriate tooling?
This is the latest in a long line of attempts to make a non-centralized Wikipedia. A Wikipedia (not me) maintains a record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHaeB%2FTimeline_of_dist...
How ironic that the link to the mentioned article by Helen Buyniski "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" is the victim of link rot.
You can find the article reposted here:
https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/49-wikipedia-rotten-to...
Fascinating that the first person cited on this site's announcement page is Helen Buyniski, a "journalist" for Russian state media and a COVID conspiracy theorist. It's almost as if this project has an agenda.
ActivityPub federation, while maybe a little complicated, seems to be well thought through.
I think many platforms would benefit from implementing that. Especially git forges, though I think someone is already working on that.
Federation of a wiki is... well, it's a bit strange, isn't it? Imagine if only one library at a time held a copy of a given book you need, and the only way to access that book was via an inter-library loan via library partnerships, or by visiting the library that has the book. This is assuredly the situation many academics are in for key reference texts, but it is not what I'd call ideal. It is in fact very fragile at times. There is a book I need right now, for example, but if I want to read it I will have to drive to see it... The library that has it won't send it for ILL. In a physical sense they "declined to federate."
The difference between a wiki and a social media network is that anyone can spin up a template social media site; the fundamental user-side barrier to entry is pretty small. The same is not true of wikis - at least not high quality ones. Documentary standards, tone, quality, reviewership, consistency, policy, moderation, accountability, leadership, thoroughness, these are all qualities that take time and commitment to develop. They are hallmarks of centralization for a reason: arguably the innovation of human governance is centered around qualities like these. They take a long time to develop.
As a counterpart to Wikipedia, well... fragmentation is often a death knell for efficient knowledge transfer. We are already losing massive swathes of our early Internet history due to fragmentation, attrition, and destruction. The thought that any piece of knowledge stored in a safehouse could go offline at once, without replication or warning, it scares me a bit. The thought that we don't really know who we're trusting as stewards of human knowledge in a federated model disturbs me too. You can have your issues with Wikipedia but at least you know who they are. You know their biases.
That's not to say there aren't use cases for this... but man, this seems like an easy way to lose or destroy important parts of our shared history on accident.
This alternative doesn't load with NoScript on, so I think I'll pass.
What does this term “federated” being thrown around in tech lately mean?
Meaning it's like email. I can have my own domain name - @example.com , not just Gmail, and they talk to each other so people on Gmail can send email outside of Gmail, and people can send emails into Gmail.
Good question. I too don't understand it.
It means that each federated technology creates a federation of "self-governing" entities, for example Mastodon servers. The meaning is very similar to the political meaning of the word.
How does this overcome power struggles and bias? That’s the most important question for me, as bias in Wikipedia is rampant these days, and even acknowledged by its founder.
The only wiki I like it's the rational wiki.
If the maintainers are reading this is cool. I would start with an exporter/importer for pages from Wikipedia format into whatever format you use, it should also deal with the media. This is no small task but what you need.
It's legitimately a pain to do, because most Wikipedia articles use a bunch of templates. So for anything outside the most-simple of articles you suddenly have to implement a lot of the more painful bits of wikitext. Then if you want to import them back to Wikipedia, you've got to match those things back up or you'll get reverted for messing up the page...
Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.