[HN Gopher] Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative
___________________________________________________________________
Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative
Author : chasingtheflow
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-03-13 16:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ibis.wiki)
(TXT) w3m dump (ibis.wiki)
| mdaniel wrote:
| https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis#federation
|
| > 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?
| foul wrote:
| >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
|
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think it depends what you want. Diffs are better if you want
| to review changes and intelligently merge them.
|
| 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| Git conflict resolution isn't great, but it's also not much
| worse than MediaWiki's existing conflict resolution today.
|
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| CRDTs are cool for tiny concurrent edits. For example two
| people typing on one line. But it doesn't save you when you get
| large conflicting edits. No system can automatically merge
| instance A removing a sentence and instance B adding some words
| within the that sentence. It's still the user that will have to
| make a decision. And at that point, you're effectively looking
| at a git style 3-way merge.
| kemayo wrote:
| Automatically merging updates between different variants of the
| article, in fact, seems like a terrible idea. This is because
| resolving conflicts between edits is easy, but making sure that
| (for lack of a better word) _semantic_ conflicts don 't make it
| through requires a manual review of changes.
|
| 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.
| rakoo wrote:
| CRDTs make sure there is only one version, but that version
| might be garbage. Think taking all the lines from all conflicts
| in git. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes not. It's even worse than
| that: you don't know there was a conflict, so you don't know if
| there was a problem or not. It's trying to solve social
| problems with technology, it's never enough (but can bring us a
| good way there)
|
| Manual merging is mandatory to have human meaning, so might as
| well use it all the time.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's
| Wikipedia.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| A federated version of Wikipedia wouldn't displace the
| centralized Wikipedia (for the same reason that Wikipedia
| didn't exactly replace traditional encyclopedias), but it has a
| potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's
| worthwhile enough.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > for the same reason that Wikipedia didn't exactly replace
| traditional encyclopedias
|
| 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
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Most traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish _in the
| book form_. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Their significance in public life was been almost
| completely replaced by Wikipedia, though
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Wikipedia articles are not consumed like traditional
| encyclopedias anyway. I would say that encyclopedias
| became much less relevant in general, but being one of
| the first influencial online encyclopedias, Wikipedia
| came to be used as a volatile source of information even
| though it didn't strive to be one.
| emj wrote:
| We used them for further research or quick look up of
| facts you should know. That seems to be how people use
| Wikipedia.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| That's how people _should_ use Wikipedia, but people
| generally don 't do so in my understanding.
| blowski wrote:
| How do they use it then?
| chgs wrote:
| We used to copy articles out of them for homework. The
| more things change...
| szundi wrote:
| As a meager pedestrian, I consume Wikipedia instead of
| Encyclopedias - that I sometimes did when I was a kid
| bawolff wrote:
| Idk if it was the first. Microsoft encarta was a pretty
| big player in that space back in the day.
| dagw wrote:
| Was Encarta ever released online? I only remember the CD-
| ROM version.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| But not among the paying clientele.
| Erwin wrote:
| Here in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is
| managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For
| every article you can see which scientist was involved in
| making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc.
| https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/
| medstrom wrote:
| I suspect they're growing again, much like Usenet, RSS and
| the blogosphere. Because, you know. I try to check
| https://www.britannica.com / https://www.encyclopedia.com
| for political hot topics.
| bawolff wrote:
| > but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I
| believe it's worthwhile enough.
|
| What do you think it would supplement?
| lencastre wrote:
| It needs to be on the blotchein! What, too soon?
| bawolff wrote:
| You know, technically i feel like wikipedia already is.
| Each revision of a pageis hashed, and they form a
| sequence in time. Isn't that the definition of block
| chain?
| kamray23 wrote:
| Wikipedia displaced traditional encyclopedias. The number of
| encyclopedias produced in Finnish fell from ~10 to 1 in the
| last two decades, that one being fiwiki. The same is true for
| many languages. What once was a normal thing middle-class
| families kept in a vitrine is now something old-fashioned and
| rare. There are no physical copies being printed nor online
| versions accessible and actively edited. There were online
| versions, but they were too costly to operate and shut down
| due to being outcompeted by Wikipedia. There is only fiwiki.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| As I've mentioned in other comments, that's not directly
| related to the rise of Wikipedia because most people no
| longer read encyclopedias in the way they used to decades
| ago. I have a counterexample as well; major encyclopedias
| and dictionaries in Korea are kept alive by portal websites
| nowadays, but these portals never tried to adopt kowiki
| instead. (I was one of earlier administrators in kowiki
| during that transition period, if you wonder.) A better
| hypothesis for Finnish would therefore be a lack of such
| sponsors to keep them alive, and that would be completely
| orthogonal to the existence or absence of fiwiki.
