Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative
ibis.wiki
ibis.wiki
Ridiculous article. Organizing a wiki effort, just to spite the original won't work, because that's not enough, and not the right kind of fuel to last for such an undertaking. I feel like these people have no idea what kind of effort is to run an organization, instead seeing the issues as part of the technical, or ideological underpinnings. It doesn't work that way, and I invite every hopeful to look up the list of alternative Wikis that have sprung up over the years.
EDIT: Basically that's how these projects turn out. Having a theme park was never the point; blackjack and hookers were the point. Having a federated Wikipedia alternative isn't the point; having an encyclopedia where you can push an insane description of a topic and present it as reality is the point. And really, that makes for a shitty encyclopedia. Shitty enough for it to disappear before doing damage to the shared sense of reality society needs? No, but still shitty.
And wow somebody has put a lot of work in this page https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia_proven_right Great resource if you want to know what US bible people care about. They have institutionalised their confirmation bias.
There is evidence of the Mediterranean Basin flooding after breach of a land bridge across what is now the Strait of Gibraltar [1,2] some 5 million years ago. In the same way there is some evidence of the Black Sea rapidly expanding some 8000 years ago [3]. Similar 'catastrophic flood' scenarios have played out elsewhere on the planet which has led to the rise of flood myths like the Biblical flood. While Conservapedia goes heavy on scripture in laying out their proof for a historical basis for the flood (i.e. they are just as biased as Wikipedia tends to be on politically contentious subjects) it is a rational position to state that the myriad of flood myths around the world and along the ages are based on historical flood events.
In short, Conservapedia does what Wikipedia does but replaces the 'progressive' bias with a 'conservative' one.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
Conservapedia calls e=mc2 "liberal claptrap".[1] The article on Oppenheimer has "Like other liberals, Oppenheimer was not as smart as he wanted to be" right in the lead and the article itself mostly seems to be about Oppenheimer's communist links more than anything else. Articles like Homosexual Agenda[3] contain so much retarded bullshit I don't even know what bit to quote.
What I'm trying to say is "it's the same as Wikipedia, with with Conservative bias" completely and utter bollocks. Conservapedia is a fringe website that's not conservative, but just crazy. Anyone claiming anything else is deeply misinformed.
[1]: https://www.conservapedia.com/E%3Dmc2
Now this implies that this "conservative" bias is on a level of the "progressive" one. As if there are two sides, these two, and that the "conservative" has equal, if not more, merit than the "progressive" one. It's the false balance.
Funnily enough, Conservapedia has the article on it. But opening it reveals that it's not that rationality suddenly penetrated the conserva-universe, it's just that they project they exact thing they do onto the "liberals".
I'm not so sure I'd call Wikipedia 'progressive'.
If you're looking for the chemical composition of some substance or want to look up something related to physics or mathematics Wikipedia tends to do just fine. Articles on history are a mixed bag, especially recent history and especially anything related to 'the West'. For political subjects Wikipedia is less than useless given the aforementioned 'colonisation' but also because political operatives from 'all sides' do their best to paint as rosy a picture of 'their' side as possible.
And if you don't find the biblical flood implausible, well, I'm somewhat intrigued why you believe that to be an option.
Don't give me the "contentious" spiel. I don't care what some reader of Conservapedia may think. I'm asking you.
No ad-hominems, or rather you are looking at this as a 'liberal' would while I described a scenario in which a 'conservative' looks at the mentioned article and concept. In the "conservative's" opinion what is written there is just as implausible as what is written in the Conservapedia article on the 'truth' of the flood story. Both Wikipedia as well as Conservapedia are biased which is what this was about, not about whether the flood or someone feeling non-binary is true.
Both-sidesing this when you have already been presented with indefensible nonsense such as “e=mc^2 is liberal claptrap” is shameful. That page hasn’t been edited since mid-2022. There’s an entire article called “liberal claptrap” linked to from that statement that has remained unedited for 7 months. It shouldn’t even exist.
That garbage is not constructive and has no place in respectable discourse.
In my view, Conservapedia is an encyclopedia only by medieval standards. It is not useful to me except for entertainment and maybe if I wanted to write US cable news ad copy. What is it to you? Do you refer to it when you want to know about historical floods?
Fair enough and indeed there are many examples. However I think good faith/steelmanning needs to come back in our discourse. It strikes me as an 'insane' description to suggest that the problems with Wikipedia can be properly captured by their resistance to 'insane' descriptions
Beyond the Wikipedia definition, I've heard the term used to describe the phenomenon of people looking at an ugly codebase with tons of special cases and expectations, thinking they can create a leaner version only to end up going nowhere because all those special cases and expectations that made for ugly UML diagrams had reasons to exist and the overconfidence led to feature creep to justify the time investment to stakeholders. I.e. a good explanation for why it's often better to refactor than rewrite.
Regardless of whether reddit made the correct decision banning those suspect subreddits, it turns out having a community composed almost entirely of those cast-offs is not a pleasant place to be.
Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page.
Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
You make a change, it gets reverted, and then you discuss it. The number one mistake I see new editors make is they don't understand how discussion works and when to seek additional input.
After being reverted, you're expected to start a discussion on the talk page. So many people do not do that, and instead try to communicate through 200 character edit summaries.
But talk pages are just the first step. The next step is to get more people involved. There are a bunch of informal rules which editors have tried to write down on how you can bring more people to a talk page in a fair way (otherwise you would only solicit input from people you would agree with).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution
The typical way this is done is through an RfC, which is a structured discussion between multiple options. When you set up an RfC to resolve a dispute, a bot randomly messages people who are interested in the general area to comment at the talk page. That means you get a bunch of uninvolved editors that don't really have any stake in the dispute and are more level-headed.
The discussion's consensus itself is then evaluated by someone (a closer) who must be uninvolved. In a contentious subject it is often an administrator who has never edited in the topic area before. The closer must give reasons for their decision and an explanation, and there is a working appeals process.
Contrast to virtually any other website where decisions are frequently made by people involved in disputes, you typically don't get reasons for why something is moderated, and you can't effectively appeal to another decision maker as you don't understand the reasoning upon which the decision is based.
Fun fact: prefiguration, a practice popular with anarchists, is essentially a form of refactoring rather than a rewrite.
Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge (i.e. it focused on individuals, not systems). It's worth noting though that the French Revolution did end up creating a representative democracy eventually even if it took a detour of replacing the monarch with a number of different autocrats - much like Cromwell in the UK for that matter.
So I'd say the problem wasn't seeing flaws and wanting to replace the systems but thinking the flaws could be fixed without addressing the system in its entirety or looking at it from an actual systems theory point of view. Another fun fact: a lot of Nazis ended up back in positions of power in post-war Germany (both Germanies actually).
I strongly disagree. They threw out way too much, not just who was in charge. "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". In the case of Mao they made sweeping changes to agriculture several times. Each with the potential of causing massive famines, and together caused the largest man made disaster in history.
That's not just replacing who is in charge (which would have been MUCH BETTER), it's dismantling a thousand years of knowledge and tradition in favor of something they thought was better. Absolute disaster.
The French revolution, and USSR did quite similar things with disastrous consequences.
Can confirm firsthand. The wiki project I founded was pretty niche (no overlap with Wikipedia) but took hundreds of hours of page creation just to get off the ground. It has to be a labour of love.
This article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.
I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.
That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism.
I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.
It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!"
And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?"
Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail.
Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG!
(trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) )
Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators!
And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that.
How can you tolerate this injustice!?!
___________________________________________________________________________
And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible.
But then you look at the rest of the website:
http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?)
And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity.
And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl.
You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn.
Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.
This is way beside the point but there is nothing inherently wrong with unsecured plain http traffic if you aren't accepting user information over that connection (such as a name/password, auth token or whatever).
There are also networking policies that prevent non-https connections, so you could be accidentally blocking out users on a strictly managed device.
The proposed alternative here is to basically distribute the taxonomy? Anybody who's touched microservices for even a minute will know how hilariously difficult it is to co-ordinate not just the services itself but the teams around them, including both the tech and people level ICP.
Find me one example of institution that managed to go for any significant amount of time (say, longer than a decade) without facing corruption. I double-dare you.
One look at the world of decentralized crypto-currency more than proves that corruption is not limited to institutions.
Corruption seems inherent to humans, the difference is that institutions are well aware of this, and frequently set up controls and systems to balance power and fight the most obvious forms of corruption.
Rug-pulls are inevitable, what matters is whether people are left with power to move on or if they are trapped into the corrupt system. How many people managed to leave the banking system after the crash of 2008?
See also: Reddit. Despite all the protests, the absolute majority of people went back to it and accepted the conditions.
>Rug-pulls are inevitable.
That sounds like a pretty undesirable system where illegal, immoral behavior is "inevitable", hardly a replacement for the existing institutions. Especially since crypto intentionally operates (or attempts to operate) outside the jurisdiction of anti corruption and law enforcement powers. I for one would much rather be the victim of a traditional institution since there are balancing institutions that exist to hold them accountable. The fact that the only organizations that have demonstrated the capability of reigning in crypto scammers are incredibly centralized is deeply ironic to me.
Plenty of people are unbanked, about 5% of adults in the US, and plenty of people left Reddit.
Until they don't. You are comparing the worst of decentralized systems (rug-pulls) with the average-to-best-case of institutions that centralize power (western democracy governments) when we should be talking about the extreme cases: autocracies and dictatorships.
> hardly a replacement for the existing institutions.
Why do people can only think in binary terms? No one is calling for the "replacement" of the institutions. The idea is to build decentralized systems as a hedge against the centralized one.
You are repeatedly giving the "so you are saying..." line and it's starting to feel like you are purposefully misunderstanding the point.
> Plenty of people are unbanked
For their own choice or because they were excluded of the system? Wouldn't it be good to have an alternative that we could have as hedge against them?
