Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more since to make an ActivityPub plugin for the MediaWiki software Wikipedia is built on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could build on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format them. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MediaWiki plugins—Semantic MW in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis.
Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative
Submitted 8 months ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,_the_federated_Wikipedia_Alternative
Comments
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 8 months ago
nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Mediawiki is an extremely complicated project with 1.2 million lines of PHP. For me it was much easier to implement this project with technology Im already familiar with. But of someone wants to create a Mediawiki plugin I would be happy to see that.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Both projects could run and integrate with each other. I like it.
imsodin@infosec.pub 8 months ago
Looks like a federated wiki, which is great. And not a Wikipedia alternative. What makes wikipedia wikipedia is not the tech. Social and knowledge problems can’t be solved with tech ;) As much as Wikipedia has issues, as the ibis announcement states, it also works in many places. And federating it won’t help with the issues of bad moderation, quite the contrary. And as much as I like nutomic (thanks for syncthing-android ;) ), I don’t hear many good things about the lemmy moderation story. So I have my doubts. Lets hope I am wrong. Plus anyway, federated wikis is a great thing to have, ignoring the whole Wikipedia aspect.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I would be willing to change the title, maybe “the federated Wiki”?
ripcord@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That would work much, much better I think.
matcha_addict@lemy.lol 8 months ago
What’s wrong with lemmy moderation? I haven’t had issues.
imsodin@infosec.pub 8 months ago
Honest question out of interest: Are you doing moderation on lemmy? I just remember reading about admins/mods complaining about the lack of tooling, sometimes plain functionality (removal of certain things) for effective moderation. I am not doing any myself so that’s very 3rd-party-ish knowledge (if you even want to call it that).
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
wikipedia is already a great non profit source of public knowledge though i don’t see the benefit of fracturing it
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Look I really hate to shatter your perception of Wikipedia and no doubt Wikipedia is a beautiful idea with many beautiful who have contributed to it…
… but at this point Wikipedia could use a nice fracturing, like “piggy bank thrown against the wall” style fracturing.
The organization is standing in the way of the idea at this point and it is largely not a healthy organization for the people participating in it.
Etterra@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The moderators of Wikipedia are largely a small, insular community that don’t always care about accuracy when it comes from anyone outside their clique.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is a cool idea, but I highly encourage you to target mobile first. Reference works will get a LOT of mobile traffic. More than 80% of Wikipedia’s traffic is mobile.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I’m not good at frontend development or webdesign so I definitely need help in those areas.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 months ago
What are the articles written in? Wiki lang (or whatever it’s called) is horrendous, IMO. Hopefully this is markdown? I couldn’t find after a quick browse through codebase and I don’t think it’s mentioned in the blog post.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Yes it uses markdown.
nutsack@lemmy.world 8 months ago
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This makes me wonder if you could make a super frictionless path from a thread on lemmy or another federated reddit-like to some form of a wiki page that presented the same information but in a more natural form for a longer term repository of knowledge instead of a conversation. About sidebars and pinned threads for subreddits/lemmy communities are an extremely important part of the structure of a reddit-like, but why limit our vision of a reddit-like to only being able to create those two narrow types of persistent, documentation style information?
In practice this obviously can just be a lemmy community linking to ibis wiki pages maintained by members of that lemmy community, but I wonder if there isn’t an exciting space here to explore what that process could look like if the integration was way tighter and more direct.
I think it is worth considering the argument for splitting a reddit-like from an associated wiki in the first place, why not have them just be two different types of posts, with different associated rules of editing, and two different home pages one that looks like a reddit-like and one that looks like a wiki? Same accounts, same website, same markdown conventions and text/media formatting.
Assuming a bit of careful edit permission handling for a lemmy communities associated wiki, wouldn’t the end result be WAY more powerful of a community resource than a lemmy community and wiki taped together?
nutomic@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I answered a similar question here: lemmy.ml/comment/9329423
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Oh awesome thanks for linking!
ShadowRam@kbin.social 8 months ago
Interesting idea,
But search sites currently can't find anything in lemmy.
So how will they link to this?
sab@kbin.social 8 months ago
I'm not sure I see the benefit of this. The point that Wikipedia might eventually become corrupted is made moot by the permissive licensing of the information there. The main challenge of the Wiki format is with fact checking and ensuring quality, which is only made more complicated by having a federated platform.
ActivityPub is great for creating the social web. The added benefit of ActivityPub for non-social services is not obvious to me at all.
That said, it's a cool proof of concept, and I'm sure it can be useful for certain types of federated content management - I just don't see how it could ever make sense as a Wikipedia alternative.
frefi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I can definitely see it being a better alternative to that Fandom wiki site
Zorque@kbin.social 8 months ago
Throwing shit at a wall would be a better alternative to the Fandom wiki site.
sab@kbin.social 8 months ago
Then again, why would a fan page want to open for contributions from outside of that fan page? Why would the Star Wars wiki federate edits with the Startrek wiki? On which page of the wiki would this make sense?
I just don't get it.
zarenki@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren’t affected by Fandom’s problems.
Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I’m not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.
yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Fanlore already exists as an alternative