Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative
ibis.wiki"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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia + Blackjack + Hookers - Wikipedia = https://www.conservapedia.com/
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.
the guy who runs this was an editor on the harvard law review with obama
> 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
There is a big difference between claiming that at some point in the last 5000 years there was almost certainly a big flood, and it plausibly inspired the bible story, versus claiming the specific details of a story from 5000 years ago are definitely literally correct.
> In short, Conservapedia does what Wikipedia does but replaces the 'progressive' bias with a 'conservative' one.
Conservapedia calls e=mc2 "liberal claptrap".[1] The article on Oppenheimer has "Like other liberals, Oppenheimer was not as smart as he wanted to be" right in the lead and the article itself mostly seems to be about Oppenheimer's communist links more than anything else. Articles like Homosexual Agenda[3] contain so much retarded bullshit I don't even know what bit to quote.
What I'm trying to say is "it's the same as Wikipedia, with with Conservative bias" completely and utter bollocks. Conservapedia is a fringe website that's not conservative, but just crazy. Anyone claiming anything else is deeply misinformed.
[1]: https://www.conservapedia.com/E%3Dmc2
The E=mc² article is performative art. The origin of it, if I had to guess, was someone saying "moral relativism is evil" then, "all forms of relativism are evil", then "general and special relativity are evil". I can't really tell if it's an honest view or not, but the related articles also seem to illustrate how hard it is for "big tent conservatism" to form a cohesive world. If Einstein is right, then the speed of light was a constant and matter warps space as we observe with telescopes. If things are billions of light years away, then the world can't be 6000 years old. If the world isn't 6000 years old, the bible isn't literally true in all respects.
>but replaces the 'progressive' bias with a 'conservative' one.
Now this implies that this "conservative" bias is on a level of the "progressive" one. As if there are two sides, these two, and that the "conservative" has equal, if not more, merit than the "progressive" one. It's the false balance.
Funnily enough, Conservapedia has the article on it. But opening it reveals that it's not that rationality suddenly penetrated the conserva-universe, it's just that they project they exact thing they do onto the "liberals".
The National Geographic link was interesting, I hadn't thought of that.
I'm not so sure I'd call Wikipedia 'progressive'.
Wikipedia as a whole is not 'progressive', it is whatever the editors make of it. Many politically contentious subjects have been - to use a word bandied around quite often in those circles - 'colonised' by 'progressive' editors who allow only their own viewpoint to remain in the articles which has turned those parts of Wikipedia 'progressive'.
If you're looking for the chemical composition of some substance or want to look up something related to physics or mathematics Wikipedia tends to do just fine. Articles on history are a mixed bag, especially recent history and especially anything related to 'the West'. For political subjects Wikipedia is less than useless given the aforementioned 'colonisation' but also because political operatives from 'all sides' do their best to paint as rosy a picture of 'their' side as possible.
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.
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.
I asked for something that is equally implausible. So I take it you think people feeling non-binary is equally or more implausible than the biblical flood? Do people not identify as non-binary? Or are they lying about their feelings?
Don't give me the "contentious" spiel. I don't care what some reader of Conservapedia may think. I'm asking you.
> I'm asking you.
No ad-hominems, or rather you are looking at this as a 'liberal' would while I described a scenario in which a 'conservative' looks at the mentioned article and concept. In the "conservative's" opinion what is written there is just as implausible as what is written in the Conservapedia article on the 'truth' of the flood story. Both Wikipedia as well as Conservapedia are biased which is what this was about, not about whether the flood or someone feeling non-binary is true.
> Both Wikipedia as well as Conservapedia are biased
Both-sidesing this when you have already been presented with indefensible nonsense such as “e=mc^2 is liberal claptrap” is shameful. That page hasn’t been edited since mid-2022. There’s an entire article called “liberal claptrap” linked to from that statement that has remained unedited for 7 months. It shouldn’t even exist.
That garbage is not constructive and has no place in respectable discourse.
