6 ms·

This points out several valid issues with Wikipedia, but does not explain how the replacement addresses them. Centralized moderation, for instance, is replaced

by mzajc 2y ago

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.

whatshisface 2y ago
>But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant. The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.
- mzajc 2y ago
  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.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."
- wkat4242 2y ago
  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
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    They're not supposed to come to an agreement on moderation. The whole idea behind federation is that a company is not trying to navigate a middle ground between Nazis and chinese communists! :-)
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Hmm yeah but the idea was not to duplicate moderation a thousand times. And then where is your community? My problem is that the fediverse is tearing itself apart on tiny differences. Lots of instances have banned others from the same ideology because one little time someone said something one of the founders didn't agree with. It's just not working like this. I think ideological choices should be made by the end user. I think the instance should be agnostic like an internet browser. And moderation done by the groups the user subscribes to. That's the model that works. We had exactly this in Usenet which is just not really used anymore due to complex technical implementation.
      - whatshisface 2y ago
        In fediverse terminology your idea would be for accounts to seamlessly hop between instances (which are usenet groups), and a lot of other people think that would be a good change too. The only difficulty is engineering something where no individual server has authority over a login identity. It would all be so easy if browsers could sign POST requests with keypairs that the browser managed, but that's been resisted in web standards for decades.
        wkat4242 2y ago
        Hmm no, I imagine they would stay on an instance (similar to the Usenet provider) and join groups or whatever they're called on mastodon, similar to the Usenet newsgroups. And then the moderators would come from the management of each group, independently from which instance they're on. There would be no central authentication necessary. Just some way for moderators to prove their ownership, perhaps some kind of public key. This way each group can do their own moderation. Of course some instances could decide not to carry some groups that go totally counter to them, but it should be a rare phenomenon. Similar to the old Usenet providers blocking binary groups (before that was the only thing Usenet was being used for anymore :) )
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  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.
dietr1ch 2y ago
> 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.
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  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.
- mzajc 2y ago
  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.
  - iterance 2y ago
    Obligatory - Wikipedia is not a democracy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#DEMOCRACY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_... (Or the related / more in depth "Polling is not a substitute for discussion" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_substitute_for_discussion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_s...)
  - mirekrusin 2y ago
    Sybil and sockpuppetry is solvable by "following" (possibly truth-weighted, can nicely express negative weights). The downside is that there is no global truth view, only individual ones based on who you grant trustworthiness and how it recursively expands – but arguably this reflects reality better.
jonstaab 2y ago
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.
- labster 2y ago
  So move the moderation decisions onto the end user? Somehow this doesn’t feel like progress.
- FireInsight 2y ago
  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.
Levitating 2y ago
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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- okasaki 2y ago
  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.
- baranul 2y ago
  > 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.
- dartos 2y ago
  Federated means that individuals can host instances and have those instances communicate with other independent instances. So yes it is more federated than Wikipedia
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
awaythrow335 2y ago
> 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.
- mzajc 2y ago
  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.
  - nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
    Please see the recent grooming gangs article on the UK scandal of the same name. This is a good recent example of bad behaviour on wikipedia by activists looking to subvert the truth.
    - brigandish 2y ago
      There are several articles on that topic. Perhaps it would be better if you were more explicit about which article or articles, and what the bad behaviour is.
esperent 2y ago
> 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?
CM30 2y ago
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.
GPerson 2y ago
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.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  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. Observers may be familiar with the scandal of the Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-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.
- dartos 2y ago
  > 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.
dartos 2y ago
> But doesn't that simply shift the problem? 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.

by mzajc 2y ago

whatshisface 2y ago

>But doesn't that simply shift the problem? The largest instance(s) can still moderate maliciously, while the rest are insignificant. The effect of this on Mastodon was to establish walls between the big servers over moderation disputes, controlling their growth.

mzajc 2y ago
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.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  That would only be likely to happen when communities identify by their bias (see: "conservapedia.") Existing wiki communities tend to divide based on topic, without a lot of overlap. (See: fandom). A federated alternative to fandom.com is what I would imagine when someone says "federated wiki."
wkat4242 2y ago
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
- whatshisface 2y ago
  They're not supposed to come to an agreement on moderation. The whole idea behind federation is that a company is not trying to navigate a middle ground between Nazis and chinese communists! :-)
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Hmm yeah but the idea was not to duplicate moderation a thousand times. And then where is your community? My problem is that the fediverse is tearing itself apart on tiny differences. Lots of instances have banned others from the same ideology because one little time someone said something one of the founders didn't agree with. It's just not working like this. I think ideological choices should be made by the end user. I think the instance should be agnostic like an internet browser. And moderation done by the groups the user subscribes to. That's the model that works. We had exactly this in Usenet which is just not really used anymore due to complex technical implementation.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      In fediverse terminology your idea would be for accounts to seamlessly hop between instances (which are usenet groups), and a lot of other people think that would be a good change too. The only difficulty is engineering something where no individual server has authority over a login identity. It would all be so easy if browsers could sign POST requests with keypairs that the browser managed, but that's been resisted in web standards for decades.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        Hmm no, I imagine they would stay on an instance (similar to the Usenet provider) and join groups or whatever they're called on mastodon, similar to the Usenet newsgroups. And then the moderators would come from the management of each group, independently from which instance they're on. There would be no central authentication necessary. Just some way for moderators to prove their ownership, perhaps some kind of public key. This way each group can do their own moderation. Of course some instances could decide not to carry some groups that go totally counter to them, but it should be a rare phenomenon. Similar to the old Usenet providers blocking binary groups (before that was the only thing Usenet was being used for anymore :) )
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
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.

dietr1ch 2y ago

> 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.

mirekrusin 2y ago
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.
mzajc 2y ago
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.
- iterance 2y ago
  Obligatory - Wikipedia is not a democracy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#DEMOCRACY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_... (Or the related / more in depth "Polling is not a substitute for discussion" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_substitute_for_discussion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_s...)
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  Sybil and sockpuppetry is solvable by "following" (possibly truth-weighted, can nicely express negative weights). The downside is that there is no global truth view, only individual ones based on who you grant trustworthiness and how it recursively expands – but arguably this reflects reality better.

jonstaab 2y ago

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.

labster 2y ago
So move the moderation decisions onto the end user? Somehow this doesn’t feel like progress.
FireInsight 2y ago
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.

Levitating 2y ago

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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

okasaki 2y ago
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.
baranul 2y ago
> 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.
dartos 2y ago
Federated means that individuals can host instances and have those instances communicate with other independent instances. So yes it is more federated than Wikipedia

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

awaythrow335 2y ago

> 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.

mzajc 2y ago
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.
- nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
  Please see the recent grooming gangs article on the UK scandal of the same name. This is a good recent example of bad behaviour on wikipedia by activists looking to subvert the truth.
  - brigandish 2y ago
    There are several articles on that topic. Perhaps it would be better if you were more explicit about which article or articles, and what the bad behaviour is.

esperent 2y ago

> 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?

CM30 2y ago

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.

GPerson 2y ago

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.

AStonesThrow 2y ago
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. Observers may be familiar with the scandal of the Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-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.
dartos 2y ago
> 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.

dartos 2y ago

> But doesn't that simply shift the problem? 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.