This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them.
Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.
I am also confused how this project improves upon Wikipedia's moderation issues. Especially calling Ibis "federated", is it more "federated" than Wikipedia is?
It's also not like Wikipedia is unusable because of these issues. As with any source of information it is necessary to be skeptical with wikipedia articles. Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.
And even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time now and contains millions of articles. With the scope and size of Wikipedia some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia also compiles their own backup collections.[1] If at any point Wikipedia becomes actually unusable anyone could use the existing article to produce a new alternative database.
> Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.
This is why anything attempting to compete with Wikipedia, has to start from that point. Otherwise, full stop, not to be taken seriously.
> even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time... some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia can never be perfect, as nothing is. At the very least, they are very public about editing and moderation history. You can at least publicly challenge anything and everybody about what was done or what they are doing.
Wikipedia's edit history is public in the same way the Firefox source code is open, in theory only. In practice nobody looks at it because it overwhelming.
> This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia
Are their issues really that valid?
> 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
From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.
They seem like nitpicks to me.
I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.
I've taken a deeper look into the listed issues since writing my comment, and you're absolutely right:
- the named scandals occurred in 2012, 2005, and 2007 respectively, so more then a decade ago. For reference, the linked Ibis page was written about 7 months ago,
- the "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" article was written by a RT employee in 2018, and is hosted on a website that is no longer online. It doesn't make any compelling points against Wikipedia, and does not seem to take itself very seriously given the "red wikipedia with horns" image.
While centralizing moderation can be problematic, I'm not so convinced it actually is in Wikipedia's case.
A particular problem with Wikipedia is the by definition one-sided view of charged issues. In a single language like Vietnamese, where the majority of native speakers locate in a single country with heavy censorship and brainwashed by propaganda, articles about social, political matters and people can be very one-sided and certainly can not be up to the standard of an encyclopedia. Change is extremely difficult due to the long term moderators, who obviously have agendas.
In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.
I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.
Moderation and admin bias is is real thing. In the US Wikipedia id say it leans left but is generally factual.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has had huge issues with bias in favor of right wing politicians, and I’ve had to fight users, mods etc to add corruption scandals to the Wikipedia pages of Portuguese politicians. Eventually I couldn’t keep them up and they were almost all deleted.
I think this works much better for social media than it would for an encyclopedia - while a Mastodon user I'm interested in is likely on a single instance, a topic an encyclopedia would cover might be present on many instances, each hosting a different version. I don't think it's feasible to expect users to read every single one.
That’s what I don’t get about mastodon. Big servers use commonly shared block lists for others that don’t abide by their censorship rules. Now we’re back to something similar to what existed anyways - big powerful centralized social media separated from smaller ones that don’t benefit from networks.
The problem there was also that it attracted some pretty seriously incompatible ideologies. Like neonazis on gab.com and tankies on lemmy.ml for example. That was never going to end well. How are they supposed to come to an agreement on moderation :)
And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned.
Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out.
Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3
I watched an interesting video recently about how one of the ex Yugoslavia countries had their Wikipedia essentially hijacked by (quasi?) fascists. They were able to purge all dissenting opinion after getting enough of their people moderator / admin privileges.
Something to keep in mind when decentralizing moderation.
The English Wikipedia draws the most coverage, it's the first and the largest project.
But since all the per-language projects are segregated and autonomous, there's a lot of space for self-governance by speakers of extremely niche languages.
This was possible because (1) few others actually spoke the language, or had enough interest to maintain a Wiki of it, and (2) the small population on that project was unable to support enough vigilant and fluent administrators.
The Spanish Wikipedia forked off, a long long time ago, but eswiki has made a comeback in its own right.
All projects are considered autonomous, and admins from other projects are really expected to stay out of local disputes. Therefore, it's quite easy for the smaller wikis to diverge and get hijacked by special interests, especially nationalist ones. I'd say it's unavoidable with the existing governance structure.
