Ibis: Federated Wikipedia alternative
ibis.wiki
ibis.wiki
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.
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.
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 :) )
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.
Building this to clean up online discourse: https://rational.app
Anyone want to join me? Reply or find my email in my profile
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.
(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...)
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).
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.
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.
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 is why anything attempting to compete with Wikipedia, has to start from that point. Otherwise, full stop, not to be taken seriously.
> even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time... some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia can never be perfect, as nothing is. At the very least, they are very public about editing and moderation history. You can at least publicly challenge anything and everybody about what was done or what they are doing.
So yes it is more federated than 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.
- 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.
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.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
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.
> A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues.
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.
The point I'm making, and you clearly missed completely, is that other people think differently to us.
You'll hear the voices primarily of the dictators' supporters.
I haven't been to Japan yet, so can't speak to that. Fascinating that you see the same attitude there, though.
> Thailand sentences man to record 50 years in prison for insulting the monarchy
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/19/asia/thailand-man-sentenc...
I guess you know about those things, just thought it's an interesting (and sad) example of what can make people go quiet and pretend they're happy.
You've been to lots of co-working spaces in SE Asia? I was thinking that then you'll meet relatively well-off people who have fewer things to complain about, that might be another source of selection bias? But what do I know.
@majewsky
Japan is a pretty homogenous country? I'd think that can work better and be one reason for a more satisfied-with-the-government mindset? (But maybe there's more)
Compared to e.g. the US with different groups of people sometimes hating each other
And yes, you could probably get a long jail sentence in Cambodia for publicly criticising Hun Sen. The thing I found interesting is that that's a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that they're a very authoritarian culture who consider it very rude (our best approximation of the emotion) when people criticise leaders. At least that was the conclusion I came to during my time there. As you say, I'm a tourist so what do I know?
I do find it fascinating that we have such a resistance to understanding that different people have different attitudes to the world and different ways of thinking about it.
[0] I moved to Berlin a few years later, and the difference was dramatic: Berliners have a reputation for being rudely abrupt even amongst Germans. They do not sugar-coat anything lol.
But these are not Western societies. In SE Asian countries, you don't criticise your boss, even in private. Not because your boss will retaliate, but because it's incredibly rude. I worked for a while in Cambodia and it became clear that for the Khmer saying "I disagree with you, boss" was the equivalent of an American taking a dump on the boss's desk.
This behaviour is not driven by fear, but by an idea of social cohesion, social harmony, that we in the West don't have and don't understand.
There's lots of democracies in Asia and they manage pretty well. "It's not our culture" is the one of the laziest excuse of dictators and despots to keep their seats. And no it's very clear cut, in those dictatorship, if you publish anything the government doesn't like, you end up in a torture camp, that's as clear cut as you can be.
This is a common expressed sentiment. When I read it, I find myself wondering if the people expressing it have ever used an encyclopaedia. I old enough to have grow up with them. Mum and dad brought two of the in fact.
One was called something like "World Book". You couldn't possibly be reffering to that. It had 24 volumes lavishly illustrated. I remember one illustration in particular. It was a nuclear powered plane. I still the scowl on dad's face when he saw it.
We then got the Britannica. Undeniably very good. But it was just 24 books. When you have to cover every topic on the planet in that space you only get a good summary on each one. It cost thousands, maybe tens of thousands in today's money, and was of course out of date the day it was delivered. It was great for background information, but it wasn't detailed enough for even a high school project - you have to supplement it with the school library.
To put numbers on the difference. Britannica has 40 million words, the English Wikipedia has around 4.7 billion - about 100 times more. In Wikipedia articles the have seen a bit of activity for a decade or so (just about every topic Britannica covers would be in that category on Wikipedia) most of them will be as good as Britannica and importantly, have far better references.
Or to put it another way, I don't think the kids of today know how far we've come since the age of dead trees.
This is a problem everywhere, even in Europe. There are a lot of articles written by people employed by the state or mainstream media.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has had huge issues with bias in favor of right wing politicians, and I’ve had to fight users, mods etc to add corruption scandals to the Wikipedia pages of Portuguese politicians. Eventually I couldn’t keep them up and they were almost all deleted.
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?
It doesn't matter how the wiki is structured, these issues are simply part of the concept. It's difficult to fact check a site as popular as Wikipedia, the sheer number of articles means that verifying sources (and author credibility) is almost always going to be an imperfect process.
Something to keep in mind when decentralizing moderation.
But since all the per-language projects are segregated and autonomous, there's a lot of space for self-governance by speakers of extremely niche languages.
Observers may be familiar with the scandal of the Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...
This was possible because (1) few others actually spoke the language, or had enough interest to maintain a Wiki of it, and (2) the small population on that project was unable to support enough vigilant and fluent administrators.
The Spanish Wikipedia forked off, a long long time ago, but eswiki has made a comeback in its own right.
All projects are considered autonomous, and admins from other projects are really expected to stay out of local disputes. Therefore, it's quite easy for the smaller wikis to diverge and get hijacked by special interests, especially nationalist ones. I'd say it's unavoidable with the existing governance structure.