> plenty of people left Reddit
Not enough to cause it to implode, and not enough to bring a critical mass to any alternative.
Also it is unjust to name crypto/Blockchain as an example of decentralized system that gets corrupted. All corruption story in fact are centralized , but labelled as crypto, or touch the field of crypto but nonetheless are very centralized. E.g mtgox, bitconnect, Celsius, FTX.
If not centralized, flawed in design. Unintentionally E.g Ethereum before the split that led to ETC. Euler more recently. Many others. And Many are intentionally flawed, e.g terra/Luna.
You have already done this with crypto. I.e. The corruption that occurs in crypto doesn’t count because those weren’t true crypto projects.
So in the spirit of the challenge. Tell me how the Adventure Cycling Association is corrupt?
But your tactic won't prevent me from calling an Irish, what's truly not Scots. I will get to that.
No what I have said about crypto was clarify that those accused of corrupted decentralized entities in fact aren't decentralized. And the distinction is non obvious because many centralized entities mingle with decentralized technology. It doesn't make those decentralized, they have all the attributes of centralized systems, often trying to disguise as decentralized themselves. See we offer a spot btc exchange, non custodial. But still centralized. Yet they don't say it. And are happy to seed confusion. why the disguise? Because decentralized systems are getting known of being corrupt resistant, so it's always good to pretend having that stamp of merit. Especially when your trust is needed for doing business.
It's a bit like open source , see, one can't simply disqualify the qualities and properties of open source using the pretext that a growing list of projects fail the test, given how many projects we've seen pretending to build open source software that same fallacious argument could be made, but would it stand correct?
Ok I won't write for too much about blockchain, crypto entities and their relation (or contradiction) with decentralization, nor which qualifies as what, check for yourself, if you don't then no argument I could make in a post will convince you anyway.
About the Adventure Cycling Association, I don't know if it's corrupt. I had never heard of it. See, it's not that it's an Irishman, a Scotsman, or an English. Maybe it's bushman. I don't know exactly but it seems to me like it's part of a pretty decentralized domain. First it's not even an institution, I think, but Let's not get into the definitions as many wouldn't even agree as to what an institution is anyway. It's an organisation, that we would all agree with. and that charity organization looks closer to an entity, part of a decentralized cloud of cycling associations.
What would make the adventure Cycling Association centralized ? If it finds a way to have monopoly or quasi monopoly on Cycling activities. Or on Adventure Cycling activities. Or such activities in a certain locality that isn't limited to some irrelevant private park.
What makes centralized systems centralized? They require a level of monopoly or authority over a matter. Reasonably agreed to be extensive.
Examples.
Facebook. It qualifies as centralized because it reached such a massive network effect that it owns a certain monopoly in what it does. Sure there are other social media networks with some significant overlap in functionality but it has this sticky effect that makes jumping boat to alternatives, difficult. That's voluntarily exclusivity of sorts.
Reddit. That one is interesting, as it has some obvious decentralized properties, but some other and very strict properties that are totally centralized. Reddit made decisions on their own that applied to all. The backlash was worth of note, also that users for the most part stayed. Had Reddit been truly decentralized? A system that would have allowed some or all subs to "fork" off that decision? We would have seen a flocking of many subs onto the "classic" regulation. Anyhow not calling Reddit corrupt here but I hope you see what distinguishes decentralized from centralized structures. Here also Reddit has a very strong sticky network effect so users who didn't like it could hardly move out.
Governments. I can't skip this mention, those institutions despite being often democratic are generally pretty centralized, they have an executive administration exercising exclusive power over some of the matters of an entire nation. They don't have full control, but even for the rest, representatives form a tiny minority of the population, yet they legislate on their own, for so many. And the many don't have the choice but follow. That's not voluntary exclusivity.
The USB alliance. That's centralized corrupt institution. They have monopoly on questions regarding the USB spec and come up with all sort of financial impacting desires and mandates. Using law enforcement in attempts to get makers to oblige and pay the cartel. not voluntary exclusivity.
Power absolutely corrupts and most absolute power corrupts most absolutely.
As to the Adventure Cycling Association which I had never heard of, nor heard of any cycling associations having acquired some exclusive control over anything to do with cycling, they may or may not be corrupt, but they aren't centralized institution.
If you believe they are, then you and I are also a centralized institution discussing matters of corruption. Perhaps your see the ridicule. But hey, if you and I got control over hackernews we would truly have centralized powers over this community and it would be being corrupted to impose a certain view on the matter.
Hackernews and its moderation may have acquired certain influence and stickiness, they could get corrupted, it depends on how absolute their power is and over what. But they've so far showed decent attitude. Does it make it an example of institution that resisted corruption? Well no, not a Scotsman. Quite young and having been well guarded against abuse, sort of a niche.
My 36 cents, in the hope to have made you see something you had not distinguished from the rest, necessary to make sense of this non trivial issue. Not expecting you to entirely change your mind, it is a difficult thing to do given how much of a shaking certain sort of belief system would need to endure.
