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Comment by mzajc | Hacker News Reader

This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them.

Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.

Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.

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I am also confused how this project improves upon Wikipedia's moderation issues. Especially calling Ibis "federated", is it more "federated" than Wikipedia is?

It's also not like Wikipedia is unusable because of these issues. As with any source of information it is necessary to be skeptical with wikipedia articles. Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.

And even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time now and contains millions of articles. With the scope and size of Wikipedia some incidents are expected.

Wikipedia also compiles their own backup collections.[1] If at any point Wikipedia becomes actually unusable anyone could use the existing article to produce a new alternative database.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

> Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.

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.

Federated means that individuals can host instances and have those instances communicate with other independent instances.

So yes it is more federated than Wikipedia

Wikipedia's edit history is public in the same way the Firefox source code is open, in theory only. In practice nobody looks at it because it overwhelming.

> This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia

Are their issues really that valid?

> For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia's front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples

From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.

They seem like nitpicks to me.

I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.

I've taken a deeper look into the listed issues since writing my comment, and you're absolutely right:

- the named scandals occurred in 2012, 2005, and 2007 respectively, so more then a decade ago. For reference, the linked Ibis page was written about 7 months ago,

- the "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" article was written by a RT employee in 2018, and is hosted on a website that is no longer online. It doesn't make any compelling points against Wikipedia, and does not seem to take itself very seriously given the "red wikipedia with horns" image.

While centralizing moderation can be problematic, I'm not so convinced it actually is in Wikipedia's case.

It is kind of bizarre that they are using those scandals.

I'm fully on team wikipedia, but i could certainly come up with more recent & better scandals than that.

Ultimately though, wikipedia isn't perfect. The important part is to learn from past mistakes and fix them - not to make no mistakes ever.

Please see the recent grooming gangs article on the UK scandal of the same name. This is a good recent example of bad behaviour on wikipedia by activists looking to subvert the truth.

There are several articles on that topic. Perhaps it would be better if you were more explicit about which article or articles, and what the bad behaviour is.

How about this one?

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues. In a single language like Vietnamese, where the majority of native speakers locate in a single country with heavy censorship and brainwashed by propaganda, articles about social, political matters and people can be very one-sided and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia. Change is extremely difficult due to the long term moderators, who obviously have agendas.

In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.

I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.

> and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia

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 really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.

SE Asian countries are big on social hierarchy and social cohesion. In the West, we view this as these countries repressing their citizens, because that would have to be the situation for a Western country to behave like this. It's not so clear-cut there. SE Asia has a very strong, very ancient culture that is different to Western culture. We don't get to just say "you should do things our way".

One major difference is their attitude to authority: in the West if you disagree with your boss you are expected to say so, possibly in private. In SE Asia that would be unbelievably rude and disrespectful, even in private. This attitude flows out to government and leadership; criticising a leader is incredibly rude. They prioritise everyone getting along rather than The Truth [0].

SE Asia has no "free speech" media any more [1], partly for this reason. Their culture just doesn't prioritise this as value. I would expect their Wikipedia entries to reflect this, too.

[0] and given the shitshow of Western democracies lately, I'm not convinced our priorities are working so much better.

[1] you can argue this, it depends on your definition of any of the words in this sentence. But we can agree that the vast majority of media in SE Asia is directly controlled by government one way or another, and the remainder is indirectly controlled.

> This is really interesting because it's a very Western point of view.

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.

The dictators who put people who criticize them in prison, love people like you.

Why? I criticise dictators freely. I'm a Westerner.

The point I'm making, and you clearly missed completely, is that other people think differently to us.

There's selection bias. People self censor, so as not to disappear in prison. Others disappear in prison for real.

You'll hear the voices primarily of the dictators' supporters.

From my limited experience with the area, what Marcus says also matches what I've seen of democratic societies like Japan. I cannot offer any detailed insights into this, but a way to test the opposing hypotheses would be to see if democratic countries in SE Asia present the same cultural basis that Marcus described.

There are no democratic countries in SE Asia (which is in an indication by itself) unfortunately. Vietnam and Laos are communist, Cambodia is a dictatorship, Thailand is a monarchy, Myanmar is rolls dice a military dictatorship this year. Malaysia is an elective Monarchy. You have to get down to Singapore to get to something like a functioning democracy.

I haven't been to Japan yet, so can't speak to that. Fascinating that you see the same attitude there, though.

Hi Marcus, look here:

> 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

No, I actually worked in Cambodia alongside Khmer folks (as well as working in a bunch of co-working spaces elsewhere in the region). And sure, they were probably lying to me about things (but that's part of the difference I found - the truth is less important than in the West [0])

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.

Ok thanks for explaining :-)

thanks for the civility :)

Yeah, if they were Western societies, this is exactly right and that's what a dictator would need to do to stop people criticising them.

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.

Your post raises an interesting point where 95+% of speakers of one language live in one country without anything resembling free speech. It is probably unavoidable. A better solution would be a parallel VN lang Wiki that is moderated by people offshore.

    > A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues.

