Ibis: Federated Wikipedia alternative

Posted by mostcallmeyt 10/27/2024

Ibis: Federated Wikipedia alternative(ibis.wiki)

209 points | 149 commentspage 2

nobodywillobsrv 10/28/2024|

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.

jll29 10/27/2024||

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.

richardw 10/27/2024||

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?

kemayo 10/27/2024||

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

aspenmayer 10/28/2024||

There’s also this page:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers

kemayo 10/28/2024||

For context, the parser I'm talking about in my first post is Parsoid on that list.

kemayo 10/27/2024||

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.

zozbot234 10/27/2024||

> 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.)

kemayo 10/27/2024||

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.)

openrisk 10/27/2024||

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/

schoen 10/27/2024||

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?

0xDEAFBEAD 10/28/2024||

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.

linmob 10/28/2024||

To me, looking at Ibis as a piece of software, it seems way more attractive as an alternative to wikia/fandom, niche wikis about a topic.

It seems to be selfhostable without massive resources and more modern, than, e.g., MediaWiki. (Also, say about Lemmy what you want, but using it feels lean and quick.)

It's especially attractive if the topic you are targetting also has some fediverse presence.

Levitating 10/27/2024||

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...

timmytokyo 10/27/2024|

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.

groceryheist 10/27/2024|

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...

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