> I don't see how your qualification is correct as I haven't said no true Scotsman yet. Prejudice already?
> As to the Adventure Cycling Association which I had never heard of, nor heard of any cycling associations having acquired some exclusive control over anything to do with cycling, they may or may not be corrupt, but they aren't centralized institution.
Called it.
Humans are selfish, fallible, lazy, unreliable, etc. what is every Shakespeare play about? what is the bible about? What is Greek mythology about? What are Aesop's fables about?
- jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught, and edits were reviewed for appropriateness. System worked as it was supposed to
- college drop out on arbcom (for those not in the know, arbcom is kind of like an internal court to solve user disputes. They are not allowed to solve content disputes or say what an article should say, only user behaviour problems). How is that a problem? You don't need a degree to mediate user disputes.
(In fairness, the Gibraltar thing they mention was pretty bad)
Wikipedia certainly isn't perfect, but for some reason they chose some of the silliest controversies.
The problem with Wikipedia is not consumption of content, but the contribution of content.
It all sounds utterly reasonable from the point of view of the community, who is most exposed to very low-quality content, spam, and vandalism. But newcomers mostly see a big bureaucratic machine rejecting their first attempt, per compliance with some long established policy whose full printed details could threaten a rainforest.
The problem is the rules are often (not always) there for a reason, and everyone involved has good intentions (assume good faith! you can generally assume good faith!). But it's definitely not always a pleasant experience for new users, and that's not an easy problem.
It isn't adherence to strict rules that is the problem. It's the massively toxic little kingdoms that have become established among power users/moderators.
Like it or don't. Them is the facts.
I wonder how a distributed architecture where each king operates its own kingdom is going to help with this problem.
(And yes, it is a problem, but also essentially a part of human nature. You can't fix it, only mitigate it)
If you see a kingdom, in principle and in practice the emperor has no clothes. No single person has any special power or ownership over articles. If someone acts that way, you get to tell them what you think of it, if you like, and you'll very much be in the right. And if you are, others should agree and side with you.
There aren't moderators as such, people are supposed to talk to each other, directly. If you don't like how someone seems to act like they own the place, it won't change unless you tell em how you feel!
The thing is people who aren't afraid to give their opinions tend to talk over quieter people. I'm afraid I don't have a very good cure to offer, but please don't feel like anyone's too big of a power-user to have a little respectful, civil chat with. Please, template the regulars! They either respond politely, or they lash out and make an ass of themselves in public.
The problem is the rules apply equally to everyone, but the power users know exactly where the line is and how the bureaucracy works. "The law, in its majestic equality, allows administrators and newcomers alike to revert edits per policy, report 3RR violations, and open AN/I threads about people they don't like"
Which, for their flaws, do sometimes produce results.
1. Be sufficiently hardened and responsive to mass bad-faith attacks, from trolling to toxicity to coups. 2. Be gentle, welcoming, and patient with newcomers, making it easy to join the community and learn the norms.
Most systems fall somewhere imperfect on the spectrum between the two, with rare exceptions going almost entirely to one extreme or the other.
While this is likely true (though not quantifiable), I would add there is also a pattern I've seen play out where somebody gets really into Wikipedia, starts stablishing turf on some subject, goes a little power mad, then gets knocked back by rules designed to keep such people out of power. Said editor then leaves Wikipedia in a huff, and a prolific contributor is lost -- but it's broadly a good thing.
To me the main argument for decentralized wikis is when a community wants to capture deep subject focused knowledge. It's why I created https://wiki.osdev.org. Wikipedia is great but at it's core it will always be an Encyclopedia with a large breadth of knowledge. Specialization in a field is best handled elsewhere with links out from Wikipedia if possible. Especially when there will be original content.
Hyperlinking is all the decentralization you need in some cases. Activitypub for wikis is of interest for people contributing to a collection of specialized knowledge. No one is going to subscribe to all the specialized wikis of the world except maybe search/aggregation systems.
Wikipedia wants to be a specific thing with a specific scope. Where that line should be is debatable, but it will eventually be drawn somewhere. No matter where you draw it, someone will be on the other side of it.
However, mediawiki is open source. The licenses of content are cc-by-sa (similar to gpl). You can start your own wiki. Similarly licensed content can be moved back and forth if rules change.
Perhaps this is just manual "federation" in a sense, but the ecosystem supports it. I persinally believe this is one of the reasons why mediawiki as an open source project should be a core part of Wikimedia's mission.
When people disagree about content, Wikipedia always falls back to just reflecting what reliable sources says. And if they disagree, people can always collaborate to try to give due weight to both viewpoints.
But if there are no reputable sources that have already written about the subject, articles risk becoming someone's personal blog about their favorite topic. The notability criteria isn't a bar about what's important enough or 'deserves' a Wikipedia page, it's a super practical matter about verifiability, content disputes, and generally just being on solid ground if any claim is challenged.
No promises about what anyone else might be thinking at AfD!*
*(Articles for Deletion. The place where people spend a lot of time discussing notability)
* keeping at least minimum quality standards
* avoiding abuse by storing your files disguised as some "knowledge". At some scale the organization is not able to check even for a trivial instance of abuse.