| techaqua wrote:
| this could be an alternative to fandom.com
| labster wrote:
| There are already alternatives to Fandom. I volunteer with
| Miraheze.org, which hosts wikis without all of the ads, has
| been up since 2015, and has recently become a US nonprofit.
| We're currently geared towards more technical users, but
| we're trying to make more tooling to simplify wiki
| administration as we've taken on more users.
|
| 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).
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Or just self-host, Mediawiki is pretty easy to setup, even
| for a large wiki.
|
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| > of course Fandom is like Hotel California, you can check
| out any time you like but your wiki content will never come
| down
|
| 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 :|
| altilunium wrote:
| Also, if you want your own free MediaWiki instance, you could
| try : https://www.wikibase.cloud/
| mmarx wrote:
| Yes, technically you'll also get a MediaWiki instance
| there, but the point is really to offer Wikibase (which is
| a set of extensions upon MediaWiki), the software behind
| Wikidata.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Why not? Do you care to expand on your comment?
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Why change it if it's not broken?
| madsbuch wrote:
| this thread really should sink to the bottom, as had also
| happened.
|
| criticizing is great! but it would be fantastic with
| enlightening discussion.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Have you ever tried to edit on Wikipedia? It's one of the most
| toxic places on the Internet. I'm partially to blame for that,
| btw, as I started the admin's noticeboard.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| I don't care. As a consumer, I don't care how they do it,
| what I care is they have an infinite amount of high quality
| information.
| account42 wrote:
| These things are not unrelated.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| If the editing being toxic and the quality to the end
| user being great are not unrelated, then I want the
| editing to be toxic.
| oefrha wrote:
| I have, and it's not. (I steer clear of politics.) I have
| been involved in pointless edit wars, but that's just human
| nature: give them a comment thread and they'll argue to death
| (plenty of case studies on this site, the older wikis where
| people essentially talk to/past each other on the same page
| were like that as well), give them a text box they can all
| edit and they'll fight to death. "Federated" wiki isn't going
| to solve shit in that regard.
|
| If you think "fediverse" isn't "toxic" when it comes to
| controversial issues, you haven't really checked it out.
| j_maffe wrote:
| I've edited on Wikipedia for several years and everyone I've
| interacted with has been nothing more than helpful. Sure,
| they don't shy away from pointing out the flaws in something
| I wrote. But I appreciate that level of honesty and
| transparency. Could you share what area you've experienced
| editing in that caused you to have this viewpoint?
| tux3 wrote:
| I think they're referring to AN/I interactions, more than
| content in articles. ANI is the Administrators'
| Noticeboard/Incidents page, where people come to complain
| about more or less urgent problems they have with other
| users' behavior.
|
| 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")
| pornel wrote:
| There is Conservapedia for those who disagree with everything
| on Wikipedia.
| kemayo wrote:
| ...they couldn't think of a good Wikipedia scandal from within
| the last decade?
|
| (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.
| matricaria wrote:
| Just search for anything remotely political and you will find a
| lot of bias.
| kemayo wrote:
| I'm not talking about whether there are scandals about
| Wikipedia. I'm saying it's _weird_ what the article chose to
| use as a demonstration.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| And Wikipedia does have an extensive list of its own
| controversies [1]. That doesn't mean Wikipedia is not to
| blame, but miraculously it did have a good track record
| compared to other online projects of the similar size and
| influence.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controv
| ersie...
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I don't see how federation can help with that.
|
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| > 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
|
| Sounds like an improvement over one dominant group being
| able to declare their viewpoint as The Truth(tm).
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| I just picked a random political article to which I have no
| significant connection[0]; I don't notice "a lot of bias"...?
|
| For me Wikipedia is consistently amongst the least biased
| sources on the internet.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Labour_Party
| vintermann wrote:
| If you have no significant connection to it, how would you
| know if it's biased or not?
| theamk wrote:
| In some wikipedia clones, it's pretty obvious:
|
| https://www.conservapedia.com/Video_games
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Compare the first paragraphs of these two articles.
| Remember that Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaig
| n...
| vkou wrote:
| But... It _was_ a misogynistic harassment campaign. Some
| maybe well-meaning useful idiots also hitched their horse
| to it (and most have not even been tarnished by it), but
| that was the main thrust of that adventure.
|
| 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.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The KYM article mentions the harassment but is less
| editorialized.
|
| "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.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Truthiness is not bias.
| sugarkjube wrote:
| Well, i think a lot is just not reported any more.
|
| 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.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| Horrible rendering on mobile. And screw those pyramid scheme
| (crypto"currency") donation links.
| tomgp wrote:
| Wikipedia is the worst possible system for making an
| encyclopaedia, except for all the others.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I clicked through, but the site is completely unusable on mobile,
| clearly hasn't even been tested let alone designed to work here.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| It also has no articles, one of the main ones listed is titled
| "Hello World".
|
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| My understanding is that the person creating it is also the
| person who made Lemmy, which is a somewhat-successful
| federated reddit-alternative. Existing notability translates
| into more interest in otherwise uninteresting things.
| buro9 wrote:
| How does moderation work in this system, and if it results in
| multiple diverging pages on the same topic, how is any of it
| trusted?
|
| 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.
| varjag wrote:
| Not sure how federation is going to increase the trustworthiness.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I'm sorry, but aren't web sites already federated? I don't
| understand what the technical contribution is here. If we wanted
| to build a federated network of wikis (do we?), then links to
| articles are just links and identity is provided by OpenID
| Connect.
|
| 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".
| oefrha wrote:
| My impression as well. I could be totally wrong, but it feels
| like the work of someone who's got the fediverse hammer and
| who's also too immersed in the social media one-place-to-
| consume-them-all mindset to realize the absurdity.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| There are aspects of federation that are stricter than the
| web.
|
| 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
| kemayo wrote:
| I think the bit that makes it "federated" is that they want to
| use ActivityPub to synchronize articles between servers.
|
| 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.
| mdaniel wrote:
| My experience with the Fediverse thus far also implies that
| one could run a copy of any such "federated wiki" that has
| all the same(?) content as other origins but that actually
| renders on mobile or without JavaScript or via the Gemini
| protocol or whatever else since it decouples content from
| presentation. _In theory_ , I would guess that if this also
| went so far as to incorporate IPFS it could also share the
| actual storage burden, too, so there wouldn't have to be 4999
| copies of the exact same pigeon text (along with 4999 cute
| pigeon pictures) stored on 4999 different servers plus the
| one where birds aren't real
| sebtron wrote:
| I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems
| mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x
| worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes
| impossible to moderate the content.
| omeid2 wrote:
| Moderation is not a feature; it is a limitation imposed by
| powers that be for you if you want to conduct business.
| Moderation is not a feature.
| consumer451 wrote:
| You are writing this on one of the more heavily moderated
| forums on the internet, and people seem to like it here.
| kemotep wrote:
| Hacker News is probably the most moderated site I use. Even
| more than reddit. And it is probably that much better for
| it.
| ithinkso wrote:
| The only thing worse than moderation is the lack of
| moderation
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Not moderating the moderators for their moderation is a
| lack of moderation.
| joquarky wrote:
| Perhaps Slashdot had the right idea.
| nequo wrote:
| I had to look this up. I think you're referring to
| metamoderation where users rate the ratings of comments:
|
| 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?
| kirun wrote:
| The problem is that if you get hit with hivemind
| moderation in M1, then you're likely to see it rated as
| fair in M2. This is encouraged by the "Troll" and
| "Flamebait" options which can be slapped on any
| dissenting opinion.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _" Do you know if it had downsides for Slashdot?"_
|
| In a word, ossification. It preserves the culture of a
| forum, to a fault.
| tsukikage wrote:
| It is not appropriate to advertise in most online spaces for
| much the same reasons it is not appropriate to barge into a
| restaurant and walk from table to table peddling your wares
| to the customers. Spam is not an acceptable "business", and
| discussion spaces are not a plaform for spam.
| sebtron wrote:
| Yes I would very much like an online encyclopedia to be
| moderated, thank you.
