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Wikipedia is maybe the most important open source project ever (competing only with linux, but that is operating at a more hidden technical level) This (non)ep

Wikipedia is maybe the most important open source project ever (competing only with linux, but that is operating at a more hidden technical level) This (non)episode of "wikipedia outage" is as good prompt as any to get our collective human chatGPT going :-). Here is my take: Wikipedia's world-changing impact has been stifled in the era of centralized walled gardens regurgitating memes and ads and isn't really future-proof. Yes you can run you own mediawiki but 1) it not very easy or pleasant at all and 2) knowledge base federation [0] is still a distant dream and 3) its whole stack is nowhere near being integrated with other open source tools that people have at their disposals (heck, even the wiki markup is now a lone exception in the markdown monoculture) Somehow the next decade of wikipedia should look much more decentralized, resilient and integrated and that could be a sublime next level. [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Federation

richardwhiuk 4y ago
Unclear there's substantial additional value by it being decentralized.
- danuker 4y ago
  Indeed, I'd rather have a single version of a truth most people can agree on, rather than thousands of bubbles each spewing their own agenda.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    That would be one of the many issues to resolve in a federated context. But achieving "consensus" is never trivial and compromises and choices underlie its current model too.
- college_physics 4y ago
  there is vastly more (and ever exploding) knowledge than what the current wikipedia model can integrate (talking always about public knowledge). Unless there is a breakthrough in how the open source ecosystem integrates, validates, federates public knowledge somebody else will claim that they can better "organize the world's information" (using, e.g "AI") and we will probably not like the new state of the world. I think there is substantial value in preventing that outcome from happening. NB: I use the term decentralization not just a technical database/server architecture but also as a means of engaging far more resources.
  - psychoslave 4y ago
    > there is vastly more (and ever exploding) knowledge than what the current wikipedia model can integrate (talking always about public knowledge). Sure, but there is two vastly different "distributed" architecture at stake here: - the social one, as in everyone can contribute easily in positive constructive manner, with optimized user path for each user level and interest, and no worry to have about any form of online harassment/bullying or outdoor threats like the-angry-party-staring-at you that might make you vanish for contributing the-wrong-thing-under-the-bad-perspective - the technical one, which is mainly about "no single point of failure" Sure there are things that largely overlap, but still two vastly independent set.
    - college_physics 4y ago
      > Sure there are things that largely overlap, but still two vastly independent set. Yes they are by no means the same aspect but the technical (the design part) and "social" domain (how human actors interact using the technology, what incentives they have to contribute, how easy it is to contribute, how to form consensus etc) are never very far apart. My argument is a general one. If, say, ten years from now wikipedia is to have the same quantum leap impact and positive role it had twenty years ago (when it first got going) it will have to be much more ambitious. But that ambition is unlikely to be served well by a forever centralized service because most knowledge is produced, stored and consumed in distributed ways. Just for conreteness, think of all those other sources of public knowledge: from openstreetmap, to research paper archives, musea collections and many other public institutions of all kinds (laws and regulations, public statistics etc). Right now everything must come to a centralized store but the size of wikipedia is already flattening [0] and a lot of that data never gets referenced or is a very cumbersome manual job. In any case, as per link in my other comment some federation is part of the plan (wikibases) and there is the broader "linked data" movement. Its just that at some point those ideas have to get real legs and start walking :-). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
xnickb 4y ago
Decentralization implies more complex failure modes and unclear paths to resolve them. Not sure how that'd help.
- college_physics 4y ago
  thats a strange assertion when the internet was famously invented to eliminate complex failure modes. Quoting from "DARPA and the Internet Revolution" By Mitch Waldrop [0] "Finally, Roberts decided to make the network completely decentralized, with no one master computer responsible for sorting the packets and routing them to their destination. Such a Grand Central Station approach would have been much simpler to implement, Roberts knew. But one blown transistor could have taken the whole network down. So instead, he decreed that the ARPA sites would be linked in a complex pattern rather like the Interstate highway map, and that each site would share the routing responsibilities equally. That is, the computer there would read the digital address on each packet as it came in, accept that packet if the address was local, or else send it off again on the next stage of its journey. This “packet-switching” approach would mean more complexity and more programming during the set-up phase. But the final system would be far more robust: No one failure could bring it down." [0] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet

richardwhiuk 4y ago

Unclear there's substantial additional value by it being decentralized.

danuker 4y ago
Indeed, I'd rather have a single version of a truth most people can agree on, rather than thousands of bubbles each spewing their own agenda.
- college_physics 4y ago
  That would be one of the many issues to resolve in a federated context. But achieving "consensus" is never trivial and compromises and choices underlie its current model too.
college_physics 4y ago
there is vastly more (and ever exploding) knowledge than what the current wikipedia model can integrate (talking always about public knowledge). Unless there is a breakthrough in how the open source ecosystem integrates, validates, federates public knowledge somebody else will claim that they can better "organize the world's information" (using, e.g "AI") and we will probably not like the new state of the world. I think there is substantial value in preventing that outcome from happening. NB: I use the term decentralization not just a technical database/server architecture but also as a means of engaging far more resources.
- psychoslave 4y ago
  > there is vastly more (and ever exploding) knowledge than what the current wikipedia model can integrate (talking always about public knowledge). Sure, but there is two vastly different "distributed" architecture at stake here: - the social one, as in everyone can contribute easily in positive constructive manner, with optimized user path for each user level and interest, and no worry to have about any form of online harassment/bullying or outdoor threats like the-angry-party-staring-at you that might make you vanish for contributing the-wrong-thing-under-the-bad-perspective - the technical one, which is mainly about "no single point of failure" Sure there are things that largely overlap, but still two vastly independent set.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    > Sure there are things that largely overlap, but still two vastly independent set. Yes they are by no means the same aspect but the technical (the design part) and "social" domain (how human actors interact using the technology, what incentives they have to contribute, how easy it is to contribute, how to form consensus etc) are never very far apart. My argument is a general one. If, say, ten years from now wikipedia is to have the same quantum leap impact and positive role it had twenty years ago (when it first got going) it will have to be much more ambitious. But that ambition is unlikely to be served well by a forever centralized service because most knowledge is produced, stored and consumed in distributed ways. Just for conreteness, think of all those other sources of public knowledge: from openstreetmap, to research paper archives, musea collections and many other public institutions of all kinds (laws and regulations, public statistics etc). Right now everything must come to a centralized store but the size of wikipedia is already flattening [0] and a lot of that data never gets referenced or is a very cumbersome manual job. In any case, as per link in my other comment some federation is part of the plan (wikibases) and there is the broader "linked data" movement. Its just that at some point those ideas have to get real legs and start walking :-). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

xnickb 4y ago

Decentralization implies more complex failure modes and unclear paths to resolve them. Not sure how that'd help.

college_physics 4y ago
thats a strange assertion when the internet was famously invented to eliminate complex failure modes. Quoting from "DARPA and the Internet Revolution" By Mitch Waldrop [0] "Finally, Roberts decided to make the network completely decentralized, with no one master computer responsible for sorting the packets and routing them to their destination. Such a Grand Central Station approach would have been much simpler to implement, Roberts knew. But one blown transistor could have taken the whole network down. So instead, he decreed that the ARPA sites would be linked in a complex pattern rather like the Interstate highway map, and that each site would share the routing responsibilities equally. That is, the computer there would read the digital address on each packet as it came in, accept that packet if the address was local, or else send it off again on the next stage of its journey. This “packet-switching” approach would mean more complexity and more programming during the set-up phase. But the final system would be far more robust: No one failure could bring it down." [0] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet