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.
I can definitely see it being a better alternative to that Fandom wiki site
Throwing shit at a wall would be a better alternative to the Fandom wiki site.
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.
At minimum it means you don’t have to create two separate accounts to make edits on both instances.
This sounds like you want federation to replace openID.
I guess you don’t have to get it. I just mentioned that site as an example because it is kind of garbage, but it’s useful for fans.
And the federation between fandoms would be like how different articles are connected on Wikipedia. For example, there are actors that had roles both in the Star Trek universe and the Star Wars universe.
Lots of those fan wikis just link to other websites. It’s entirely possible to do that.
If you’re on a Star Trek wiki, why would you want to go to a page that’s almost exclusively talking about Star Wars information in relation to some actor other?
I was pointing out that the two fandoms are actually connected by some actors because the person I was responding to seemed to be unaware.
Maybe no one does this, but I’ve looked at character pages and clicked on actors’ pages if I liked them and wanted to see what other work they’ve done.
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.
Ok
Fanlore already exists as an alternative
Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more sense to make an ActivityPub plugin for the open-source MediaWiki software Wikipedia runs on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could expand on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format it. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MW plugins—Semantic MediaWiki in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis, like articles that could query and aggregate information from other federated articles rather than just linking to the text.
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.
Both projects could run and integrate with each other. I like it.
For the love of god fix ur mobile css
You can make a pull request here: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis/blob/master/assets/ibis.css
Not everyone here is a developer.
And some developers are bad at design/css (like me).
Fair, but I would argue that the basics of CSS positioning aren’t too complex.
And at this point we’re just talking about moving that NAV element to the top of the page, not the left side.
I believe this addresses your concern:
Dev publishes unreadable website:
“Some developers are bad at CSS and design/CSS (like me)”
Implying some innate incapacity.
Same dev:“Or these people could learn Rust and contribute to the existing project.”
https://lemmy.ml/comment/8855579Man I just don’t get it. There’s a kind of wilful ignorance here or something? It’s jarring. All due respect for what’s been made but this attitude… I’m not offended or have disdain, just dumbfounded at the messaging.
but this attitude
Opensource is not some public service you just request something and the developers create it for you. If anything attitude like yours are what’s burning out opensource developers.
It’s their time, work and effort and I am glad they’re upfront about it rather than pacify everyone’s request beyond what they already do.
This is not about software licensing nor the spirit of FOSS.
There’s some inconsistent messaging that’s genuinely confusing me. I’ve shared an anecdote below (from a time when I was developing open source software) in the interest of generating discussion to clear it up for me and perhaps others, too. I don’t mean to imply I know what is happening right here.
I kind of feel like I’m walking into a construction site where someone didn’t some amazingly complex joinery, and I trip over the cuttings on the shop floor.
Then I say “you might want to clear a path here,” and I’m told by the woodworker that they never learned to use a dustpan, but it’s over there. “Go sweep for me.”
Ha nice analogy. Might steal it if that’s ok! :)
Reminds me of a place I used to work at. Small place; 10 people. I started as a sysadmin but later started programming. They encouraged me; “yes we suck at this we need help!” so I kept going. But as the work became more involved and I needed a bit of co-operation from their side, it was torture. They didn’t “suck” at it, they just didn’t respect or bother themselves with that kind of work.
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I know CSS, but not git. How can I test the webpage css and upload it to your project?
If you paste your suggested CSS improvements with example code into a new GitHub issue, that may lead to another git-savy contributor creating a pull request.
I need the js and html as well as the css for the frontend, but I can’t easily see where that’s located
On it
based
Average nutomic response 🗿
For the love of god, be more polite
The link is virtually unreadable, it formats really strangely on mobile. The text is in a 1cm wide column on the right side, allowing only ~3 letters per row.
Im bad at CSS, contributions welcome: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis/blob/master/assets/ibis.css
For those on desktop, this is what mobile users see:
the entire internet may as well look like this for me i hate knowledge
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.I would be willing to change the title, maybe “Announcing Ibis, the federated Wiki” ?
That would work much, much better I think.
Actually its too complicated to change the title in Ibis due to federation. Plus I would have to rewrite the whole intro. But I will keep it in mind for the future.
What’s wrong with lemmy moderation? I haven’t had issues.
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).
Ahh sorry I misunderstood. I thought you meant moderation is bad from the user’s perspective, not from the mod’s perspective.
wikipedia is already a great non profit source of public knowledge though i don’t see the benefit of fracturing it
i can see a benefit to using this to replace things like fandom wikia though
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.
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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.
I’m not good at frontend development or webdesign so I definitely need help in those areas.
Very interesting concept. Since the original wikipedia is in most parts published under licenses that permit copying & adaptations, are you planning to integrate their articles as a snapshot for the sake of having a solid foundation?
I dont have time for that, but other people could setup instances which mirror parts of Wikipedia.
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.
Yes it uses markdown.
i was going to screenshot the mobile browser view but it looks like half the comments are ripping on it already
This is super exciting. I think one of the things a lot of people are missing here is the potential for wikis to augment existing fediverse communities. Reddit’s killer feature has always been the massive treasure trove of information for hobbyists and niche interests. There is huge potential in the fediverse to take advantage of that sort of natural collaborative knowledge building process.
Interesting idea,
But search sites currently can’t find anything in lemmy.
So how will they link to this?
@nutomic aside from leveraging ActivityPub, I’m not sure what Ibis is bringing to the table that numerous failed distributed wiki alternatives haven’t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals
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I answered a similar question here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/9329423
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