Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative

nutomic@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 471 points –
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This serves well as a statement.

It is, however, delusional to think that at this point anything can become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, unless Wikimedia collapses because of reasons from within.

All the more reason to push this project forward, as a redundancy.

You can already download the entirity of Wikipedia. If it ever fell, the content could easily be restored elsewhere.

Also, I don't think I understand why this should be federated.

The infrastructure is already there in that case, to restore it, and it would be less likely to fall.

Having no sole source of information hosting in an encyclopedic format is safer.

But having an open data project full of information that's actively contributed to and fact checked, with copies over many servers, is much better than having the same thing but fragmented. I still don't see a reason. If it was something else or corporate driven, I wouldn't bat an eye. But Wikipedia?

You can have all of that good if you want to, but being federated allows people to break off if they want. It also allows for niche servers.

When Wikipedia collapses, it will be too late to create an alternative from scratch.