> Something to keep in mind when decentralizing moderation.
FWIW federated isn’t decentralized.
Federated instances can have whatever moderation rules without affecting all other instances, but decentralized systems usually try to achieve some kind of consensus, which isn’t necessary in federated systems.
> The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
I've always thought this is an inherent problem for all decentralized solutions. If one node or server or whatever it gets called grows big enough, it stops being decentralized.
If one (or even a few) federated server in a decentralized system becomes big enough to be the one that everyone uses, them it's just centralization with extra steps and a lot of moralization and handwaving.
Do decentralized/federated systems in general have a way of preventing this from happening?
For a more relativistic approach, built on nostr, see wikifreedia.xyz, which allows everyone to maintain their own version of any article, fork, vote, and merge as needed.
Seems a bit bloated. I opened the front page and could only see a list of recently edited pages, with the count constantly ticking up. Trying to open any of them by clicking them didn't do anything, seems like the page was ground to a halt. Tried to search 'wikifreedia' to see if there's a wiki page explaining what the project is about, but could not get the search to go through.
> Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
I've always thought about modeling this as vote based system votes support claims.
Like, "Israel's IDF is committing genocide in Palestine" would be maybe supported by Wikipedia, but would have opposing votes by the US and Israel, and it's up to each client to decide who to trust.
Non controversial claims would be generally supported, and on controversial ones you could have them scored given your prior trust in voters and have the UI mention it's controversial and show the underlying votes if you want to dig into that.
Wikipedia generally avoids resolving disputes democratically, instead opting to establish consensus based on sources where possible.
With voting systems you end up walking the tightrope between making your system susceptible to Sybil attacks and sockpuppetry on one end, and giving well-established users undue voting rights on another.
That model doesn’t work because there are plenty of issues on which a vote by the US would increase my confidence in the truthfulness of a claim, but others where it would not make a difference, or even decrease my confidence.
Exactly, votes + who you trust-follow (ie. "MIT" with high degree, "Flat Earth Society" with high negative degree) – recursively; creates your own landscape of truth-weighted information.
I have a different approach — rather than keeping people apart in echo chambers, I force them all together in a centralized site where they have to see the best arguments for and against each claim
Yeah I'm confused as to how it could solve these problems too. All the issues listed in the article come from the challenges inherent in moderating a large wiki used by millions of people, not from centralisation or technology.
It doesn't matter how the wiki is structured, these issues are simply part of the concept. It's difficult to fact check a site as popular as Wikipedia, the sheer number of articles means that verifying sources (and author credibility) is almost always going to be an imperfect process.
I get the concerns towards Wikipedia governance, but this feels almost like slacktivism. It’s been done numerous times, to slap ActivityPub onto a communication mode and call it a „federated foobar alternative”. It never works, it always fails to gain meaningful adoption. The federated hosts end up in disputes between themselves and their users. It’s mostly a miserable experience.
There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
Federation is the open source answer to microservices.
Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.
Hmm when has it happened in the past? This is literally the Lemmy creator so it seems somewhat unique! But I could definitely just be behind the times.
Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
For what definition of 'very successful' are we using here? Mastodon has <900k MAU, Lemmy <45k. It's not nothing, but compared to what they're competing with(Twitter at > 330 million), they aren't even a blip on the radar.
If we're defining success as not having died out and generally working, I guess I could agree.
If by "never works" you mean "someone's side project whose monetization strategy is to put up a donation link never takes down an established business worth hundreds of millions in a fraction of the time it took for such business to establish itself as some sort of a monopoly", then yeah, no shit.
I don't have any particular trust (or distrust) in Wikipedia as an institution, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse: is there a reason to believe that a federated wiki would be more accountable, rather than less?
(This isn't meant to be a jab; I like federated stuff. But I'm also not sure the order of operations is right here.)