| vintermann wrote:
| Moderation is fine, but it must not be confused with
| censorship.
|
| 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.
| tsukikage wrote:
| The distinction you are trying to make is impossible to
| make in practice.
|
| 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.
| mavhc wrote:
| Some say moderation is the only feature
| bawolff wrote:
| The problems mentioned aren't even real problems:
|
| - 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of decent editors
| who have stopped contributing due to toxic, non-productive
| people. This could be a way for them to continue contributing
| in a less toxic environment.
|
| The problem with Wikipedia is not consumption of content, but
| the contribution of content.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Care to share details/sources for this claim? I haven't
| experienced any of this toxicity while editing there
| myself.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| I think AARoads might be a good example.
| https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/wikipedia-road-
| highway-...
|
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| Wikipedia's notability requirements in particular are
| quite arbitrary. It doesn't make sens for an online
| encyclopedia that isn't limited by physical space
| restrictions to not document _everything_. If you must,
| layer curation of what is notable on top of that.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| There are many practical reasons to limit the scope:
|
| * 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| The main concern Wikipedia has with notability is that if
| you don't have reputable secondary source writing about
| the topic, then you won't have references for any claims
| in the article. People just starting adding things that
| they know, or that "everyone knows".
|
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| But _" has reputable secondary sources"_ isn't even close
| to Wikipedia's real 'notability' determination.
| tux3 wrote:
| Well, I can only say that it's what goes into my decision
| process. And it is a good part of what the written
| guidelines focus on.
|
| 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)
| tux3 wrote:
| Wikipedia has a similar problem to Stackoverflow, though
| nowhere near as bad, where the active community members
| really care about rules and have a whole established
| process and tooling for efficiently dealing with new
| contributions that don't necessarily meet that bar.
|
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem with this, with Wikipedia specifically is the
| good faith part.
|
| 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| On the other hand, it is very democratic. With many of
| the flaws of a democracy,
|
| 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"
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > It's the massively toxic little kingdoms that have
| become established among power users/moderators.
|
| 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)
| vkou wrote:
| That makes it no different from a run-of-the-mill legal
| system.
|
| Which, for their flaws, do sometimes produce results.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's the ancient mass-internet-moderation problem. I have
| yet to see a system that, even with the best of
| intentions, is able to do both of the following:
|
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I have corrected _typos_ on Wikipedia and seen them
| reverted immediately without comment. Decided pretty
| quickly it wasn 't worth the effort anymore.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| It could be, in the same way that drinking a cup of tea
| every morning could make me make rich somehow. Why do you
| expect a federated system to be better in this respect?
| the_biot wrote:
| > There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of decent
| editors who have stopped contributing due to toxic, non-
| productive people.
|
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| A decentralized wiki with little to no oversight sounds
| like a significantly more toxic environment to me. All
| those assholes and bad faith editors will be on your new
| decentralized network too.
| arcfour wrote:
| > jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught
|
| 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.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| > How is that a problem? You don't need a degree to mediate
| user disputes
|
| You probably shouldn't be lying about having one though
| BeetleB wrote:
| > jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught, and edits were
| reviewed for appropriateness. System worked as it was
| supposed to
|
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| Oh, there will be plenty of problems and mistakes.
|
| The question is, should people be allowed to make their own
| mistakes, or should Jimmy Wales' mistakes take priority?
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| People can make whatever websites they want, that doesn't
| mean anybody else is going to view them (let alone
| contribute).
| sschueller wrote:
| Ibis is a large hotel chain. I am not sure using this name is a
| good idea.
| creshal wrote:
| Ibis is a bird.
| sn0wleppard wrote:
| Well, it was also the name of a bird long before that
| account42 wrote:
| I think GP's point is that the name will need to compete with
| existing much more popular uses in online search results and
| similar limited spaces, which makes it a bad choice even the
| the hotel chain doesn't have an exclusive claim to the name.
| meepmorp wrote:
| It's also a bird; in ancient Egyptian mythology, Thoth had head
| of an ibis and was the god of writing, wisdom, knowledge, art,
| science, etc.
| cpcloud wrote:
| Turns out people like naming things ibis:
|
| - 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
| moi2388 wrote:
| Maybe make it tender properly on iOS safari first?
| outime wrote:
| Cannot take a project like this seriously in 2024 while looking
| like total garbage [1] on mobile.