If I called you a fringe US conservative, that would be ad-hominem. We haven't gotten there because we're stuck at the question you are deflecting.
In my view, Conservapedia is an encyclopedia only by medieval standards. It is not useful to me except for entertainment and maybe if I wanted to write US cable news ad copy. What is it to you? Do you refer to it when you want to know about historical floods?
This is a useful resource but for other reasons than the authors intend.
That was fascinating!
Interestingly has a similar mobile experience as OP.
> where you can push an insane description of a topic and present it as reality is the point
Fair enough and indeed there are many examples. However I think good faith/steelmanning needs to come back in our discourse. It strikes me as an 'insane' description to suggest that the problems with Wikipedia can be properly captured by their resistance to 'insane' descriptions
"I'll write a new UNIX shell... with blackjack!... and hookers!"
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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,_discus...
You make a change, it gets reverted, and then you discuss it. The number one mistake I see new editors make is they don't understand how discussion works and when to seek additional input.
After being reverted, you're expected to start a discussion on the talk page. So many people do not do that, and instead try to communicate through 200 character edit summaries.
But talk pages are just the first step. The next step is to get more people involved. There are a bunch of informal rules which editors have tried to write down on how you can bring more people to a talk page in a fair way (otherwise you would only solicit input from people you would agree with).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution
The typical way this is done is through an RfC, which is a structured discussion between multiple options. When you set up an RfC to resolve a dispute, a bot randomly messages people who are interested in the general area to comment at the talk page. That means you get a bunch of uninvolved editors that don't really have any stake in the dispute and are more level-headed.
The discussion's consensus itself is then evaluated by someone (a closer) who must be uninvolved. In a contentious subject it is often an administrator who has never edited in the topic area before. The closer must give reasons for their decision and an explanation, and there is a working appeals process.
Contrast to virtually any other website where decisions are frequently made by people involved in disputes, you typically don't get reasons for why something is moderated, and you can't effectively appeal to another decision maker as you don't understand the reasoning upon which the decision is based.
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.
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...
> 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).
> 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 strongly disagree. They threw out way too much, not just who was in charge. "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". In the case of Mao they made sweeping changes to agriculture several times. Each with the potential of causing massive famines, and together caused the largest man made disaster in history.
That's not just replacing who is in charge (which would have been MUCH BETTER), it's dismantling a thousand years of knowledge and tradition in favor of something they thought was better. Absolute disaster.
The French revolution, and USSR did quite similar things with disastrous consequences.
Maybe we should name it. The "alt-Wiki reflex" or something like that.
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.
Well, the wiki format isn’t really theirs: https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiWikiWeb
> 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.
I agree. I feel like it's a combination of labor of love, and the effort of organizing a community. I also think that with Wikis specifically, it needs to allow something that the original doesn't. For example this is why fandom wikis are popular, because they allow "in-universe" explanations and notability is only required in terms of the universe discussed. Or RationalWiki, which has a specifically different style guide, and an opinionated slant. Or Encyclopedia Dramatica, which allows... well not the healthiest things, but still, I consider it a successful project, compared to the ghost towns of other Wiki initiatives. And neither of these wikis aim to be alternatives to the original Wiki, which is also very important.
Right? I think there is a cool idea here, but the article is so weirdly negative and generally garbage I have trouble telling.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
I would also add that the proposed solution here to the supposed "rot in Wikipedia" amounts essentially to "What if websites? and ... links?".
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> deeply centralized institutions, the overall system continues to work
Until they don't. You are comparing the worst of decentralized systems (rug-pulls) with the average-to-best-case of institutions that centralize power (western democracy governments) when we should be talking about the extreme cases: autocracies and dictatorships.
> hardly a replacement for the existing institutions.
Why do people can only think in binary terms? No one is calling for the "replacement" of the institutions. The idea is to build decentralized systems as a hedge against the centralized one.
You are repeatedly giving the "so you are saying..." line and it's starting to feel like you are purposefully misunderstanding the point.
