Introducing IBIS-Wiki
A federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. https://ibis.wiki/
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This sounds like a way to have 13 different ‘realities’ for any given topic, depending on which instance it was hosted on.
Agree.
I also think a federated wiki is a great idea.
I think the way to do that is: instead of having separate realities/universes linked together by search and federation, try to unite those universes into a shared multiverse, to the greatest possible.
In other words
- ❌ merely give all federated users access to the same articles
- ✅ automatically link and embed similar articles into each other by default (collapsed, but expandable). similarity can be determined by authors’/contributors’ intentional citations, by instance owners’ filter rules, by LLM, etc.
of course, there may be attempts to obfuscate relatedness, astroturfing, brigading, whatnot. I wonder if its possible to visualize voting results for each duplicated/linked article along with the originating instance. I think this would function as a pseudo version of ‘community fact-checking’. Maybe a better name would be ‘reality-checking’ or ‘sanity-checking’ or whatever.
Generally yeah, the same could be said for Lemmy and their communities. The challenge is when you have federated systems like this you have to largely take it as good faith that instance owners will keep reasonably updated software and good practices so you don’t end up with a pile of spam edits.
With communal wiki type systems as a whole you end up with the question of credibility. Some people would cite only well researched and validated studies, and some people whole heatedly believe that a religious text was written by divine hand and this must be true. How do you reconcile those two without giving weight to things that are patently nonsense, aka you must teach the gospel of the flying spaghetti monster to be fair to all?
Hm, that’s not how Lemmy communities / threads tend to develop. Unless you’re considering the effects of defederation I guess.
Missing an /s?
Take a look at the ‘news’ on various instances like hexbear vs world and it’s night and day. An encyclopedia is meant to be factually reliable, but if this works like it does here you would have the equivalent of conservapedia and prolewiki sitting side by side as ‘true’.
What you’re observing are different communities and different threads. The same community lemmy.world/c/news is roughly the same across most instances. A specific thread in some community in lemmy.ca is roughly the same when viewed from most instances. I imagine a wiki page would function like a thread in Lemmy. Any instance federating with most instances would see roughly the same version of the wiki page as the originating instance.
That could be, I was thinking if the pages were more like the communities. I would have to think they need to be for any kind of moderation, otherwise who approves edits or has edit permissions? If someone else doesn’t agree with the vision on the existing page/thread what stops someone from putting up an alternate version?
Moderation, voting, there are options. My point is whatever the version is of a community or a thread on Lemmy on its host instance, nearly the same the version is on another Lemmy instance that federates with most of the same instances. If we consider just 2 instances federating with each other, and users have no blocklists, and all federation updates are perfectly transferred (no networking issues), then a community in one instance would look identical on the other. So would a thread. After moderation actions and all.
Any encyclopedia will reflect the biases of its editors. The best you can do is to have good procedures and fact-checkers.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding how it’s designed but I don’t think I am, and I don’t think that’s how this works.
A topic definition on the wiki includes the instance it’s hosted on. All links to that topic will go to that same instance and all the content for that topic will be served by the one instance as the authoritative source for “That-topic@that-instance” which is the link everyone will use. The federated part is specifically that you can link to topics on other instances and view them through your local instance.
For example, hypothetically, if you are a “fedipedia” author and you are writing a “fedipedia” article about a video game, and you mention a particular feature of the video game, you can include in your “fedipedia” article a link to a topic about that particular feature on “wikia-gamipedia” or even “the-games-own-wiki.site” and interact with and maybe even edit that content without needing to make accounts on all these other wikis. It’s like it’s all hosted on one centralized wiki, but it’s hosted on different servers that are all talking to each other.
Of course, it’s possible both our hypothetical “wikia-gamipedia” AND “the-games-own-wiki.site” will have their OWN, completely SEPARATE topics about the video game feature in question. The topics might even have exactly the same name. That’s allowed. In that case, you’ll have to decide for yourself which one is more credible and useful, and which one you want to link to and interact with, because yes, two different federated wikis can have different topics with totally different content.
Just like on Lemmy you can have two different communities with the same name but totally different people and content because they’re on different instances. That’s not really the general intention of how communities are supposed to work though. The intention is that you can pick the one community that is the “right” one for you, or the largest, and use that and hopefully other people will do the same. You can all pick that same instance/community, no matter which account you live on, even if it’s not hosted on your local instance. You don’t have to use the one from your local instance, or from any particular instance. That’s what the federation does.
Yeah, that’s the part that I was referencing to. If you have a topic called ‘the sky is’ on multiple instances, and they all say a different color, it rather defeats the purpose of an encyclopedia as some sort of source of truth if you have to pick which one is right.
Well, in my hypothetical scenario, “gamipedia” is not going to have an article about “the sky is”, that’s not really its purpose. Ideally you’d only have one encyclopedia wiki, or multiple that are willing to work together and not duplicate each other’s content. If another competing supposed-encyclopedia instance called “assholepedia” does have an article about “the sky is: a liberal delusion”, then you block and defederate that asshole instance. No big deal.
Initially, when I navigated to https://ibis.wiki/ I saw “502 bad gateway”. That is not a good first impression…
Reloading the page let me see more useful things though.