|
| [1] https://i.ibb.co/3RWgMGy/IMG-4197.jpg
| janfoeh wrote:
| You believe the interesting, valuable part is the three lines
| of CSS it will take to improve rendering on baby internet
| browsers? Not the part where they federated a Wiki-style
| system?
| meepmorp wrote:
| When meeting somebody for the first time, it's generally a
| good idea to comb your hair and put on clean clothes. First
| impressions matter, and since the effort to make a good one
| would've been a mere "three lines of CSS," the fact that the
| project didn't bother with that is kind of off-putting.
| janfoeh wrote:
| > the fact that the project didn't bother with that is kind
| of off-putting.
|
| 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.
| outime wrote:
| I believe that if I have a new project and I want people to
| read about it and get interested, I must support mobile
| browsers (which nowadays produce more than half of the global
| website traffic) - more so if not doing it like in my example
| means not being able to read a single line at all.
|
| It's just basic accessibility what we're talking about here.
| t-3 wrote:
| Interesting. How does performance compare to other wikis? I'm
| thinking that something like this may be attractive for a
| browsable self-hosted private knowledge base with a "sync" server
| hosted on a VPS and local instances running on different machines
| which may or may not have persistent connections.
| manfre wrote:
| You'd likely have a much easier time using a file based wiki
| with rsync.
| j_maffe wrote:
| There's a lot of options for self-hostable wikis if that's what
| you're looking for. Decentralized has been done as well here:
| https://ipfs.kiwix.org/
| beders wrote:
| The issue you seem to be trying to solve is that of authenticity
| and change management.
|
| > 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.
| janfoeh wrote:
| Sounds good, please make sure to let HN know when you've got
| something running!
|
| I just wanted to tell you good luck, and we're all counting on
| you.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Hey if the devs are in here, check out your mobile styling/css,
| it's a bit weird
| lakomen wrote:
| _sigh_ unviewable on mobile phones. From the little I can make
| out it 's also some bootstrap site.
| medstrom wrote:
| Also unviewable on text terminals.
| bawolff wrote:
| Reading through, this doesn't sound like a "federated wikipedia"
|
| 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.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I'm for sure not a federation nor ActivityPub ninja, but _as I
| understand it_ due to the broadcast nature of ActivityPub and
| this project 's "send updates to the origin server as patches"
| approach, then it is the opposite of both github _and_
| Subversion in that there is not _one_ canonical hostname, and
| any _one_ hostname doesn 't, itself, contain 100% of the
| content, same as infosec.social for sure doesn't contain 100%
| of Mastodon content but I can read infosec.social posts on
| my.mastodon.example by subscribing to feeds that interest me. I
| currently can't (that I know of) submit patches to their Toots
| as reply activity, but I don't believe there's anything in the
| spec that would prevent such a thing, either
|
| 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
| InsomniacL wrote:
| how does this solve the problem it claims to exist for?
|
| i.e stopping scandals & improving trust?
|
| if anything, this seems to be more prone to scandals and less
| trustworthy.
| chris_wot wrote:
| This looks awful on an iPhone.
| crotchfire wrote:
| The real wikipedia renders (perfectly!) without javascript.
|
| This does not render _at all_ without javascript.
|
| Not an alternative.
| rajamaka wrote:
| Not an alternative for you maybe, but a fine alternative for
| over 99% of the rest of the world running javascript in their
| browser.
| justaj wrote:
| 99% of the users you're talking about won't see any benefit
| in switching to this alternative from Wikipedia anyway, so
| what's your point?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| His point that the javascript-turner-offers are a vocal,
| but very small minority.
|
| 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.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Wikipedia is one of the few initiatives where not being
| satisfied with 99% accessibility is absolutely warranted. If
| your goal is to dethrone it, you have to bite that bullet.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| It also renders like garbage on mobile, which makes it
| useless for about 50% of the world. Not a great start.
| SPBS wrote:
| It doesn't even run on _mobile_ because the sidebar takes up
| all the space and the main content is squeezed to the side.
| Even more disappointing to learn that what is essentially a
| static webpage doesn 't render without JavaScript. This is not
| going anywhere with that kind of attitude (not testing on
| mobile, relying 100% on JavaScript).
| account42 wrote:
| This seems to be a common problem with the fediverse ecosystem.