* abuse legal problems by publishing illegal content (again, nobody will be able to do even basic checks if there's no limit)
* if anything goes, you get limited by physical needs like storage
> If you must, layer curation of what is notable on top of that.
Wikipedia is the curation. Store the non-curated data elsewhere.
You probably shouldn't be lying about having one though
Here's a better example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AAlan_Dershowitz%2FArchi...
Jimbo essentially moved the whole history of an article elsewhere, and rewrote it. So if you clicked the History on the article, you wouldn't see the prior edits.
I mean he made the edits under his own name, not sure there's much to "catch" there. This made it sound like he was editing via a sockpuppet.
The question is, should people be allowed to make their own mistakes, or should Jimmy Wales' mistakes take priority?
I don't care for removing spam, but funny enough, the most moderated platform allow you to go table to table peddling your wares, for a cost.
https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml
Sounds like a great idea, I wonder why it hasn’t been adopted by other websites. Do you know if it had downsides for Slashdot?
In a word, ossification. It preserves the culture of a forum, to a fault.
Moderation is when stuff is filtered out for you, because you don't want to see it. If you got to see it by mistake, you would agree that you didn't want to see that - maybe because it was factually wrong, maybe because it was disgusting, maybe because it was just irrelevant. Doesn't matter. All moderation is justified in terms of what the user wants to see.
Censorship is when someone hides something for you, because they don't want you to see it. Maybe because they're afraid it'll turn you into a racist, or into an idiot, or into a slave of consumerism, whatever. Doesn't matter. All censorship is justified in terms of what it will do to the minds of the recipients.
Now, maybe there are some people who are afraid for their own minds. Who are afraid that they will turn into a racist, if exposed to racist propaganda, for instance. But it can't be many. So there's little actual overlap between moderation and censorship.
I don't want to see holocaust denial bullshit. Others might not have a problem with seeing it. Every sufficiently large space will contain at least one person who wants to post it and is therefore OK with seeing it. Is it moderation or censorship when a space I share with those people decides not to carry such content? The mods may not want to see it, and as it happens I don't want to either, but I've not actually /told/ them I don't want to. They've simply assumed on my behalf.
The same applies to any subject you might pick, no matter how controversial.
There's no per-person per-subject way to opt-in or opt-out that can possibly scale. I don't want to have to supply every online space with an exhaustive list of horrible things I don't want to see; and flagging after the fact doesn't solve this either since I also don't want to see those things even once before I get a chance to express my desire to not see them. Those cookie opt-out boxes with giant lists of vendors that everyone loves to hate? Imagine that but everywhere and for every subject. That's what exhaustively expressing my preferences would look like.
One approach that does scale is to allow the owner of a space to make filtering decisions on my behalf, and if my preferences don't match theirs in a way that is important to me, well, I can go elsewhere or make my own space. This is what we have now. But it's still someone deciding for me what they do not want me to see; they may or may not have my best interests in mind, but in your proposed classification, this is censorship.
Worse, though, some people /really/ want to parade stuff I don't want to see in front of my eyeballs - they believe the problem is that they are simply not shouting loudly, frequently enough, and if they were just allowed to preach to me one more time, I would convert. Compare the person elsewhere in this comments thread arguing for their right do "do business" everywhere currently moderated. Those folk are strongly motivated to make arguments containing combinations of words that will result in their bullshit being paraded in front of my eyeballs yet again. They will try feeding different combinations of syllables to the owner, the moderation team and/or anyone who might exert pressure on them, in the hope of rules being relaxed. One such possible combination of syllables is "This is censorship! I am being censored!" It may even be true, for whatever definition you prefer! Regardless, it will be attempted. For some, it's their hobby and/or job. They devote all available time to doing this. Slow drips of water, given sufficient time, wear down stone. If I don't push back even a little, all spaces I frequent will become filled with content I do not want to see. Is this censorship? Am I a censor?
Personally I see the moderation/censorship divide as one of those irregular verbs English is so full of, conjugated approximately like so: I am making my preferences known; you are moderating; he/she/it is a censor. The "our glorious homeland / their barbarous wastes" image frequently seen on social media is another good analogy for what frequently happens.
At the end of the day, though, call the practice what you will, but despite our best wishes, entirely uncensored spaces do not look like a university agora filled with enlightened folk freely exchanging valuable ideas for the benefit of mankind. They look like 4chan's /b/. I am glad such spaces exist, but I would be very sad indeed if every place on the internet was like that.
And I'm not even saying all censorship is necessarily wrong. There's one very obvious case where you keep people from seeing things because you fear the effect it will have on them (which is censorship), but it's generally accepted, and that is when the people in question are children.
Yeah, it's hard to judge people's sincerity. Do you really just worry that your space will be overrun with nazis/terfs/communists because you don't want to see that shit yourself, or are you afraid that they'll convince others? But that doesn't mean the distinction isn't worthwhile. Most of all, it's necessary to apply to yourself. It's a critical question you have to ask yourself, if people trust you to moderate for their benefit.
