Federated wiki software?
from early_riser@lemmy.radio to fediverse@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 2025 11:46
https://lemmy.radio/post/6576007
from early_riser@lemmy.radio to fediverse@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 2025 11:46
https://lemmy.radio/post/6576007
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.
threaded - newest
It’s not federated, but something like BookStack could be an option for self-hosted collaboration.
Easy hosting isn’t quite the issue. Dokuwiki is trivial to self host. What I’d like something that’s a happy medium between requiring account creation to edit pages and letting literally every rando with an IP address go to town.
I wonder if it could be done with a MediaWiki plugin, given how extensible MW and its plugin system is
I wouldn’t doubt it, though MW seems hard to manage.
It’s not that bad once you get the hang of it, especially using a wiki farm like www.miraheze.org
Or maybe Miraheze but it doesn’t sem federated either
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).
ibis.wiki
I see, thanks. Will look into that.
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.
That doesn’t sound like a federated wiki but more like federated account management.
Yeah, people tend to mistake "federated" for "open alternative" 🤷
Sounds like single sign-on (SSO). Which is practically everywhere these days.
I mean most fandom I have seen have more than one wiki as there is more than one wiki company.
ibis.wiki ?
This is the answer.
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 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.
This looks interesting.
Seems like it’s still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?
For now my focus is to make it federate with Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse. But you’re welcome to open an issue for that kind of feature.
Seems like there is a federated solution for everything lol
There’s also a list of ActivityPub software on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub#Software_using_…
Nah… Missing IMHO:
Also:
These seem kind of ideal for a federated network, IMO.
I actually think Lemmy would be a pretty decent format for something stackoverflow like - just maybe needs to UI tweaks to minimise the visual space that replies take up, plus maybe answered post flair
There’s codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt for a marketplace.
I’m really missing something like yrpri.org/domain/3
Thanks, I saw that flohmakrt link in another comment too. Excellent!
Does that yrpri site work well?
It’s been around for many years now and famously was used in the consultations for the constitution of Iceland. We also used it in Bulgaria back in 2013 and had a community of more than 3000 users, but it lost traction due to being ignored by politicians and controversial debates.
You can see more recent activity on www.citizens.is , particularly the impact and news sections.
I wonder if they would be interested in implementing ActivityPub?
github.com/CitizensFoundation/…/161
It’s not a straightforward task. And it’s controversial is you want to avoid multiple registrations.
Strava like: FitTrackee and Endurain are planning to implement ActivityPub so yah there's gonna to be one
IMDB like: NeoDB and LibRate
Not sure about the rest
thank you! I will keep an eye on those
!neodb@lemmy.zip
yes!
Yeah, that could definitely be cool.
Cost would be a big factor … Fandom got big by being free and eventually replaced (or heavily customized) mediawiki to the point it’s unrecognizable.
Hosting a wiki isn’t that expensive it’s basically texts and some lightweight pictures. The whole english wikipedia is around 109GB of data.
That doesn’t include images. Images are stored on wikimedia commons, which is about 600 TB.
Well, with Kiwix I was able to download the whole english wikipedia with mid-res pictures on my 128GB USB Drive. I think the 600TB you’re talking about includes videos and high-res pictures.
This is another example of the type of thing it would be great for conventions and clubs and such to host.
It's not federated by any means, but if you want to replace FANDOM wikis with other equivalents, Indie Wiki Buddy is a great extension to have on hand.
https://getindie.wiki
There's options to remove FANDOM from search results in favour of other options, and they also allow you to redirect to the Breezewiki frontend for FANDOM to get rid of all those shitty ads and UI, which is legal considering the contents of FANDOM pages are still under the Commons.
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: help.hubzilla.hu/benutzerhandbuch/wikis.html
Hubzilla is pretty amazing and has a ton of potential, unfortunately hasn’t really taken off at all.
Ward Cunningham has written a federated wiki.
www.wired.com/2012/07/wiki-inventor/
github.com/fedwiki
fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors
I used gitit for a while. It’s git backed and you can propagate it around that way.
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?
Discovery. The current state of google dooms such small wikis. They will have zero traffic. Google has been overtaken by AI slop, so if we want to be relevant, we have no choice but to federate
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.
What would that solve that mandating accounts for a standard wiki wouldn’t?