| amrangaye wrote:
| I thought it was just me - I even tried different mobile
| browsers. You'd think before you wrote a whole article about
| how bad Wikipedia is you'd at least make your site work on
| mobile. (And I have js turned on - the site is just one long
| column of unreadable text)
| npteljes wrote:
| "There are many problems with Wikipedia. Here is an example from
| 12 years ago! Did we forget to mention that Wikipedia is now
| twice as old?"
|
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up
| regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.
| npteljes wrote:
| Dunning-Kruger effect might have something to do with it.
| People spotting issue in an established project, having an
| idea about how to improve it, but no actual experience in
| running such projects or even knowing the history and context
| of the established project. And the lack of this knowledge
| helping to overestimate their ability and perceived chance of
| success.
| agumonkey wrote:
| True, but I think there's a social/group aspect to it too.
| A lot of projects start like this, people all thinking it's
| time to start fresh only to devolve into nothingness in a
| few weeks.
| observationist wrote:
| If someone has staked a claim over an article, regardless
| of its factual accuracy, it's almost impossible to fix
| problems. Look at any politicians, celebrities, topics that
| are contentious in the public sphere, and you'll find
| control over the topic has been taken. There is no sane
| recourse - you can find endless examples of years long
| discussions as people who know what they're talking about
| battle it out with empty headed wiki editors who simply
| want the clout, or don't know the first thing about
| rational discourse and insist on their weird, distorted
| views of reality.
|
| 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.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Speaking as someone who's been on there for years, the
| process is about as fair and transparent as it can be.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_dis
| cus...
|
| 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_resolutio
| n
|
| 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.
| boxed wrote:
| I think it's universal among humans to see the flaw of
| existing systems and wanting to replace them and then are
| surprised at the following disaster. Communism, the French
| Revolution, Franco, the fall of the Roman Empire, every big
| software rewrite that failed spectacularly...
| hnbad wrote:
| > Communism
|
| 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).
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The "Blackjack and Hookers" reflex, from Futurama when Bender
| gets thrown out of the amusement park on the Moon and says
| "I'll start my own theme park... with blackjack!... and
| hookers!... in fact, forget the park!"
|
| 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.
| nick238 wrote:
| Wikipedia + Blackjack + Hookers - Wikipedia =
| https://www.conservapedia.com/
| lolc wrote:
| Wow I haven't seen a link to Conservapedia in a looong
| time. Out of curiosity, I clicked. They claim physical
| reality of the biblical flood:
| https://www.conservapedia.com/Great_Flood
|
| 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.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| > They claim physical reality of the biblical flood
|
| 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
| lolc wrote:
| Yea these flood events are interesting. But did you read
| the Conservapedia page? They are very specific about the
| flood having happened 5000 years ago and say it was a
| global phenomenon. That was just the first link I clicked
| on the homepage. I dare you to find something equally
| implausible on the English Wikipedia homepage.
|
| And if you don't find the biblical flood implausible,
| well, I'm somewhat intrigued why you believe that to be
| an option.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Looking at Conservapedia from a 'liberal' standpoint is
| like looking at Wikipedia from a 'conservative'
| standpoint. Where a Conservapedia article like the one
| you mentioned - the Biblical flood being based on a
| recent 'global' flood event - is hard to take seriously
| by 'liberals' the same goes for Wikipedia articles like
| 'Non-binary gender' [1] to 'conservatives'. Both
| Conservapedia as well as Wikipedia treat highly
| contentious issues - the 'truth' of Bible stories and the
| 'truth' of gender ideology - as settled facts where in
| reality both are very much up for discussion.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary_gender
| nyolfen wrote:
| the guy who runs this was an editor on the harvard law
| review with obama
| brnt wrote:
| This is a useful resource but for other reasons than the
| authors intend.
| hnbad wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
|
| 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.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Having read the book that term came from, I recall that
| being more about _the developers of the first system_
| feeling overconfidence in their abilities on a version two,
| rather than an outsider looking in (as is the case here).
