this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative (ibis.wiki)
submitted 8 months ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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[โ€“] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the support. I think the era of single, centralized sources of information will soon be in the past.

  1. This would be a project on its own, with writing import scripts, hosting an instance etc. Certainly not something I have time for, just like I'm not running a Reddit mirror for Lemmy. If you or someone else wants to set it up, go ahead!
  2. How would you detect that it's the same article, only from having the identical title? That could fail in lots of ways.
  3. I agree about this.
[โ€“] roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

  1. 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.

  2. 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.