This is a wide brush stroke. Certainly on the English language version, there is a wide set of views offered for controversial topics. Do you make this claim only for VN land Wiki, or all Wikis?

> A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues

This is a problem everywhere, even in Europe. There are a lot of articles written by people employed by the state or mainstream media.

You don't need to look as far as Vietnamese Wikipedia to see ideology creeping in. I noticed weirdly forced extreme-left concepts in a lot of French and English pages, to the point it lowered my trust in the whole website.

Examples please.

Anything to do with Zionism is a great starting point.

When I said examples I was looking for a link to a paragraph. Instead, you gave me the same vague shit as the person I was talking to.

Moderation and admin bias is is real thing. In the US Wikipedia id say it leans left but is generally factual.

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.

>But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.

The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.

I think this works much better for social media than it would for an encyclopedia - while a Mastodon user I'm interested in is likely on a single instance, a topic an encyclopedia would cover might be present on many instances, each hosting a different version. I don't think it's feasible to expect users to read every single one.

That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."

That’s what I don’t get about mastodon. Big servers use commonly shared block lists for others that don’t abide by their censorship rules. Now we’re back to something similar to what existed anyways - big powerful centralized social media separated from smaller ones that don’t benefit from networks.

The problem there was also that it attracted some pretty seriously incompatible ideologies. Like neonazis on gab.com and tankies on lemmy.ml for example. That was never going to end well. How are they supposed to come to an agreement on moderation :)

And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned.

Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out.

Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3

They're not supposed to come to an agreement on moderation. The whole idea behind federation is that a company is not trying to navigate a middle ground between Nazis and chinese communists! :-)

Hmm yeah but the idea was not to duplicate moderation a thousand times. And then where is your community?

My problem is that the fediverse is tearing itself apart on tiny differences. Lots of instances have banned others from the same ideology because one little time someone said something one of the founders didn't agree with.

It's just not working like this. I think ideological choices should be made by the end user.

I think the instance should be agnostic like an internet browser. And moderation done by the groups the user subscribes to. That's the model that works. We had exactly this in Usenet which is just not really used anymore due to complex technical implementation.

In fediverse terminology your idea would be for accounts to seamlessly hop between instances (which are usenet groups), and a lot of other people think that would be a good change too. The only difficulty is engineering something where no individual server has authority over a login identity. It would all be so easy if browsers could sign POST requests with keypairs that the browser managed, but that's been resisted in web standards for decades.

Hmm no, I imagine they would stay on an instance (similar to the Usenet provider) and join groups or whatever they're called on mastodon, similar to the Usenet newsgroups.

And then the moderators would come from the management of each group, independently from which instance they're on. There would be no central authentication necessary. Just some way for moderators to prove their ownership, perhaps some kind of public key.

This way each group can do their own moderation. Of course some instances could decide not to carry some groups that go totally counter to them, but it should be a rare phenomenon. Similar to the old Usenet providers blocking binary groups (before that was the only thing Usenet was being used for anymore :) )

I watched an interesting video recently about how one of the ex Yugoslavia countries had their Wikipedia essentially hijacked by (quasi?) fascists. They were able to purge all dissenting opinion after getting enough of their people moderator / admin privileges.

Something to keep in mind when decentralizing moderation.

The English Wikipedia draws the most coverage, it's the first and the largest project.

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.

> Something to keep in mind when decentralizing moderation.

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.

> The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.

I've always thought this is an inherent problem for all decentralized solutions. If one node or server or whatever it gets called grows big enough, it stops being decentralized.

If one (or even a few) federated server in a decentralized system becomes big enough to be the one that everyone uses, them it's just centralization with extra steps and a lot of moralization and handwaving.

Do decentralized/federated systems in general have a way of preventing this from happening?

> But doesn't that simply shift the problem?

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.

For a more relativistic approach, built on nostr, see wikifreedia.xyz, which allows everyone to maintain their own version of any article, fork, vote, and merge as needed.

So move the moderation decisions onto the end user? Somehow this doesn’t feel like progress.

Seems a bit bloated. I opened the front page and could only see a list of recently edited pages, with the count constantly ticking up. Trying to open any of them by clicking them didn't do anything, seems like the page was ground to a halt. Tried to search 'wikifreedia' to see if there's a wiki page explaining what the project is about, but could not get the search to go through.

> Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.

I've always thought about modeling this as vote based system votes support claims.

Like, "Israel's IDF is committing genocide in Palestine" would be maybe supported by Wikipedia, but would have opposing votes by the US and Israel, and it's up to each client to decide who to trust. Non controversial claims would be generally supported, and on controversial ones you could have them scored given your prior trust in voters and have the UI mention it's controversial and show the underlying votes if you want to dig into that.

Wikipedia generally avoids resolving disputes democratically, instead opting to establish consensus based on sources where possible.

With voting systems you end up walking the tightrope between making your system susceptible to Sybil attacks and sockpuppetry on one end, and giving well-established users undue voting rights on another.

Sybil and sockpuppetry is solvable by "following" (possibly truth-weighted, can nicely express negative weights). The downside is that there is no global truth view, only individual ones based on who you grant trustworthiness and how it recursively expands – but arguably this reflects reality better.

"No global truth view" also makes discoverability difficult. How do you know whom to follow? Just people you already know from elsewhere?

Then if you don't know any subject-matter experts, will your individual view of the wiki be devoid of subject-matter expertise?

That arguably reflects reality better, but also isn't terribly useful.

Edit: I guess the situation of an expert correcting an article written by laypeople is similar to an expert replying to a layperson's toot or whatever. So maybe you could solve this by letting people see new edits made by other people on top of their own edits, and giving them the option to block or accept the change, or even follow the user in question.

Wikipedia has an explainer called "Verifiability, Not Truth". It was quite popular to reference this during disputes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...

It was deprecated to "essay" status a while ago, because it was quite controversial, but not because it was inaccurate.

Wikipedia is not involved in the business of publishing Truth. Wikipedia's articles are based on Verifiability, which means that the assertions can be backed up and traced to the reliable sources that are provided alongside them.

If there is a dichotomy or controversy about the "truth" of a fact, well, then, Wikipedia documents that controversy, according to the reliably-published information about it.

Wikipedia projects work within the languages they're published in, for better or worse. That means, a Vietnamese wiki will generally be run by and for people who speak Vietnamese, and will generally rely on sources published in that language. So if there is a consensus about a fact or assertion in Vietnamese-language sources, and it's agreed by people who speak Vietnamese, then it wouldn't be easy to break through that consensus, even if you had a sincerely held belief.

Which brings us to another Wikipedian axiom: WP:RGW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tendentious_editing#...

People who edit Wikipedia shouldn't be concerned about "Righting Great Wrongs" through editing or discussion. If there is injustice in the world, it will likely be reflected in Wikipedia, despite striving to be a collegial utopia, it is not usually possible to change the world from activism there, and activist editors are eventually blocked and banned for being non-neutral.

It's a nice claim, but ultimately Wikipedia is publishing its own truth based on the sources it allows or doesn't.

That is indeed the key to Wikipedia's systemic bias. By carefully curating their blacklist of sources, they're able to exclude any viewpoints that differ with their majority viewpoint. Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" is only neutral when viewed by those who agree with them, for example: mainstream progressive center-left outlets like NYTimes and HuffPo, and scholarly ivory towers such as Oxford/Cambridge/Ivy League.

It would be neutral which is current status quo, not that bad?

The nice part is that it would work the other way around as well – from article/subject back to people who endorse or object it – in case you want to follow (attract/repel their pov).

In reality who to follow should be easy as it would be recursive – if you follow MIT and MIT follows ie. Noam Chomsky – you wouldn't have to directly follow Noam as your trust would already exist as transitive one from MIT etc.

The status quo is not neutral. It is extremely biased, particularly against spam, vandalism and low-quality content. Its defense against sybil attacks and sockpuppetry is a single global truth, collectively patrolled by all users.

If you tried to do a neutral wiki anyone can edit, it would be full of ads and porn.

It's neutral in the sense that it's not trust-weight-filtered by observer.

It can be created yes, just like any web page can be created, but won't surface for anybody because nobody will endorse it.

If it's endorsed by sybil accounts – it'll be visible to sybils and their followers – ie. nobody real.

To rephrase it – following somebody means it alters your view and nothing else – it's uni-directional (but recursive).

It's not exactly democracy once you add weights penalising erroneous information and bad actors.

Science kind of works this way, you have papers to support, and lack of rebuttal is sort of understood as general acceptance, new evidence updates our beliefs about old information. I think it should be feasible to encode this general agreement into something that can be put into a database. No one has succeeded I guess, and it seems a bit harder since "flatearther-12345" is initially the same as "actual_scientist" since it's hard to have verified identity and offer anonymity at the same time.

Obligatory - Wikipedia is not a democracy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_...

(Or the related / more in depth "Polling is not a substitute for discussion" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_s...)

Yea but the list of sources accepted is itself editorialization. And furthermore the articles are unbalanced and incomplete on anything controversial, choosing to quote from sources supporting the view espoused and ignoring others.

That model doesn’t work because there are plenty of issues on which a vote by the US would increase my confidence in the truthfulness of a claim, but others where it would not make a difference, or even decrease my confidence.

I don't think it's impossible to encode that, but yeah, it means that the straightforward approach meets immediate edge cases that may render it broken.

Exactly, votes + who you trust-follow (ie. "MIT" with high degree, "Flat Earth Society" with high negative degree) – recursively; creates your own landscape of truth-weighted information.

This requires web-of-trust/friend-to-friend or similar system, and despite numerous attempts none of such things had ever succeeded so far.

I have a different approach — rather than keeping people apart in echo chambers, I force them all together in a centralized site where they have to see the best arguments for and against each claim

Building this to clean up online discourse: https://rational.app

Anyone want to join me? Reply or find my email in my profile

Yeah I'm confused as to how it could solve these problems too. All the issues listed in the article come from the challenges inherent in moderating a large wiki used by millions of people, not from centralisation or technology.

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.

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