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Maybe we should name it. The "alt-Wiki reflex" or something
| like that.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I've seen something similar referred to as the "Voat" effect.
| Voat was a reddit alternative that popped up when reddit
| started banning subs that had poor optics (the explicit hate
| subreddits, the pro-racism subreddits, the basically-child-
| porn subs). Voat was founded on a principle of free speech,
| allowing whatever content users wanted.
|
| 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.
| hughesjj wrote:
| I tried it for a solid 5m before noping TF out. There was
| also a bunch of mudslinging against Ellen Pao when it
| turned out she was basically just a scapegoat for the
| founders and other reddit higher ups to make some unpopular
| (at the time, given public context) decisions
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right? I _think_ there is a cool idea here, but the article is
| so weirdly negative and generally garbage I have trouble
| telling.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| I feel the second biggest innovation of Wikipedia, after the
| wiki format itself, is establishing the proper tooling,
| policies, and incentives to allow a stable hierarchy of editors
| and maintainers to develop. This is the aspect that gives
| Wikipedia its longevity.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| How long will it take before all of the content on wikipedia is
| kanged onto this site? I mean, the license explicitly allows that
| kind of thing.
| slily wrote:
| If I were attempting to create a less "captured" Wikipedia
| alternative that's what I would do - start from there and try
| to keep it synchronized while hacking at it slowly, instead of
| taking a from-scratch approach.
| jl6 wrote:
| There have been many Wikipedia forks, but all have failed,
| because 99% of the work is in doing uncontroversial stuff
| that most people are fine with, and 1% is in controversial
| "captured" areas. If you fork the whole thing in the hope
| that you can fix the 1%, you will have to find a way to do
| the 99% bit.
| dizhn wrote:
| They should have done it already because that demo site looks
| sad.
| account42 wrote:
| Right, you'd expect that there would be a complete initial
| import as well as semi-automatic updates of non-controversial
| changes.
| kemayo wrote:
| The license does allow for it, but it's actually sort of tricky
| to do if you want to import it into a non-mediawiki system.
| Wikipedia makes really extensive use of templates in wikitext,
| which can be complicated nested things that can call out to Lua
| modules.
|
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| > Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the
| article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry
| Sanger.
|
| 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.
| tiptup300 wrote:
| I've been wanting to do this exact thing for a couple months, not
| for any of what their talking about.
|
| 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.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| The idea of federating wikis is pretty old:
| https://www.dokuwiki.org/interwiki
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > The fact is that we can't rely on any single website to hold
| the whole world's knowledge, because it can be corrupted sooner
| or later. The only solution is a distributed architecture, with
| many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing
| information.
|
| This article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make
| this argument, it just takes it as given.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I mean, it is a given...
| theamk wrote:
| There is a non-zero amount of people who are unhappy with
| wikipedia's policy. The "rot in wikipedia" link gives some
| examples: "fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative
| Medicine and progressive politics"
|
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| That article is upset alternative "medicine" quackery isn't
| taken serious. In particular it seems upset that it calls
| Gary "you can cure AIDS with a diet" Null's fraudulent
| bullshit exact that. It calls Stephen Barrett from quackwatch
| "a discredited former psychiatrist", which is a blatant
| brazen lie.
|
| 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.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| That article (http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-
| wikipedia/49-wi...) is a perfect example of radicalizing
| material.
|
| 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.
| shuntress wrote:
| > no ssl certificate because?
|
| 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).
| BizarroLand wrote:
| True, but based on the remainder of the page, my guess is
| that they found some correlation between SSL and the Mark
| of the Beast or the New World Order or some other
| craziness.
| panopticon wrote:
| SSL also protects against certain classes of third party
| snooping and injection. It's nice knowing that every
| piece of networking gear between me and the server
| doesn't know what I'm reading. Hell, I've seen ISPs
| inject ads into non-secure pages.
|
| There are also networking policies that prevent non-https
| connections, so you could be accidentally blocking out
| users on a strictly managed device.
| fsckboy wrote:
| sort of like you didn't even try to explain or make any
| argument why it might not be true?
|
| 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?
| shuntress wrote:
| I would also add that the proposed solution here to the
| supposed _" rot in Wikipedia"_ amounts essentially to "What if
| websites? and ... links?".
| ljm wrote:
| Taxonomy is also quite a complex problem and Wikipedia has put
| a hell of a lot of work into that, and disambiguation.
|
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| To me, Wikipedia is the canonical answer for how centralization
| and content moderation should be done. They have solved the
| hard problems as well as anyone. Federated solutions basically
| sidestep the real problems by rendering them completely
| unsolvable.