Sure, that sounds like it could be a great principle. It's not what actually happens, though. The terms are loaded weapons, sticks to beat people over the head with; and discourse online trends weaponised. Cries of "censorship" are used as a battering ram to prise open an online space for invasion. When the only difference between an action that is morally acceptable and one that is not is the internal state of mind of the actor, with the case being tried in the court of public opinion, defense is all but impossible.
You did it yourself: "Censorship is when someone hides something for you, because they don't want you to see it." Someone. /They/. That's not a sentence about personal introspection. That's a statement tying a judgement to someone else's actions. He/she/it censors.
This does not render at all without javascript.
Not an alternative.
The mobile issue here is big, and the fact that this effort is just another attempt following a long string of previous failures and has a small chance of success, but that's something different.
> applying all associated edits in order. Instances can synchronize their articles with each other, and follow each other to receive updates about articles. Edits are done with diffs which are generated on the backend, and allow for conflict resolution similar to git.
I somehow got the impression that CRDT was stand of the art in multiple edits to a common document, and sincerely doubt that git's conflict resolution is going to be a good experience
Also, as I understand federated things, the real hazard to usefulness is one of discovery. So how would I, owner of a hypothetical mdaniel.wiki, discover who has the best CRDT documents in their wiki such that I could subscribe to updates on those pages? A wiki of wikis?
Your CRDT merge can be a technological marvel that will seamlessly stitch together different edits on a topic... that say wildly different things about it, resulting in a completely nonsensical article.
CRDT adds automatic conflict resolution, wikis need at most, if any, manual conflict resolution, because their page editing has little need for concurrent real-time edits, it's a slower process (ironic given the meaning of wiki in Hawaiian). About git, OP tried to explain to non-wiki editors what wikis do under the hood, conflict reconciliation in wikis is vaguely similar to git but simpler, and the tech Ibis uses, paired to a design for independence prone to content rotting (every url of the federation can differ even in context about any page), makes me smell of just importing by hand or by trust edits from peers into the backing store.
CDRT is better if you want there to be just one document that everyone is editing at the same time, with merging being an automatic process and the rare non-sensical merge being acceptable.
It doesn't matter all that much whether your servers are federated or served from a single domain, the time users spend with the page editor open is much longer than the latency of a federation request. A server somewhere might be horribly out of sync and cause a lot of conflicts, but presumably those are also the scuffy servers with low traffic that don't see a lot of edits per minute anyways.
CRDT is cool, but it's deploying a very shiny new tech for a small problem that doesn't really need anything fancy.
Manual merging is mandatory to have human meaning, so might as well use it all the time.
"Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth?
I read a comment here on HN recently, wish I could find it now (I think it was in one of the threads on the 'missing datatype (graphs)'). The gist was that we do large things pretty well: Operating Systems, standard libraries, etc and small things pretty well: single header file libs, specific open source projects, etc, but medium size things are missing. This seems to be the same kind of thing: you have enough complexity that coordination is hard(tm) but you don't have enough scale to build up an institutional inertia to overcome the bus-factor-of-one-ness that--- uhhh
What I'm trying to say is that the support system around that project, like if you have a medium sized project, its going to have individual experts for the parts that make it up, but they're all single points of failure.
If I had more time I would have written a shorter more coherent comment.
Especially common in the DoD where they're good at funding enormous numbers of SBIRs/STTRs, yet they never go anywhere, because all large money contracts are guaranteed to be vacuumed up by Lockheed / Raytheon / Northrup Grumman / Boeing / General Dynamics / Teledyne Brown / Honeywell / ect...
And in most cases (in my opinion, not legally binding), they purposely, slowly build cripple-ware with planned obsolescence that results in equipment that's vestigial before it launches and immediately needs 'upgrade' contracts.
[♪] DoD funding, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2023/07/defense-i...
[♫] VC investment, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-valley-curve.asp
[ꜘ] US Biomanufacturing, https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/mind-gap-bridging-...
The reason to make a new wiki or wiki-style technology is to serve a different informational niche, guided by different rules. There's a reason each video game has its own Wiki. You could fork Wikipedia to be more inclusionist, or have people from one particular political viewpoint - if that's your goal.
But re-creating Wikipedia to do exactly what it's supposed to do - form a body of encyclopedic knowledge (subject to copyright laws, etc) - this doesn't make sense, and isn't a convincing argument for a new Wikipedia, even if its distributed.
It sounds more like they want to implement the github fork & pull-request model of version control where currently Wikipedia uses a more SVN type of version control.
There are pros and cons to both models. However federation it is not. The mentioned controversies also seem entirely unrelated to which model you like.
I'm keeping an eye on https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/architecture/blueprints/activity_... <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39201453> with acute interest because I'm totally open to not even being able to see the ways federation can make ecosystems more valuable due to my lack of hands-on experience with the kinds of problems it is solving
For example, I think there's a spectrum of knowledge-base like solutions, but the middle of the spectrum is often poorly served:
- wikipedia: global, canonical reference material. Is very good, and we almost all use it in some fashion.