> Plenty of people are unbanked
For their own choice or because they were excluded of the system? Wouldn't it be good to have an alternative that we could have as hedge against them?
> plenty of people left Reddit
Not enough to cause it to implode, and not enough to bring a critical mass to any alternative.
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.
You’re asking for things that you plan to “no true Scotsman”. If I name an institution you will claim it doesn’t count because it isn’t big enough, or that it actually is corrupt by your measure.
You have already done this with crypto. I.e. The corruption that occurs in crypto doesn’t count because those weren’t true crypto projects.
So in the spirit of the challenge. Tell me how the Adventure Cycling Association is corrupt?
I don't see how your qualification is correct as I haven't said no true Scotsman yet. Prejudice already?
But your tactic won't prevent me from calling an Irish, what's truly not Scots. I will get to that.
No what I have said about crypto was clarify that those accused of corrupted decentralized entities in fact aren't decentralized. And the distinction is non obvious because many centralized entities mingle with decentralized technology. It doesn't make those decentralized, they have all the attributes of centralized systems, often trying to disguise as decentralized themselves. See we offer a spot btc exchange, non custodial. But still centralized. Yet they don't say it. And are happy to seed confusion. why the disguise? Because decentralized systems are getting known of being corrupt resistant, so it's always good to pretend having that stamp of merit. Especially when your trust is needed for doing business.
It's a bit like open source , see, one can't simply disqualify the qualities and properties of open source using the pretext that a growing list of projects fail the test, given how many projects we've seen pretending to build open source software that same fallacious argument could be made, but would it stand correct?
Ok I won't write for too much about blockchain, crypto entities and their relation (or contradiction) with decentralization, nor which qualifies as what, check for yourself, if you don't then no argument I could make in a post will convince you anyway.
About the Adventure Cycling Association, I don't know if it's corrupt. I had never heard of it. See, it's not that it's an Irishman, a Scotsman, or an English. Maybe it's bushman. I don't know exactly but it seems to me like it's part of a pretty decentralized domain. First it's not even an institution, I think, but Let's not get into the definitions as many wouldn't even agree as to what an institution is anyway. It's an organisation, that we would all agree with. and that charity organization looks closer to an entity, part of a decentralized cloud of cycling associations.
What would make the adventure Cycling Association centralized ? If it finds a way to have monopoly or quasi monopoly on Cycling activities. Or on Adventure Cycling activities. Or such activities in a certain locality that isn't limited to some irrelevant private park.
What makes centralized systems centralized? They require a level of monopoly or authority over a matter. Reasonably agreed to be extensive.
Examples.
Facebook. It qualifies as centralized because it reached such a massive network effect that it owns a certain monopoly in what it does. Sure there are other social media networks with some significant overlap in functionality but it has this sticky effect that makes jumping boat to alternatives, difficult. That's voluntarily exclusivity of sorts.
Reddit. That one is interesting, as it has some obvious decentralized properties, but some other and very strict properties that are totally centralized. Reddit made decisions on their own that applied to all. The backlash was worth of note, also that users for the most part stayed. Had Reddit been truly decentralized? A system that would have allowed some or all subs to "fork" off that decision? We would have seen a flocking of many subs onto the "classic" regulation. Anyhow not calling Reddit corrupt here but I hope you see what distinguishes decentralized from centralized structures. Here also Reddit has a very strong sticky network effect so users who didn't like it could hardly move out.
Governments. I can't skip this mention, those institutions despite being often democratic are generally pretty centralized, they have an executive administration exercising exclusive power over some of the matters of an entire nation. They don't have full control, but even for the rest, representatives form a tiny minority of the population, yet they legislate on their own, for so many. And the many don't have the choice but follow. That's not voluntary exclusivity.
The USB alliance. That's centralized corrupt institution. They have monopoly on questions regarding the USB spec and come up with all sort of financial impacting desires and mandates. Using law enforcement in attempts to get makers to oblige and pay the cartel. not voluntary exclusivity.