The answer to your question is basically the same as for federation in real life: I don't care if they mayor of a city 300 miles away is accountable to me. I only care if my mayor is accountable to me. Making mayors into presidential appointees would represent a slight increase in my influence in the city code of places I don't know the name of, but that's not a great trade for my influence in the city I live in.
When you join a federated instance, the owner of it still isn't accountable to you, and is likely to be more eccentric than a centralized instance that is at least run by a larger number of people.
Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
I don't know about accountability on the part of the participants, but in theory it ought to be harder to attack because success means coordinating a consistent (maliciously-altered) experience across infra maintained by a wider variety of people, some of whom might be harder to coerce than others.
In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately.
So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
Serious question: why are we talking about Wikipedia like it has the same shape of trust problem as the Web PKI? With Wikipedia, you or I or anybody else can go and edit out the obvious misinformation. That leaves subtle misinformation, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that.
It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
If you're skeptical about Wikipedia, you can easily create your own fork of Wikipedia: the data and code is open source after all. In the end, it’s all about whether you can keep a community alive and kicking. No one gives a damn about whether a wiki is built on ActivityPub.
There are many examples: Larry Sanger, who was mentioned in the article, created Citizendium after breaking from Wikipedia.[0] He was then involved with Everipedia, a for-profit venture built the original code base which later morphed into crypto nonsense.[1]
There are many examples of other wikis too. Some are focused[2][3], some are fun[4][5], some are revisionist[6][7][8], and some meet the requirements of totalitarian regimes[9][10].
If Wikipedia’s not your style, grab the code, rally a crowd, and make the encyclopedia you want to see—just know it’s the people, not the platform, that make it thrive.
A social problem is by definition one with a social solution. If we can find a technical solution to a problem, it turns into a technical problem. Wikipedia is itself a technology. It's not outrageous to suggest that new technologies can improve on it.
Just because something is based on technology does not mean that any problem is has is solvable with different technology. This is a lesson that it seems we need to learn over and over. The hard part of a system designed to squish together the brains of millions of humans and somehow wring truth out of the chaos is a fundamentally messy human system whose issues aren't solved by putting all those messy humans on a new platform.
If the top "scandals" in the article are considered reasons to change, just wait until the alt-crew get a hold of wikipedia. Medical, political, science, education, religion discussions would all be even more crazy when people can point to some wiki gospel as proof. We'd find the list of scandals grows a thousandfold.
Wikipedia is amazing, if imperfect. Make it better, don't try to break it by splintering it into some weird "whatever you think is right" solution. That's already what we have in social media. Truth is already federated enough.
Edit: what would convince me more is some demonstration article/cluster of articles and maybe some math proof that shows how this is better, through faster convergence on truth, defence against rando's etc. I think even getting a definition of "better" would be a bit of a battle!
Actually, a lot of people use Lemmy, and there's pretty decent content on it in the communities. I post Linux stuff mostly and my threads get a lot of comments. Or I'll ask questions like "What are everybody's cool not so well known websites" and get a ton of feedback. Accounts are accessible via Mastodon as well, it isn't ideal, but, it's some kind of start.
So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
That seems like a very cynical take. Is it a stated goal or expectation of the author that more than what you deem "nobody" will use this over a centralized wiki? Is that what you're criticizing, or is it just handwaving the project away the same way one could say Linux distributions (see: year of the linux desktop) and other things "nobody uses" don't matter and are disjointed from reality?
I have the same problem with this that I do with "federated forums" or "federated forges"—what does it even mean for an encyclopedia to be federated? In fact, they already are—if I want to go look up information about Minecraft, I can use the federated internet to go to minecraft.wiki.
So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?
Readit News
Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced by moderating every instance separately. But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant.
Also, are there any plans to import existing articles from Wikipedia? I find it hard to imagine an alternative gaining traction by disregarding decades of edits on Wikipedia itself.
It's also not like Wikipedia is unusable because of these issues. As with any source of information it is necessary to be skeptical with wikipedia articles. Wikipedia has the major advantage over any other source that the edit history is public.