- confluence/notion/gh-wiki: team knowledge base. Often spotty, stale, neglected.
- logseq/obsidian/org-mode: personal knowledge base, notes. Typically very idiosyncratic, sketchy, but can work very well for the people who put effort into it.
What if a "federated wiki" was targeted at the team/personal level? I'm not saying this is Ibis in its present form, but imagine:
- You keep your personal notes and knowledge store, in a way which is always implicitly contextualized against corresponding info (or lack of info) in the team knowledge store.
- When you're noting something new, or modifying something, you always have an easy path to push your personal addition/edit to the shared store.
- Ideally notes from everyone's work around or interaction with some X drives low-effort maintenance of the community reference of X.
have a local repo of your own notes, a hosted repo serving as the communal ref. if you want to make updates, commit and push --, you can cherry pick the sections you want.
i recall seeing something like mediawiki (but it stored articles as plaintext) a while back, you could use that for a web-based portal too
Looks like a toy weekend project by someone learning web development. A worthy endeavour no doubt but not sure why it's on the front page.
What have I misunderstood?
> Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be treated in completely different ways. For example geology.wiki/article/Mountain may be completely different different from poetry.wiki/article/Mountain. There can be Ibis instances strictly focused on a particular topic with a high quality standard, and others covering many areas in layman’s terms. Others may document fictional universes from television series or videogames. If one instance is badly moderated or presents manipulated information, an alternative can easily be created. Yet all of them will be interconnected, and users can read and edit without leaving their home website.
This is absurd. You are describing WWW, except for the "without leaving their home website" bit, but I don't know why that feature is so important to you. You can just replace that by "without leaving their home browser of choice".
Based on https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation I think the practical impact of this would be that it'd be easy to have your personal Ibis instance be a fork of some big mainstream one, where the only difference is that e.g. your version of the Pigeons article explains that birds aren't real, but everything else is automatically kept in sync.
I'm not convinced this is particularly worthwhile, or much of an improvement over the existing "run a wiki" workflow.
It isn't that you are wrong as there is some overlap but here are a few properties that federation assures, that the web doesn't.
The web is decentralized. What's served on the web isn't necessarily decentralized.
- Server Decentralization: Federated systems use a decentralized network (www), and are themselves decentralized, meaning the servers that forms the federated network are decentralized, there is no single central authority controlling the network. multiple servers run by different individuals or organizations communicate with each other to share content and data, via:
- Interoperability: different platforms can communicate and share data seamlessly, and also enables easier:
- Privacy and Control as users are given alternative servers, which may operate very different policies, or can run their own if policies from this or that server don't fit their liking, compared to centralized platforms. all ultimately run on the same web but since users can choose which server to join or even host their own, they have more autonomy over their online presence and data.
Analogy with selling buckets of paint:
- Centralization of that service is a one stop shop re-selling exclusive delux white and blue paints.
- Federation of that service is multiple shops, selling white and blue paints. By a maker not moved about the idea of shops selling to each others, not interested in making it exclusive and letting any shops offering other colors.
- the web is all the streets
As much as it's a complicated mess, a centralised system with a broad army of moderators operating to similar standards, is the feature of Wikipedia. They may be wrong at times, but they're accountable somewhat collectively for that and so hold each other to account.
This page doesn't even render on my phone properly. Probably should fix that before it can approach being an alternative
You can easily take Wikipedia's HTML output and use it, but reusing the source of those articles requires a lot of work on either compatibility or translation.
(The "why wikipedia is bad" bit at the start talks about things from 2005, 2007, and 2012.)
Anyway, this might be pretty "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" since I work for the WMF, but I'm not really seeing much appeal from federation in this area. It certainly seems less relevant than in social media, anyway.
As a small example (not a scandal), a local celebrity mentioned in the (local) media last week that she'd put some incorrect facts on her own wiki page in the past, but can't get them corrected any more.
I tried to suggest a useful addition onto a page recently (against knowing better), and was blocked immediately. Then I noticed others tried the same change several times already, to no avail. So i gave up, and wont bother any more. Also in the future, i wont bother. Life's too short.
Things like this happen all the time without having any visibility.
Its good to be protective, and necessary to avoid spam. But in a few encounters it felt like there are many tiny kingdoms on wikipedia being guarded by their monarchs.
For me Wikipedia is consistently amongst the least biased sources on the internet.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Labour_Party
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign...
For what it's worth, I agree with that KYM's opening paragraph is better and less-biased than Wikipedia's.
Is Wikipedia supposed to describe World War II as a 'small disagreement over national borders and ethnic purity', lest it be accused of partiality? A spade's a spade, a war's a war, a harassment campaign is... A harassment campaign.
"The term has also since been used to describe the group of internet users, based mainly on Twitter, who claim that there is a lack of transparency within the video game journalism industry. These same people have also been criticized of practicing misogyny and sexism by many, through harassment and trolling, referring to their opposition as social justice warriors."
