Ibis-Wiki (A federated encyclopaedia)

Hm, that's not how Lemmy communities / threads tend to develop. Unless you're considering the effects of defederation I guess.

Agree.

I also think a federated wiki is a great idea.

I think the way to do that is: instead of having separate realities/universes linked together by search and federation, try to unite those universes into a shared multiverse, to the greatest possible.

In other words

• ❌ merely give all federated users access to the same articles
• ✅ automatically link and embed similar articles into each other by default (collapsed, but expandable). similarity can be determined by authors'/contributors' intentional citations, by instance owners' filter rules, by LLM, etc.

of course, there may be attempts to obfuscate relatedness, astroturfing, brigading, whatnot. I wonder if its possible to visualize voting results for each duplicated/linked article along with the originating instance. I think this would function as a pseudo version of 'community fact-checking'. Maybe a better name would be 'reality-checking' or 'sanity-checking' or whatever.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how it's designed but I don't think I am, and I don't think that's how this works.

A topic definition on the wiki includes the instance it's hosted on. All links to that topic will go to that same instance and all the content for that topic will be served by the one instance as the authoritative source for "That-topic@that-instance" which is the link everyone will use. The federated part is specifically that you can link to topics on other instances and view them through your local instance.

For example, hypothetically, if you are a "fedipedia" author and you are writing a "fedipedia" article about a video game, and you mention a particular feature of the video game, you can include in your "fedipedia" article a link to a topic about that particular feature on "wikia-gamipedia" or even "the-games-own-wiki.site" and interact with and maybe even edit that content without needing to make accounts on all these other wikis. It's like it's all hosted on one centralized wiki, but it's hosted on different servers that are all talking to each other.

Of course, it's possible both our hypothetical "wikia-gamipedia" AND "the-games-own-wiki.site" will have their OWN, completely SEPARATE topics about the video game feature in question. The topics might even have exactly the same name. That's allowed. In that case, you'll have to decide for yourself which one is more credible and useful, and which one you want to link to and interact with, because yes, two different federated wikis can have different topics with totally different content.

Just like on Lemmy you can have two different communities with the same name but totally different people and content because they're on different instances. That's not really the general intention of how communities are supposed to work though. The intention is that you can pick the one community that is the "right" one for you, or the largest, and use that and hopefully other people will do the same. You can all pick that same instance/community, no matter which account you live on, even if it's not hosted on your local instance. You don't have to use the one from your local instance, or from any particular instance. That's what the federation does.