And even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time now and contains millions of articles. With the scope and size of Wikipedia some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia also compiles their own backup collections.[1] If at any point Wikipedia becomes actually unusable anyone could use the existing article to produce a new alternative database.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
This is why anything attempting to compete with Wikipedia, has to start from that point. Otherwise, full stop, not to be taken seriously.
> even though there are many incidents with Wikipedia's moderation, the website has also existed for a long time... some incidents are expected.
Wikipedia can never be perfect, as nothing is. At the very least, they are very public about editing and moderation history. You can at least publicly challenge anything and everybody about what was done or what they are doing.
So yes it is more federated than Wikipedia
Are their issues really that valid?
> 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
From their examples, it seems like the issue that spurred the development of Ibis was that a few individuals compromised a select set of articles.
They seem like nitpicks to me.
I think more motivation is needed to justify why to abandon Wikipedia. It will be no small undertaking for them to rebuild the world's largest and comprehensive knowledge repository.
- the named scandals occurred in 2012, 2005, and 2007 respectively, so more then a decade ago. For reference, the linked Ibis page was written about 7 months ago,
- the "Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core" article was written by a RT employee in 2018, and is hosted on a website that is no longer online. It doesn't make any compelling points against Wikipedia, and does not seem to take itself very seriously given the "red wikipedia with horns" image.
While centralizing moderation can be problematic, I'm not so convinced it actually is in Wikipedia's case.
In such situations, an alternative version/server might be a solution. For example, a social.vn.wiki could specialize in alternative views on socio-political issues in Vietnamese and be moderated differently. I can imagine new Wikipedia hubs where content changes are monitored by AI to detect manipulation attempts and obviously false content. I also can imagine a new Wikipedia, where the reader can up vote/down vote an article instead of actively change it. For heavy moderated contents, this could be a better alternative to a edit war.
I'm not sure that federations can solve this problem because of their inherent dynamics. But living in a world where the well of knowledge is poisoned can feel quite suffocating. Federation at least allows alternatives to exist.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has had huge issues with bias in favor of right wing politicians, and I’ve had to fight users, mods etc to add corruption scandals to the Wikipedia pages of Portuguese politicians. Eventually I couldn’t keep them up and they were almost all deleted.
The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.
And then in the middle of that you have the German instances that demand everyone else pledges to follow their peculiar local laws precisely to the latter or get banned.
Fwiw I'm with none of the above groups, I'm pro LGBT/progressive for which there's also a lot of instances but I'm just sad that the fediverse didn't come out.
Having said that, some instances have really made a name for themselves like beehive <3
Something to keep in mind when decentralizing moderation.
But since all the per-language projects are segregated and autonomous, there's a lot of space for self-governance by speakers of extremely niche languages.
Observers may be familiar with the scandal of the Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...
This was possible because (1) few others actually spoke the language, or had enough interest to maintain a Wiki of it, and (2) the small population on that project was unable to support enough vigilant and fluent administrators.
The Spanish Wikipedia forked off, a long long time ago, but eswiki has made a comeback in its own right.
All projects are considered autonomous, and admins from other projects are really expected to stay out of local disputes. Therefore, it's quite easy for the smaller wikis to diverge and get hijacked by special interests, especially nationalist ones. I'd say it's unavoidable with the existing governance structure.
FWIW federated isn’t decentralized.
Federated instances can have whatever moderation rules without affecting all other instances, but decentralized systems usually try to achieve some kind of consensus, which isn’t necessary in federated systems.
Deleted Comment
I've always thought this is an inherent problem for all decentralized solutions. If one node or server or whatever it gets called grows big enough, it stops being decentralized.
If one (or even a few) federated server in a decentralized system becomes big enough to be the one that everyone uses, them it's just centralization with extra steps and a lot of moralization and handwaving.
Do decentralized/federated systems in general have a way of preventing this from happening?