Compare that to the indignation dripping from the wiki paragraph.
At worst it's going to have hundreds of conflicting versions of a document, where each federated node disagree on which is the current master of the document, because each node is fighting for their bias, or it's going to be Wikipedia, where there is one promoted version of the document with whatever bias.
Sounds like an improvement over one dominant group being able to declare their viewpoint as The Truth(tm).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
I ran a wiki for local music artists. I started it on an ancient version of mediawiki for use with an ancient extension that wasn't even used, so overall bad idea. It no longer works on a modern version of php so I'm having a lot of trouble getting it back up.
But on that same note, a federation of local wikis, like for small towns/cities, artists that sort of thing, I think would be very cool.
Trying to extend, mirror, or bolster it is potentially beneficial.
Trying to replace it is foolish.
As if the constant begging for donations they don't need and the shithole that is Fandom wans't enough to lower my opinion of ol Jimmy.
i.e stopping scandals & improving trust?
if anything, this seems to be more prone to scandals and less trustworthy.
It's just basic accessibility what we're talking about here.
Didn't bother with that _yet_. Given the date on the front page, Ibis is apparently fresh out of the gates.
Clothing and styling also provides social signalling and filtering, to stay with your analogy. If this were my early-stage project, I would welcome a little friction to select towards the helpful, the imaginative and the invested. To improve the signal/noise ratio.
Maybe that's the case here. If it is, it seems to be working.
The most successful alternative to Wikipedia is probably Conservapedia which is largely edited, I believe, by American right wing political activists and evangelical Christian homeschooled teens. Their articles reflect the changes in American right wing politics over the past 20 years or so meaning some are out of date with the current party line because they haven't been touched in years. That's one model of competing with Wikipedia but an encyclopedia consisting of outright partisan political propaganda and outright religious propaganda isn't useful to most people even most people who agree with its viewpoint[0]. Counterintuitively, I think Conservapedia has probably been successful because it rewrote everything from scratch. That also ensures you won't get dinged by Google under the duplicate content policy and basically delisted from search.
I don't think federation is the right way to make a Wikipedia alternative viable because it is already an open source project run on open source software that anybody can fork. It's solving the wrong problem. The right problem to solve is getting a critical mass of editors who aren't just editing to push an agenda. That probably requires paid professional editors whose job is to maintain the encyclopedia. You can probably hire sufficiently smart people for $15 or so an hour because there are probably many smart people already working for that rate at McJobs[1]. That also makes your alternative appealing to current Wikipedia editors who are generally paid $0 to edit Wikipedia. If you're looking to hire expert editors, you'd probably have to pay more but you probably don't need experts. The downside of this is you have to have money to pay editors and probably to advertise that you're paying editors to create a competitor to Wikipedia. That also ensures you have enough editors to maintain the articles. I think Wikipedia alternative with paid editors would probably work as a relatively low risk but also low reward startup idea assuming there was sufficient funding behind it.
[0]: Wikipedia does have its own biases and "neutral point of view" is now basically equated with "objectivity" but it is far less in your face about its biases than Conservapedia which reads more like the timeline of a Twitter account that follows all of the big right wing influencers to Wikipedia's Google News.
[1]: Specifically, high school and college students. Also, many smart people who didn't go to college for whatever reason. They'd probably prefer writing over flipping burgers or running a checkout line.
It didn't?
Compare https://www.worldbook.com/world-book-encyclopedia-2024.aspx :
> As the only general reference encyclopedia still published today, The World Book Encyclopedia 2024 provides authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages
What do you think it would supplement?
I also hear wiki.gg is pretty good, but they're focused on gaming wikis. A lot of Fandom wikis jumped ship to them (of course Fandom is like Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but your wiki content will never come down).
I hear the folks running the Baldur’s Gate 3 wiki are doing so with a server that costs less than $20 a month and they’re hitting serious traffic numbers.
And Jimmy Wales' Fandom puts enough effort into SEO that combined with their size their version will likely appear in search results before the actually useful ad-free community run wiky :|
criticizing is great! but it would be fantastic with enlightening discussion.
If you think “fediverse” isn’t “toxic” when it comes to controversial issues, you haven’t really checked it out.
It's a lot of interpersonal conflict, so it has a bit of a reputation (redirects to WP:ANI include gems like "Wikipedia:CESSPOOL" and "Wikipedia:Dramaboard")
- The band: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225562259251
- The hotel chain: https://all.accor.com/brands/ibis.en.shtml
- The anime drawing program: https://ibispaint.com/?lang=en-US
- The beer: https://ibisrice.com/ibis-pale-ale/
- The whatever this is: https://ibis.ibo.org/
- The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis-framework/ (disclaimer: I work on this library)
- The ibis python library: https://pypi.org/project/ibis/
- The software for reverse mortgage management: https://www.ibisreverse.com/
- The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE
> The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information.
That is incorrect.
What you want is a block chain.