Posted by mostcallmeyt 4 hours ago
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.
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
The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you tried to do a neutral wiki anyone can edit, it would be full of ads and porn.
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).
(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...)
Building this to clean up online discourse: https://rational.app
Anyone want to join me? Reply or find my email in my profile
There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045
163 points | 252 comments
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
[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
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.
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!
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controvers...
This is much less of an issue now that there are LLMs, even with the occasional hallucination.
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.
98% of writing these articles is research. Current LLMs are nowhere near good enough.
So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?