Power absolutely corrupts and most absolute power corrupts most absolutely.
As to the Adventure Cycling Association which I had never heard of, nor heard of any cycling associations having acquired some exclusive control over anything to do with cycling, they may or may not be corrupt, but they aren't centralized institution.
If you believe they are, then you and I are also a centralized institution discussing matters of corruption. Perhaps your see the ridicule. But hey, if you and I got control over hackernews we would truly have centralized powers over this community and it would be being corrupted to impose a certain view on the matter.
Hackernews and its moderation may have acquired certain influence and stickiness, they could get corrupted, it depends on how absolute their power is and over what. But they've so far showed decent attitude. Does it make it an example of institution that resisted corruption? Well no, not a Scotsman. Quite young and having been well guarded against abuse, sort of a niche.
My 36 cents, in the hope to have made you see something you had not distinguished from the rest, necessary to make sense of this non trivial issue. Not expecting you to entirely change your mind, it is a difficult thing to do given how much of a shaking certain sort of belief system would need to endure.
>> You’re asking for things that you plan to “no true Scotsman”. If I name an institution you will claim it doesn’t count because it isn’t big enough, or that it actually is corrupt by your measure.
> I don't see how your qualification is correct as I haven't said no true Scotsman yet. Prejudice already?
> As to the Adventure Cycling Association which I had never heard of, nor heard of any cycling associations having acquired some exclusive control over anything to do with cycling, they may or may not be corrupt, but they aren't centralized institution.
Called it.
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.
Even nominally decentralized systems tend to create unaccountable power structures. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
What's the argument here? If it is possible for something to be corrupt it shouldn't exist and should be replaced?
Not replaced, but we should develop alternatives to the centralized systems that concentrate too much power to have a backup in case they fail.
I mean, it is a given…
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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"
Except you get mobs forming on AN/I and they allow toxic users to fester. BrownHairedGirl was allowed to fester on the project for years. Innumerable productive members left or were banned as a direct result of her and her supporters.
That makes it no different from a run-of-the-mill legal system.
Which, for their flaws, do sometimes produce results.
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.
I have corrected typos on Wikipedia and seen them reverted immediately without comment. Decided pretty quickly it wasn't worth the effort anymore.
> 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.
Care to share details/sources for this claim? I haven't experienced any of this toxicity while editing there myself.
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.
Ultimately though, i still think the existing system works well here.
Wikipedia wants to be a specific thing with a specific scope. Where that line should be is debatable, but it will eventually be drawn somewhere. No matter where you draw it, someone will be on the other side of it.
However, mediawiki is open source. The licenses of content are cc-by-sa (similar to gpl). You can start your own wiki. Similarly licensed content can be moved back and forth if rules change.
Perhaps this is just manual "federation" in a sense, but the ecosystem supports it. I persinally believe this is one of the reasons why mediawiki as an open source project should be a core part of Wikimedia's mission.
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 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.
But "has reputable secondary sources" isn't even close to Wikipedia's real 'notability' determination.
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)
It’s a problem of scale, which they are already hitting. This is where Ibis would be useful.
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.
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?
Wikipedia has certainly not solved the problem of getting huge groups of people to get along (especially when the people aren't getting paid and are instead presumably motivated by ideology). However i don't think anyone else has either.
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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
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?
People can make whatever websites they want, that doesn't mean anybody else is going to view them (let alone contribute).
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.
You are writing this on one of the more heavily moderated forums on the internet, and people seem to like it here.
Hacker News is probably the most moderated site I use. Even more than reddit. And it is probably that much better for it.
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.
You misunderstood. Moderation is the price you must pay if you want to operate an online business because it is often the law.
I don't care for removing spam, but funny enough, the most moderated platform allow you to go table to table peddling your wares, for a cost.
The only thing worse than moderation is the lack of moderation
Not moderating the moderators for their moderation is a lack of moderation.
