I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?
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I’m not sure federation is that important on sites that aren’t built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.
I could see a setup where each server is a separate wiki around a specific topic, and federation allows people from other servers to edit or comment/discuss. Pretty much like Fandom but federated. It would be beneficial in that people wouldn’t have to make a login for every wiki they follow, and may help discoverability.
This is what I mean. Lots of small wikis, like subreddits, like the old forums, only that a wiki setup seem to me a better way to collect and present knowledge than the forums, mailing lists, facebook groups, subreddits or wherever we used to put our stuff.
Any community can host their own wiki using the software used by Wikipedia, the WikiMedia software even has very basic support for federation.
An example is the MCO wiki, a specific wiki dedicated to the MCO Minecraft server.
Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.
I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.
not sure wikis need that, though a federated internet search engine would be a great idea. then wikis, instances, everything could be available similar to google. Maybe even provide some kind of lookup for search systems like google.
I think what you’re suggesting already exists. Take a look at SearXNG: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/#searxng
I’m looking for something more federated like IPFS/Lemmy where I can run an indexing node that crawls the systems my group cares about and federates the dataset out.
I would want, for example, be capable of easily linking between the info for a particular plant in my botany wiki and my herbalism wiki. But I don’t want to overwhelm the botany wiki contributor with a heavy list of medical input fields when he enters a new article.
wiki content hosted on IPFS which others can then pin and reshare?
Can you explain what this does like I’m 5 please?
ChatGPT4 Summary
Question
Explain IPFS as if I was five
Response
Sure! You know when you want to show your friend a specific toy in your toy box, you point it out directly? That’s kind of how the Internet usually works too - it looks for the specific place (like a website’s server) where information is kept.
But, imagine if you could find that same toy even if it was in a different box or at a friend’s house, as long as you knew what it looked like. IPFS, which stands for InterPlanetary File System, does something similar for the Internet. It doesn’t just look for where information is stored, but what the information is. This way, even if the information gets moved, it can still be found because IPFS knows what it’s looking like, not just where it used to be!
tldr sort of like P2P content sharing. Wiki content is just files at the end of the day.
Sounds cool. Does that mean we need heavy disks full of data everywhere or is there a magicky way around it?
iirc You “pin” content to access, which means you’re also then hosting it. You wouldn’t need to necessarily store the entirety of wiki for example unless its held in like, data files rather than page per content.
Im not fully up to scratch of the intricacies on IPFS, just thought it sounded like a possible solution to your use-case
I think wikis have already gotten there, at least for games. All of the game wikis have gotten consolidated into fandom/Wikia, which, from my experience, has enshittification levels that makes viewing Reddit from a phone browser feel likea slick experience. You can’t avoid it either. Wikis that used to be very good (at least compared to fandom, like gamepedia), have somehow gotten all pulled into the enshittification vacuum.
A few days ago I was on the Minecraft wiki, but I was playing b1.7.3 so I was viewing it on wayback. And holy shit, before fandom bought out gamepedia (albeit I was looking at the pre-gamepedia wiki), the wiki was actually usable.
I’ve used Gitit for that. The backing store is Git so all git’s distributed VCS capabilities are there too. If you run Debian, apt install gitit should set it up for you.
Git seems to be a good way to approach this. It’s funny that I never really had to get around to what Git actually is (some thingy to store files for programmer teams?). For a somewhat technophile but non-IT person it’s all a bit overwhelming.
Yeah, git is complicated and having a synchronized gitit across multiple servers would be kind of a pain to set up. Maybe someone could package that to make it easier. Or Lemmy could add a federated wiki just like Reddit has a wiki.
It occurs to me, you could also look at Fossil (fossil-scm.org). It is also mostly intended as a VCS, but it has a wiki built in, and it is quite easy to set up. Again though, idk about the setup for keeping multiple servers synchronized.
wiki software that can kind of talk among each other
What do you feel wikis have to gain from being able to talk to each other?
Are you picturing a situation where 20 people host their own, say, music wikis, and every time you look up an album, you’re presented a list of up to 20 hot takes about that album, all independently hosted and federating, rather than those users collaborating on a single communal knowledge source? I feel like removing the “communal knowledge source” aspect defeats the purpose of a wiki; they’re supposed to be collaborative by nature.
Or are you picturing a world where I could host a music wiki and you could host a TV wiki, and we could link to each other if we wanted? Because that’s already how it works, eh.
Others have covered why they think this isn’t appropriate, but I’m curious what you thought we stand to benefit from federated wiki software.
I’m not sure but I like the concept.
This is what web 1.0 was.
Funny, i was just thinking that…didn’t we already do this? 😀
I think that the nature of a wiki is inherently centralised. You want a central, curated wiki, not one that has a thousand different versions, each of which needs to be mixed together, and checked. Otherwise, you’ll have quite the time dealing with conflicts and things.
But the upside of a wiki is that it can be self-hosted. If a current wiki isn’t good enough, you are able to host your own, and work from that instead. Issue is that it’s not great if you’re technically inclined, and it’s a lot easier to manage a wiki that someone else hosts, tying it all the way back to a single central service.
I’m not aware of any way.
How would a federated wiki run with different admins applying different standards to articles?
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What does the ‘blockchain’ component do? Not sure what it means compared with a regular platform.
Im no crypto expert, but i think it just means its decentralised so that if things are changed everyone know, theres no way to stop it. I think this is good to read: https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-blockchain.html#:~:text=A blockchain is a decentralized,the consensus of the network. So i think it’d be how wikis work now, just that nothing can be omitted. (Again not a crypto expert, so i might be wrong, but i cant see anything else itd be useful for a wiki)
Wikis serve mainly lurkers, and federation of these sites does not matter much for them. The main advantage of wiki federation would be ability to edit several wikis under the same account. However, you can achieve the same effect with OAuth (that is, logging to many sites with the same account on another one).
And even that is unnecessary if the wiki in question allows anonymous editing.
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All you guys think fandom type wikis. I am thinking about practical knowledge. A wiki about donkey care can very well need a quick link to a wiki about medicinal plants, and wikis about adjacent practical topics, or think for example car tuners and motorbike tuners - they might like to have different wikis but will have lots of similar or equal topics. Wouldn’t a federated wiki mean it can be better protected from attempts of centralized censorship?
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