• CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Interesting project and good luck on this.

    Did you not consider something like Codeberg to host this? Many open source devs do not trust MS or their stewardship of Github, and considering the aim of this project is against American control of information, surely this really needs serious consideration.

    Many open source devs do not want to use Github at all now.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
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      7 months ago

      That is true but most developers are still on Github, which hasn’t been affected by enshittification yet. I also have to keep using Github because of Lemmy, so I don’t want to switch back and forth between two separate platforms.

      However once Gitea starts federation we definitely want to migrate Lemmy to a selfhosted instance, and probably Ibis too.

      • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        They sunset Atom to push VS code despite assurances they wouldn’t.

        Co-pilot slurping open source code and spitting out code without license attribution. One example of this was when it spat out Quake 2 comment verbatim.

        Enshittification started, you just ain’t ready to see it yet. MS has a track record and will continue.

        2 git hosts is just 2 tabs and by the time federation happens, you’ve already got vendor lock in because of all the issues. I doubt migration of those will be straightforward.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
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      7 months ago

      Adding such functionality in Lemmy would be very complicated because Lemmy itself is already quite a complicated project. So it would require test coverage, pass code review, have a stable API and so on. Its better to experiment with this in a new project so I can write some quick and dirty code to get the basic functionality working. If it proves successful it can be integrated with Lemmy later.

  • Frogodendron@beehaw.org
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    7 months ago

    This serves well as a statement.

    It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.

      • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        You can already download the entirity of Wikipedia. If it ever fell, the content could easily be restored elsewhere.

        Also, I don’t think I understand why this should be federated.

        • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          The infrastructure is already there in that case, to restore it, and it would be less likely to fall.

          Having no sole source of information hosting in an encyclopedic format is safer.

          • derpgon@programming.dev
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            7 months ago

            But having an open data project full of information that’s actively contributed to and fact checked, with copies over many servers, is much better than having the same thing but fragmented. I still don’t see a reason. If it was something else or corporate driven, I wouldn’t bat an eye. But Wikipedia?

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I’m going to just say that I’m exteremely sceptical on how this will turn out, just because there has been quite a few Wikipedia forks that have not exactly worked out despite the best interests and the stated objectives they had.

    Now - Wikipedia isn’t exactly an entity that doesn’t have glaring problems of its own, of course - but I’m just saying that the wiki model has been tried out a lot of times and screwed up many times in various weird ways.

    There’s exactly two ways I can see Wikipedia forks to evolve: Crappily managed fork that is handled by an ideological dumbass that attracts a crowd that makes everything much worse (e.g. Conservapedia, Citizendium), or a fork that gets overrun by junk and forgotten by history, because, well, clearly it’s much more beneficial to contribute to Wikipedia anyway.

    I was about to respond with a copy of the standard Usenet spam response form with the “sorry dude I don’t think this is going to work” ticked, but Google is shit and I can’t find a copy of that nonsense anymore, so there.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlOP
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      7 months ago

      Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.

    • figaro@lemdro.id
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      7 months ago

      Oh man I can’t wait to see what hexbear will do with this, I’m sure people will love to use a platform that actively denies genocides and supports dictators

  • vis4valentine@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    I think this could be useful for a project I have where school that are not connected to the internet could create their own wikis, however, I need to see how it develops.

    • jackpot@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      ‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 months ago

        ‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open

        The heart of narrative control on Wikipedia is controlling what standards of evidence need to be met and what sources are acceptable.

        An easy example of this would be the argument over adding an entry for Thomas James Ball to the List of Political Self-Immolations. Before they finally gave in and accepted it, there was a push to establish a standard for entries on the list that almost no existing entry on the list met and apply that standard to determine if Thomas James Ball should be included, while painting it as though the process were neutral.

      • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You can get specific about certain articles needing improvement, but to call all of Wikipedia generally biased without any proof seems like a pretty red lil flag

    • figaro@lemdro.id
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      7 months ago

      Idk man I’d say wikipedia is probably 95% great. The political stuff will always have it’s issues, sure, but most of it is quite good info.

      I’m all for competition though. I hope this one takes off as well.

  • joenforcer@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    This feels like a hasty “solution” to an invented “problem”. Sure, Wikipedia isn’t squeaky clean, but it’s pretty damn good for something that people have been freely adding knowledge to for decades. The cherry-picked examples of what makes Wikipedia " bad" are really not outrageous enough to create something even more niche than Wikia, Fandom, or the late Encyclopedia Dramatica. I appreciate the thought, but federation is not a silver bullet for everything. Don’t glorify federation the way cryptobros glorify the block chain as the answer to all the problems of the world.

    • hamid@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I don’t think the fact that a small group of people who are easy to manipulate by the US government and millions of edits originating from Langley are a small or invented problem. I’m extremely scared of having resources being centralized and controlled by the US propaganda apparatus and think this is a major problem.

      • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        I’ve just realised that I independently came up with the idea for federated services while imagining how to make yt better over 5 years ago.

        Cool!

        • jeremyparker@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don’t mind paying for things if they’re good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        7 months ago

        There’s a wiki program that natively uses a version control repository, Fossil. You can fork a Fossil wiki and contribute updates back to the original.

        It wouldn’t be too hard to for example create a few Fossil repositories for different topics where the admins on each are subject matter experts (to ensure quality of contributions), and then have a client which connects to them all and with a scheme for cross linking between them

        Peertube already exists for video, it’s more like a different take on bittorrent.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      It only gets corrupted by state department interests if it gets popular, so we must work to make it less popular! (edit: I hope its obvious this is a joke)

    • socsa@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      I mean we have seen how the Lemmy devs approach certain topics, and it is definitely not with a preference for openness or free exchange of ideas. There are certain topics here which have a hair trigger for content removal and bans, for extremely petty and minor “transgressions,” so the motivation here seems pretty transparent.

  • AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Yeah, no, wouldn’t touch that from a longstick, specially from the political slant it’s coming from. Wikipedia itself already has enough problems, Ibis is just asking to be a misinformation hub.

  • airportline@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    It is not well known but there have been numerous scandals which put this trust into question. For example in 2012, a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK used his position to place his PR client on Wikipedia’s front page 17 times within a month. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made extensive edits to the article about himself, removing mentions of co-founder Larry Sanger. In 2007, a prolific editor who claimed to be a graduate professor and was recruited by Wikipedia staff to the Arbitration Committee was revealed to be a 24-year-old college dropout. These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.

    I don’t really understand how decentralization would address the trust and legitimacy problems of Wikipedia. I do see value in adding community wikis to Lemmy, however.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Wikipedia got as bad as it did because neoliberals had gotten into positions of power and kicked everyone else out. They weren’t the people who made the site (it was one guy who did like 90% of the articles) but they are the ones who made it the shithole that it is today.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        Besides still needing to establish that a) wikipedia is bad today (as opposed to just flawed), you also need to establish b) what about this would entice people over from wikipedia and c) if it did succeed, then why wouldn’t whoever got into positions of power with wikipedia get into the same positions of power on the biggest instances?