The recent announcement of Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative built on ActivityPub, has ignited intense discussions within the tech community about the future of collaborative knowledge platforms. While the project aims to address perceived issues with Wikipedia's centralized structure, community members have raised significant concerns about the implications of federation for encyclopedic content.
The Federation Dilemma
Ibis proposes a system where multiple independent wiki instances can interconnect and share information, similar to how Mastodon operates for social media. However, this approach has sparked debate about whether federation actually solves or potentially exacerbates existing problems with online encyclopedias.
Many commenters point out that federation, while offering independence from centralized control, could lead to:
- Fragmentation of knowledge across instances
- Reduced quality control and consistency
- Difficulty in maintaining unified standards
- Potential echo chambers for different viewpoints
- Challenges in content discovery and verification
Critical Mass and Content Creation
A significant challenge highlighted by the community is the bootstrap problem. As one commenter noted, Wikipedia's success isn't just about technology—it's about the massive community of contributors who have built and maintained its content over decades. Any new platform would need to either:
- Import existing Wikipedia content (raising technical and licensing challenges)
- Build a new content base from scratch
- Develop a sustainable model for content creation and maintenance
Technical Implementation
Built by Felix nutomic Ableitner, who previously worked on Lemmy, Ibis uses a stack of PostgreSQL and Rust, with a frontend written in Rust WebAssembly. While this technical choice promises efficiency and scalability, some users have noted that the WebAssembly implementation creates accessibility issues, such as not functioning with NoScript enabled.
The Moderation Question
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the project is its approach to moderation. While Ibis allows each instance to set its own moderation policies, critics argue this could lead to:
- Inconsistent quality standards across instances
- Potential spread of misinformation
- Difficulty in establishing authoritative sources
- Challenges in resolving content disputes between instances
Alternative Perspectives
Some community members suggest that rather than creating a new platform, efforts might be better spent on:
- Improving existing Wikipedia infrastructure
- Developing better tools for content verification
- Enhancing the existing MediaWiki federation capabilities
- Focusing on specific use cases, such as specialized wikis or alternatives to Fandom/Wikia
Current Status
The project is currently in its early stages, with a proof of concept available at open.ibis.wiki. While it demonstrates core functionality like article creation, editing, and federation, many crucial features are still missing, including user profile settings, discussions, localization, and moderation tools.
The community's response suggests that while federation might offer benefits for certain use cases, it may not be the silver bullet for Wikipedia's challenges. The project raises important questions about the balance between decentralization and maintaining encyclopedic quality, questions that will likely continue to shape the evolution of online knowledge platforms.