I absolutely love wiki walking through random obscure fan wikis, but I hate how most are on Fandom.
I think a federated wiki solution makes sense. I could see it as an evolution of the interwiki concept.
What benefit would federating it bring?
The ability to self-host your own FOSS wiki already exists and has for over two decades. It’s called MediaWiki.
You could have federated accounts I guess but do editors on the Doctor Who wiki really need the ability to see posts on Mastadon or edit pages on the That 70’s Wiki?
In addition to discoverability, I’d say it provides a happy medium between letting every rando with an IP address edit a page and requiring account creation. Part of the point of the fediverse is to have (almost) everything in one place under a single account while still keeping things decentralized.
Can you elaborate on “discoverability”? Finding individual subject wikis has never been a particular problem for me. Even ones that don’t use Fandom, provided they are at least active. Just googling “<insert subject> wikia” (I know. I can’t let it go) always gets me what I need.
Can’t say I see an advantage to universal accounts (I see more disadvantages), but if that’s the big selling point and people really want it. I’m not opposed to having it, i’ve just always treated it as a mild novelty I never use.
As for decentralization, it has already been solved by MediaWiki. Which is GPL and (can be) self-hosted.
On Lemmy you can see (and search) a list of all the activity from every instance federated to your home instance. Looking at Ibis, which a few posters have mentioned on this thread, it has a discover page with a list of federated instances and articles on those instances. The current format is hardly scalable, but it’s a start.
But, as I said before, the issue is less about discoverability and more about editing. Just like I can post in this thread even though I’m on a different instance, you can edit an article on one instance even though you’re on another. The alternative as used by Wikipedia, is to allow anyone, account or not, to edit. Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.
It wouod be amazing to see Ibis take off and pick up more developers
Thanks for linking my project. Im happy to answer questions about it. Also here you can find the git repo.
This looks interesting.
Seems like it’s still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?
This looks very awesome. So it also functions as a redundant wiki?
Wikipedia should use it. Then others can create their own wikis, which keep a version of articles of Wikipedia.
Its similar to Lemmy in many ways, so like Lemmy posts are redundantly mirrored across instances, the same is true for Ibis articles.
Getting Wikipedia federated would be great, but it will take a long time for Ibis to be ready for that scale.
Can ibis import a full Wikipedia backup?
There is an API so you could write a script to import any kind of data.
Hubzilla (macroblogging service in the Fediverse) can also be used to create and collaborate on wikis.
I can only find a German-language manual for this right away: https://help.hubzilla.hu/benutzerhandbuch/wikis.html
Hubzilla is pretty amazing and has a ton of potential, unfortunately hasn’t really taken off at all.
I’ve had this thought before, but have also wondered whether it’s even possible to implement this using ActivityPub, considering that a wiki inherently requires having the same state everywhere, but ActivityPub allows instances to ban and defederate how they like (thus become desynchronized from each other).
I’m not thinking of a single distributed wiki, but something more like Fandom where you can edit pages on other wikis that are federated to yours.
Sounds like single sign-on (SSO). Which is practically everywhere these days.
