About
Ibis is a federated online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia. Users can read, create and edit articles seamlessly across instances. It uses the Activitypub protocol to connect users across different websites, similar to Mastodon or Lemmy.
You can browse the flagship instance ibis.wiki, or register an account on open.ibis.wiki to start editing.
Changes
- Fix math parsing by @Silver-Sorbet
- Add support for markdown footnotes
- Add anchors to markdown headings
- Remove autolink markdown rule
- Add spoiler tags
Support
Creating a project like this from scratch requires a lot of work. So contributions are more than welcome, in order to add all the necessary features.
https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis
You can also support the project by donating.
Hey Nutomic. Ibis seems interesting.
If I understand correctly the first and most crucial part would be reaching a certain critical mass. To do this, you would need to get a bunch of existing wikis to join the project as a federated entity.
I’ll list a bunch of random projects I know of that could take part in this. Like for example: https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.gardenology.org/wiki/Main_Page
etc etc etc.
But it would be unlikely to reach a mass sufficient to make it feel complete, anywhere near wikipedia. Likely, what would come next is people starting forks of different bits of wikipedia (ie. I found anacho-wiki.org, which starts as a fork of all anarchist related wikipedia articles, but then lets users update the pages and create new ones). This would need to happen for lots of different niches I guess.
But I have a hard time envisioning how this would be successful in practice. Perhaps whats more likely to happen is “Ibis” attracting for example a niche group. Since this is Lemmy.ml lets say marxist leninists. They start an ibis instance on marxist-leninism. Then adjacent movements pick up, perhaps trotskyists, anarcho-communists, then maybe some russian historians start an instance, maybe one is started on political philosophy, and it slowly grows. Starting out as something niche that slowly branches out.
Anyways sorry for the ramble, thats how at first glace I imagine this could grow I guess. But what’s your view, how do you think it could grow? What’s the plan to make it “flourish”.
In case of Lemmy most initial users came from subreddits that were banned, specifically communist ones. But that is unlikely to work for Ibis, as people banned from Wikipedia have many alternatives such as setting up Mediawiki. Other people who joined Lemmy early were excited about the technology, and open source in general (which is why those topics are still so popular). So open source and fediverse enthusiasts are more likely to join.
Besides Ibis is still in a very early stage, so far there are not even any mod tools or account settings. So for the moment its more important to get programmers, designers, testers and other contributors to develop the project. Once some of these major features are implemented, it will make more sense for general users to join. But I dont have a specific plan for growth, hopefully growth will simply happen organically over time like it did with Lemmy.