Introducing IBIS-Wiki
A federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. https://ibis.wiki/
Introducing IBIS-Wiki
A federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. https://ibis.wiki/
This sounds like a way to have 13 different ‘realities’ for any given topic, depending on which instance it was hosted on.
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.
That’s present in any user editable platform. Wikipedia’s consensus doesn’t mean it’s actually representing broad universal truth. That why everything gets cited and the talk and history pages are public to the readers, so they can judge the reliability themselves. If you stumble on a less visited page, that consensus group gets smaller and smaller and the likelihood of it being essentially a pretty fiefdom increases.
Even printed encyclopedias had no such claim. If someone is putting out a instance that’s too highly biased to be useful, defederate.
Wikipedia though has a strong reputation for being well cited and due in large part to the huge user base glaring inaccuracies get corrected quickly. I saw a study at one point comparing them to a traditional encyclopedia and they had of course faster shifting errors, but on average where pretty on par for accuracy.
A federated system where I or any other knucklehead could put up an instance isn’t going to have that ‘checked by 1000 eyes’ factor going so much, or if it did ever get to that point then they’ve likely become the defacto ‘real’ federated encyclopedia and the others inherently suspect.
All in all It’s a neat idea, but sounds like it’d be rife with chaotic discord. As a general thing if something is on the standard Wikipedia I can be pretty sure it’s reasonably accurate without having to research who posted it, and I can torrent a copy of the whole thing as I just recently found out.
That just a function of it being a long-term and established community. And likely a bit of agreement with your broad cultural and political views. Right now Reddit is more likely to have information on a random video game than Lemmy, but that doesn’t mean their structure is inherently good for producing information.
A federated system where you federate with everyone without limit is a good way to get a lot of bad shit, but that’s not how the Fediverse actually works. Instances defederate from other instances that are dragging down the quality of their social network. Most importantly, if your admins go bad and decide they want to not pursue truth but instead craft a narrative, you can move instances to one that has the standards you want while only losing the content that was actually on the now-bad instance.
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’.
Any encyclopedia will reflect the biases of its editors. The best you can do is to have good procedures and fact-checkers.
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.
Lol 13 books on the same topic 😎 13 different Wikipedia 🤮
It’s fine if people fit people to have different views/take on a subject.