Perhaps Slashdot had the right idea.
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?
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.
> "Do you know if it had downsides for Slashdot?"
In a word, ossification. It preserves the culture of a forum, to a fault.
Yes I would very much like an online encyclopedia to be moderated, thank you.
Some say moderation is the only feature
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.
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.
In many cases it's easy to make the distinction. Many will not hesitate to admit that they suppress things because of the effect they fear it will have on the audience. Not just the effect it will have on the appeal of the venue, or the image of the company, or whatever.
And I'm not even saying all censorship is necessarily wrong. There's one very obvious case where you keep people from seeing things because you fear the effect it will have on them (which is censorship), but it's generally accepted, and that is when the people in question are children.
Yeah, it's hard to judge people's sincerity. Do you really just worry that your space will be overrun with nazis/terfs/communists because you don't want to see that shit yourself, or are you afraid that they'll convince others? But that doesn't mean the distinction isn't worthwhile. Most of all, it's necessary to apply to yourself. It's a critical question you have to ask yourself, if people trust you to moderate for their benefit.
> Most of all, it's necessary to apply to yourself.
Sure, that sounds like it could be a great principle. It's not what actually happens, though. The terms are loaded weapons, sticks to beat people over the head with; and discourse online trends weaponised. Cries of "censorship" are used as a battering ram to prise open an online space for invasion. When the only difference between an action that is morally acceptable and one that is not is the internal state of mind of the actor, with the case being tried in the court of public opinion, defense is all but impossible.
You did it yourself: "Censorship is when someone hides something for you, because they don't want you to see it." Someone. /They/. That's not a sentence about personal introspection. That's a statement tying a judgement to someone else's actions. He/she/it censors.
The real wikipedia renders (perfectly!) without javascript.
This does not render at all without javascript.
Not an alternative.
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).
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)
This seems to be a common problem with the fediverse ecosystem.
Not an alternative for you maybe, but a fine alternative for over 99% of the rest of the world running javascript in their browser.
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.
It also renders like garbage on mobile, which makes it useless for about 50% of the world. Not a great start.
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?
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> "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.
It's known as the Valley of Death syndrome. [♪][♫][ꜘ]
Especially common in the DoD where they're good at funding enormous numbers of SBIRs/STTRs, yet they never go anywhere, because all large money contracts are guaranteed to be vacuumed up by Lockheed / Raytheon / Northrup Grumman / Boeing / General Dynamics / Teledyne Brown / Honeywell / ect...
And in most cases (in my opinion, not legally binding), they purposely, slowly build cripple-ware with planned obsolescence that results in equipment that's vestigial before it launches and immediately needs 'upgrade' contracts.
[♪] DoD funding, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2023/07/defense-i...
[♫] VC investment, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/death-valley-curve.asp
[ꜘ] US Biomanufacturing, https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/mind-gap-bridging-...
WikiNews[0] sounds like the news bit of what you're describing.
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.
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.
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
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.
git? not sure exactly what you're trying to say here, but you could do some stuff with git
have a local repo of your own notes, a hosted repo serving as the communal ref. if you want to make updates, commit and push --, you can cherry pick the sections you want.
i recall seeing something like mediawiki (but it stored articles as plaintext) a while back, you could use that for a web-based portal too
I clicked through, but the site is completely unusable on mobile, clearly hasn't even been tested let alone designed to work here.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
It's unusable on mobile. Adding a basic responsive layout is essential and trivial compared to the problems Ibis is trying to solve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They should have done it already because that demo site looks sad.
Right, you'd expect that there would be a complete initial import as well as semi-automatic updates of non-controversial changes.
…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.
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.
Just search for anything remotely political and you will find a lot of bias.
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
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_campaign...
This isn't "anything remotely political" is it, it's a highly contentious culture war issue among the chronically online. I was disputing the claim actually made, not a different claim you appear to have understood I was making.