| rglullis wrote:
| "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
| absolutely".
|
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Decentralized organizations (institutions?) are not at all
| immune to corruption and malevolent inside actors.
|
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| No one (reasonable) ever said that decentralization makes
| us immune to corruption. The argument is that
| decentralization reduces _concentration_ of power and the
| potential damage that inevitably will occur when anyone in
| a position of power fails or tries to abuse the power they
| have.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Again, look at crypto-currency, there have been more than
| ample examples that prove that a single person can
| aggregate power and wield it in self-interested ways.
| rglullis wrote:
| It's the opposite: despite all the scams that have
| occurred in cryptocurrency, the _overall_ system still
| continues to work.
|
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Despite all of the corruption/scams present in deeply
| centralized institutions, the _overall_ system continues
| to work. What is your point?
|
| >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.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| In any case the point made was that centralized systems
| always corrupt. Challenge it and dare finding one example
| that didn't get corrupted.
|
| 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.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I don't think concentration of power is the root of
| corruption. Corruption is usually distributed across an
| entire system, and even if there is a boss at the top,
| they're reliant on a lot of other people to stay in power
| (see Tammany Hall). What corruption needs is mechanisms
| which can be exploited to ensure that a system designed
| for the public good can be used to enrich individuals.
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| What's the argument here? If it is possible for something to
| be corrupt it shouldn't exist and should be replaced?
| rglullis wrote:
| Not replaced, but we should develop alternatives to the
| centralized systems that concentrate too much power to have
| a backup in case they fail.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| On iPhone, page renders with main content in a cell shoved hard-
| right with only two to five characters visible per line. I wasn't
| even able to evaluate the content. Came here to mention this and
| it sounds like I'm not missing much.
| shuntress wrote:
| Wikipedia is genuinely a wonder of the world.
|
| Trying to extend, mirror, or bolster it is potentially
| beneficial.
|
| Trying to replace it is foolish.
| user- wrote:
| Wikipedia has a very slick website on mobile, desktop and mobile
| apps.
|
| This page doesn't even render on my phone properly. Probably
| should fix that before it can approach being an alternative
| 5900 wrote:
| It's unusable on mobile. Adding a basic responsive layout is
| essential and trivial compared to the problems Ibis is trying
| to solve.
| jrm4 wrote:
| This feels like a really good idea, really _poorly explained,_
| especially with the whole "going up against Wikipedia" thing
| (Wikipedia being arguably the best mostly-decentralized thing
| ever?)
|
| "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?
| kaibee wrote:
| > "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.
| araes wrote:
| It's known as the Valley of Death syndrome. [][][]
|
| 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/20
| 23/07/defense-i...
|
| [] VC investment, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-
| valley-curve.asp
|
| [] US Biomanufacturing, https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-
| measure/mind-gap-bridging-...
| thcipriani wrote:
| WikiNews[0] sounds like the news bit of what you're describing.
|
| [0]: <https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page>
| abeppu wrote:
| So, I agree that I don't think a software project solves the
| problems the post starts out with. However, I wonder if the
| project can be used to solve other issues?
|
| 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.
| pradn wrote:
| Wikipedia is an amalgam of a large number of humans editing w/
| some guardrails provided by the guidelines and tech (clean-up
| bots, edit alerts). If there's a human problem (corruption,
| bias), there's no tech solution that'll magically make all of it
| go away.
|
| 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.
| mlinksva wrote:
| To be added to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...?
|
| Edit: added at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distribu...
| bdw5204 wrote:
| There's probably an order of magnitude of people who don't edit
| Wikipedia because they're unhappy with Wikipedia's policies or
| its culture. I think the right Wikipedia alternative is probably
| viable and could maybe even be bigger and more successful than
| Wikipedia but alternatives generally fail because they can't get
| the critical mass of active editors necessary to keep the site
| updated especially on quickly changing topics where Wikipedia's
| approach is good enough for most people who'd be interested in
| editing on those topics. Forks (Infogalatic, Everipedia)
| typically become filled with outdated Wikipedia articles plus a
| few new articles about the creator's personal hobby horses. Just
| like features in open source software, articles in an open source
| online have to be maintained.
|
| 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.
| tripdout wrote:
| Doesn't even display properly on mobile - can barely read the
| page.
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