Introducing IBIS-Wiki
A federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. https://ibis.wiki/
Introducing IBIS-Wiki
A federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. https://ibis.wiki/
Yeah, that’s the part that I was referencing to. If you have a topic called ‘the sky is’ on multiple instances, and they all say a different color, it rather defeats the purpose of an encyclopedia as some sort of source of truth if you have to pick which one is right.
That’s present in any user editable platform. Wikipedia’s consensus doesn’t mean it’s actually representing broad universal truth. That why everything gets cited and the talk and history pages are public to the readers, so they can judge the reliability themselves. If you stumble on a less visited page, that consensus group gets smaller and smaller and the likelihood of it being essentially a pretty fiefdom increases.
Even printed encyclopedias had no such claim. If someone is putting out a instance that’s too highly biased to be useful, defederate.
Wikipedia though has a strong reputation for being well cited and due in large part to the huge user base glaring inaccuracies get corrected quickly. I saw a study at one point comparing them to a traditional encyclopedia and they had of course faster shifting errors, but on average where pretty on par for accuracy.
A federated system where I or any other knucklehead could put up an instance isn’t going to have that ‘checked by 1000 eyes’ factor going so much, or if it did ever get to that point then they’ve likely become the defacto ‘real’ federated encyclopedia and the others inherently suspect.
All in all It’s a neat idea, but sounds like it’d be rife with chaotic discord. As a general thing if something is on the standard Wikipedia I can be pretty sure it’s reasonably accurate without having to research who posted it, and I can torrent a copy of the whole thing as I just recently found out.
Well, in my hypothetical scenario, “gamipedia” is not going to have an article about “the sky is”, that’s not really its purpose. Ideally you’d only have one encyclopedia wiki, or multiple that are willing to work together and not duplicate each other’s content. If another competing supposed-encyclopedia instance called “assholepedia” does have an article about “the sky is: a liberal delusion”, then you block and defederate that asshole instance. No big deal.