FWIW federated isn’t decentralized.
Federated instances can have whatever moderation rules without affecting all other instances, but decentralized systems usually try to achieve some kind of consensus, which isn’t necessary in federated systems.
Yes, but that’s kind of a good thing. It’s impossible to moderate in a way that’s acceptable to absolutely anyone.
Federated moderation gives users the ability to select moderators they like, by selecting which instances they use.
There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
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.
Mastodon and Lemmy are both very successful projects.
If we're defining success as not having died out and generally working, I guess I could agree.
Defining success := MAU is a very one dimensional way of thinking and it's not even the most important dimension from a user perspective.
(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.
More seriously, are you talking about the company coal towns in the Appalachian mountains?
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.
The right of exit is often far more important than the right of voice, and federation offers a practical way to exercise the right of exit without surrendering access to the broader ecosystem.
Democracy is not distributed governance. It's centralized governance that just allows for some form of (often performative and ineffective) input from those subject to its rules. If everyone involved has the capacity to choose or create their own "little fiefdom", that is a far better outcome than centralized democracy which offers little or no practical right of exit.
This is like a monolith vs micro services debate all over again and it shares a lot of the same issues and tradeoffs since we're talking about network efficiency, validation, throughput and error handling in systems generally.
Federation fosters fragmentation and discovery issues that means unless you have a "reality reification" process a centralized but transparent and public system sees very little benefit from federation.
Having a trusted (due to transparency, not perfection in data) and transparent centralized source that trends towards "true" is almost always more efficient than federation, but people seem to hate the idea of rules of governance, this makes sense, as anyone who for whatever reason disagrees with the content on wikipedia will push for fragmentation to push their position closer to the mainstream (which may very well be "more true" for a specific topic) even if the fragmentation damages accurate mapping to a shared reality in general. That's why good governance processes must include "dissent from dissenters in their own words". We must have a "good enough" in content and accuracy system that is the globally agreed on place for us to "fight" over propositions, this allows us to all be on the same page even if we disagree and to share a map of the disagreement space.
Independence is not the same as governance, they are orthogonal and people who conflate this clearly haven't thought this through. Just look at denominations and churches for historical repercussions of the different approaches towards governance, excepting a very narrow subset of polity beliefs if you go to attend a "baptist church" or "bible church" you have NO CLUE what they believe or even if they are in fact a koolaid drinking death cult. I think this is good but it is very inefficient, so even in these types of denominations groups will join "conventions" to signal their belief... even then it's buyer beware.
There are a lot of young earth creationists, flat earthers and corporate and political shills of various stripes who sounds plausible to those ignorant of the subject who HATE wikipedia. This hate is a sign of a generally healthy ecosystem.
I think a lot of people and state actors are incentivized to denigrate anything "imperfect but auditable" as being bad, the simple fact is that humanity needs "Trusted" sources, not in the sense that they are perfect or accurate but in the sense that this platforms goal is "we're trying to align with reality as hard as possible" and we have a globally recognized and shared space to do so, which means dissenting voices will be observable in Talk pages and we ultimately have a jumping off point that has a "shared nomenclature/history" people can fight over.
People assume small players are inherently more trustworthy. They are not. Some people assume contrarians are inherently more trustworthy. They are not.
Big is not inherently more evil than small. Transparency is the core to error correction either way. Most federated systems as implemented today seem to reject transparency outright which is totally screwed up and worse than a "open" centralized system.
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.
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.
[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
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!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045
163 points | 252 comments
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.
So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?
Wikipedias whole value function, don't get me wrong it's a great value function, is that it is a curated centralized web.
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.
they're good for writing emails.
98% of writing these articles is research. Current LLMs are nowhere near good enough.
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.
And contrary to your rather morbid view of society, in general most WP editors try hard to get it right. And support rather than undermine each other (don't let the more contentious topics distract you from the much larger pool of contributions)
More to the point, with humans you can demand they provide a source and at scale the iterative process should get to the right answers for a good percentage of content. That won't work for LLMs because none of that has meaning.
Wikipedia and anything that replaced it will simply be a target for aggressive activists.
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.
Do you mean something different, e.g. not just structured data?
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
You can find the article reposted here:
https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/49-wikipedia-rotten-to...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AHaeB%2FTimeline_of_dist...
http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federat...
Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.
I think many platforms would benefit from implementing that. Especially git forges, though I think someone is already working on that.
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.
That this project tries selling these warmed-over scandals as basic reasons for its existence shows that it’s not serious.
Every online collective eventually fosters corruption. The difference between this group and Wikimedia is that you know what you’re dealing with when it comes to Wikimedia.
EDIT: Since the link is broken on the site, I will make the case that the cited “investigative journalist,” Helen Buyniski, is less than convincing, using her role to criticize Wikipedia’s stance on alternative medicine, just as an example: https://web.archive.org/web/20240521014407/http://helenofdes...
Citing an apparent conspiracy theorist does not a convincing case make.