Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative

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.

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.

For the love of god fix ur mobile css

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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?

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.

i was going to screenshot the mobile browser view but it looks like half the comments are ripping on it already

This makes me wonder if you could make a super frictionless path from a thread on lemmy (or similar fediverse software) to some form of a wiki page that presented the same information but in a more natural form better suited to a longer term repository of knowledge rather than an evolving 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?

What if a lemmy post could be turned into a wiki post (on that same lemmy/wiki instance) with a click of button, only requiring a small amount of tweaking to restructure the information in a wiki fashion? The wiki post would of course reference the original thread it was made from and only certain accounts on a lemmy community would have permission to do this.

This capability would give a small lemmy community the ability to warp ahead of clunky, obtuse discord communities in constructing genuinely useful repositories of expert information with far less effort or friction.

Interesting idea,

But search sites currently can't find anything in lemmy.

So how will they link to this?