this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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This is a great project. I had the same idea myself, and posted about it, but never did anything about it! It's great that people like you are here, with the creativity, and the motivation and skills to do this work.
I think this project is as necessary as Wikipedia itself.
The criticisms in these comments are mostly identical to the opinion most people had about Wikipedia when it started - the it would become a cesspool of nonsense and misinformation. That it was useless and worthless when encyclopaedias already exist.
Wikipedia was the first step in broadening what a source if authoritative information can be. It in fact created richer and more truthful information than was possible before, and enlightened the world. Ibis is a necessary second step on the same path.
It will be most valuable for articles like Tieneman square, or the Gilets Jaunes, where there are sharply different perspectives on the same matter, and there will never be agreement. A single monolithic Wikipedia cannot speak about them. Today, wiki gives one perspective and calls it the truth. This was fine in the 20th century when most people believed in simple truths. They were told what to think by single sources. They never left their filter bubbles. This is not sustainable anymore.
To succeed and change the world, this project must do a few things right.
The default instance should just be a mirror of Wikipedia. This is the default source of information on everything, so it would be crazy to omit it. Omitting it means putting yourself in competition with it, and you will lose. By encompassing it, the information in Ibis is from day 1 greater then wiki. Then Ibis will just supersede wiki.
There should be a sidebar with links to the sane article on other instances. So someone reading about trickle down economics on right wing instance, he can instantly switch to the same article on a left wing wiki and read the other side of it. That's the feature that will make it worthwhile for people.
It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.
Thanks for the support. I think the era of single, centralized sources of information will soon be in the past.
I just assumed that would be easy, that you would have one instance with no actual content. It just fetches the wikipedia article with the same name, directly from the wikipedia website. I guess I didn't really think about it.
I guess that's a design choice. Looking at different ways similar issues have been solved already...
How does wikipedia decide that the same article is available in different languages? I guess there is a database of links which has to be maintained.
Alternatively, it could assume that articles are the same if they have the same name, like in your example where "Mountain" can have an article on a poetry instance and on a geography instance, but the software treats them as the same article.
Wikipedia can understand that "Rep of Ireland" = "Republic of Ireland". So I guess there is a look-up-table saying that these two names refer to the same thing.
Then, wikipedia can also understand cases where articles can have the same name but be unrelated. Like RIC (paramilitary group) is not the same as RIC (feature of a democracy).
I do think, if each Ibis instance is isolated, it won't be much different from having many separate wiki websites. When the software automatically links you to the same information on different instances, that's when the idea becomes really interesting and valuable.