Yes, but that’s kind of a good thing. It’s impossible to moderate in a way that’s acceptable to absolutely anyone.
Federated moderation gives users the ability to select moderators they like, by selecting which instances they use.
I've always thought about modeling this as vote based system votes support claims.
Like, "Israel's IDF is committing genocide in Palestine" would be maybe supported by Wikipedia, but would have opposing votes by the US and Israel, and it's up to each client to decide who to trust. Non controversial claims would be generally supported, and on controversial ones you could have them scored given your prior trust in voters and have the UI mention it's controversial and show the underlying votes if you want to dig into that.
With voting systems you end up walking the tightrope between making your system susceptible to Sybil attacks and sockpuppetry on one end, and giving well-established users undue voting rights on another.
Building this to clean up online discourse: https://rational.app
Anyone want to join me? Reply or find my email in my profile
It doesn't matter how the wiki is structured, these issues are simply part of the concept. It's difficult to fact check a site as popular as Wikipedia, the sheer number of articles means that verifying sources (and author credibility) is almost always going to be an imperfect process.
There needs to be another way to increase accountability for critical online services.
Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.
Are there other federation projects other than mastodon and Lemmy?
https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub
Mastodon and Lemmy are both very successful projects.
If we're defining success as not having died out and generally working, I guess I could agree.
(This isn't meant to be a jab; I like federated stuff. But I'm also not sure the order of operations is right here.)
Speaking of federation in real life reminds me of people yelling about state's rights. I'm pro-distribution, but none of these e-institutions are democratic, they're all little fiefdoms. Governance needs to be distributed, not just bandwidth.
Exactly how does it help that there's a bunch of small Wikipedia mirrors with like four different pages each that differ from the main one.
In practice, I don't know how much that would matter. If I were the kind of powerful actor that federation is supposed to guard against, I'd use DNS poisoning and crooked CA's/ISP's to work at the network level rather than attempting to corrupt each server admin separately.
So I see it as a good start, but really only meaningful if we de-root-of-trust those things also.
It's already "hard" to attack Wikipedia, in the sense that there's an army of pedantic dorks ready to argue about anything already on it. Which is a different kind of hard than attacking a PKI.
If you're skeptical about Wikipedia, you can easily create your own fork of Wikipedia: the data and code is open source after all. In the end, it’s all about whether you can keep a community alive and kicking. No one gives a damn about whether a wiki is built on ActivityPub.
There are many examples: Larry Sanger, who was mentioned in the article, created Citizendium after breaking from Wikipedia.[0] He was then involved with Everipedia, a for-profit venture built the original code base which later morphed into crypto nonsense.[1]
There are many examples of other wikis too. Some are focused[2][3], some are fun[4][5], some are revisionist[6][7][8], and some meet the requirements of totalitarian regimes[9][10].
If Wikipedia’s not your style, grab the code, rally a crowd, and make the encyclopedia you want to see—just know it’s the people, not the platform, that make it thrive.
[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page
[1]: https://rosettacode.org/
[2]: https://citizendium.org/
[3]: https://iq.wiki/
[4]: https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page
[5]: https://edramatica.com/Main_Page
[6]: https://www.metapedia.org/
[7]: https://www.conservapedia.com/
[8]: https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
[9]: https://www.qiuwenbaike.cn
[10]: https://ruwiki.ru
Wikipedia is amazing, if imperfect. Make it better, don't try to break it by splintering it into some weird "whatever you think is right" solution. That's already what we have in social media. Truth is already federated enough.
Edit: what would convince me more is some demonstration article/cluster of articles and maybe some math proof that shows how this is better, through faster convergence on truth, defence against rando's etc. I think even getting a definition of "better" would be a bit of a battle!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39694045
163 points | 252 comments
So, lots of people use it, actually. I haven't noticed any bots replying to each other like what Reddit is now adays reposting content and reposting top comments.
So what are these new "federation" features actually giving us? Is it just OpenID login reinvented?