For what it's worth, I agree with that KYM's opening paragraph is better and less-biased than Wikipedia's.
I consider the culture war a political issue but I'm glad you can see the obvious bias in the wiki article.
Yes it's a political issue, but the user I originally replied to claimed that bias was obvious on _anything_ political.
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.
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.
If you have no significant connection to it, how would you know if it's biased or not?
In some wikipedia clones, it's pretty obvious:
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.
> 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).
If only the versions had voting...
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.
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_controversie...
Truthiness is not bias.
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.
The idea of federating wikis is pretty old: https://www.dokuwiki.org/interwiki
Not sure how federation is going to increase the trustworthiness.
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.
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/
You'd likely have a much easier time using a file based wiki with rsync.
Wikipedia is genuinely a wonder of the world.
Trying to extend, mirror, or bolster it is potentially beneficial.
Trying to replace it is foolish.
sigh unviewable on mobile phones. From the little I can make out it's also some bootstrap site.
Also unviewable on text terminals.
> 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.
Horrible rendering on mobile. And screw those pyramid scheme (crypto“currency”) donation links.
Hey if the devs are in here, check out your mobile styling/css, it’s a bit weird
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.
Maybe make it tender properly on iOS safari first?
Does anyone remember Citizendium? They were going to give Wikipedia a run for its money.
Doesn't even display properly on mobile - can barely read the page.
We don't need a Wikipedia alternative.
Cannot take a project like this seriously in 2024 while looking like total garbage [1] on mobile.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
This looks awful on an iPhone.
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.
Why?
So, this one will be left or right wing politically controlled?
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.
If there's one thing I DON'T want a new version of, it's Wikipedia.
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.
> 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
Most traditional encyclopedias ceased to publish in the book form. Online encyclopedias are pretty much alive.
Their significance in public life was been almost completely replaced by Wikipedia, though
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/
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.
We used them for further research or quick look up of facts you should know. That seems to be how people use Wikipedia.
That's how people should use Wikipedia, but people generally don't do so in my understanding.
How do they use it then?
We used to copy articles out of them for homework. The more things change…
As a meager pedestrian, I consume Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedias - that I sometimes did when I was a kid
Idk if it was the first. Microsoft encarta was a pretty big player in that space back in the day.
Was Encarta ever released online? I only remember the CD-ROM version.
Yes, i think starting around 1999 so quite a bit after the cdrom releases. Admittedly that is only 2 years before wikipedia.
But not among the paying clientele.
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.
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.
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.
It's not orthogonal, though. We had online encyclopedias for around a decade, they functioned extremely well, and it was the way people got their information. During the latter part of that decade fiwiki started to really pick up steam (although it was years old by that point) and very quickly every other encyclopedia ran out of users and therefore revenue. The concept worked well, it's the movement of users to a competing product that caused their downfall, and therefore it is definitely fiwiki that is the issue.
> but it has a potential to supplement everything else, and I believe it's worthwhile enough.
What do you think it would supplement?
It needs to be on the blotchein! What, too soon?
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?
this could be an alternative to fandom.com
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).
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.
> 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 :|
Also, if you want your own free MediaWiki instance, you could try : https://www.wikibase.cloud/
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.
Why not? Do you care to expand on your comment?
Why change it if it's not broken?
this thread really should sink to the bottom, as had also happened.
criticizing is great! but it would be fantastic with enlightening discussion.
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.
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.
Yes. They only encourage me more and more to create sockpuppets. I already have a dynamic IP.
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.
These things are not unrelated.
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.
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?
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")
Specifically, it was a now-banned editor called BrownHairedGirl caused me to be permanently banned. The community is extraordinarily toxic and her supporters were unbelievable toxic.
There is Conservapedia for those who disagree with everything on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the worst possible system for making an encyclopaedia, except for all the others.
Ibis is a large hotel chain. I am not sure using this name is a good idea.
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
Well, it was also the name of a bird long before that
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.
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.
Ibis is a bird.
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.