Thinking about Fediverse Wikis
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This is just a soft inquiry for now, but I wanted to open up a discussion about public-facing documentation for the Fediverse: whether it's beneficial to have, what form it should take, and to what degree thorough historical and technical information is needed for preservation and reference.
I've been kind of unhappy with where various Fediverse information projects lie currently, such as the Join the Fediverse wiki. To me, there are a few problems with existing efforts:
- Inherent Bias - Public resources taking a particular biased stance regarding things like competing technologies, what community values should be defined by, or who gets to be counted as part of the Fediverse based on a wide range of assumptions.
- Lack of Organization / Quality Control - Generally, existing community efforts do not pass muster for technical documentation or cultural reference, and instead suffer from poorly-written explanation of what a given platform "is like".
- Lack of Resources (People / Information / Etc) - Could probably fall into the previous category, but compounds problems by generally leading to even higher levels of inconsistency / abandonment.
The thing is, I'm of the belief (maybe delusion) that the wider community would benefit from a dedicated wiki detailing project history, cultural developments, technical insights, and functionally unique spaces within the network. It doesn't necessarily have to be a "here's how to do ActivityPub" guide for developers, or a "here's all the platforms and what they are" dictionary for end users, but I think it might be a useful resource for pointing a lot of different people in the right direction.
Two potential paths
The question boils down to this: hosting a wiki is easy. Cultivating and maintaining one is hard. We (We Distribute) might be in a position to do one of two things:
- Try to support and upgrade a vast body of information on an existing community wiki project.
- Launch our own initiative under the We Distribute umbrella.
I think either one is an initiative worth taking to, but each option has their various benefits and drawbacks. It would be interesting to get insight from the wider community on whether this kind of thing is even wanted or needed, and if so, whether we should spearhead it, or if we should try to improve something that already exists (even if it's bad).
I would love to hear some thoughts from anybody who's interested on the subject.
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This is just a soft inquiry for now, but I wanted to open up a discussion about public-facing documentation for the Fediverse: whether it's beneficial to have, what form it should take, and to what degree thorough historical and technical information is needed for preservation and reference.
I've been kind of unhappy with where various Fediverse information projects lie currently, such as the Join the Fediverse wiki. To me, there are a few problems with existing efforts:
- Inherent Bias - Public resources taking a particular biased stance regarding things like competing technologies, what community values should be defined by, or who gets to be counted as part of the Fediverse based on a wide range of assumptions.
- Lack of Organization / Quality Control - Generally, existing community efforts do not pass muster for technical documentation or cultural reference, and instead suffer from poorly-written explanation of what a given platform "is like".
- Lack of Resources (People / Information / Etc) - Could probably fall into the previous category, but compounds problems by generally leading to even higher levels of inconsistency / abandonment.
The thing is, I'm of the belief (maybe delusion) that the wider community would benefit from a dedicated wiki detailing project history, cultural developments, technical insights, and functionally unique spaces within the network. It doesn't necessarily have to be a "here's how to do ActivityPub" guide for developers, or a "here's all the platforms and what they are" dictionary for end users, but I think it might be a useful resource for pointing a lot of different people in the right direction.
Two potential paths
The question boils down to this: hosting a wiki is easy. Cultivating and maintaining one is hard. We (We Distribute) might be in a position to do one of two things:
- Try to support and upgrade a vast body of information on an existing community wiki project.
- Launch our own initiative under the We Distribute umbrella.
I think either one is an initiative worth taking to, but each option has their various benefits and drawbacks. It would be interesting to get insight from the wider community on whether this kind of thing is even wanted or needed, and if so, whether we should spearhead it, or if we should try to improve something that already exists (even if it's bad).
I would love to hear some thoughts from anybody who's interested on the subject.
This is something that Federated Works has been thinking about taking on as well. But, as you pointed out, creating and running a successful wiki is not an easy task.
To be most effective, it probably should be a collaborative effort, with multiple projects and organizations involved.
You also have to consider that some people will want to host their own wiki or documentation using software of their choosing. So we may want to have a main wiki with general information, and then crosslink back and forth between project-specific wikis and documentation.
For example, Hubzilla and related projects will be using the fediverse-enabled Hubzilla wiki instead of MediaWiki.
I think this is a great task to take on, especially since there are a lot of people who want to contribute but who are not developers. A set of wikis may be a good want to increase engagement by supporters and enthusiasts. -
This is something that Federated Works has been thinking about taking on as well. But, as you pointed out, creating and running a successful wiki is not an easy task.
To be most effective, it probably should be a collaborative effort, with multiple projects and organizations involved.
You also have to consider that some people will want to host their own wiki or documentation using software of their choosing. So we may want to have a main wiki with general information, and then crosslink back and forth between project-specific wikis and documentation.
For example, Hubzilla and related projects will be using the fediverse-enabled Hubzilla wiki instead of MediaWiki.
I think this is a great task to take on, especially since there are a lot of people who want to contribute but who are not developers. A set of wikis may be a good want to increase engagement by supporters and enthusiasts.@scott@loves.tech Yeah, 100% agreed on all counts. It should be a cross-organizational effort, data-sharing should be encouraged, and there ought to be a decent set of guidelines for how written pages look.
One thought that's been in the back of my mind: while there's some old stalwart platforms like MediaWiki that we could get running, would this effort benefit from a federated wiki platform? One ActivityPub-based effort that I know of is Ibis, which is by the Lemmy dev @nutomic@lemmy.ml.
This might also be a good use of the Fedizen.net domain that I currently own, and have been sitting on.
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@scott@loves.tech Yeah, 100% agreed on all counts. It should be a cross-organizational effort, data-sharing should be encouraged, and there ought to be a decent set of guidelines for how written pages look.
One thought that's been in the back of my mind: while there's some old stalwart platforms like MediaWiki that we could get running, would this effort benefit from a federated wiki platform? One ActivityPub-based effort that I know of is Ibis, which is by the Lemmy dev @nutomic@lemmy.ml.
This might also be a good use of the Fedizen.net domain that I currently own, and have been sitting on.
@deadsuperhero I just took a brief look at Ibis. Very interesting. They took a completely different approach to wikis than Hubzilla did.
I just recently started a new wiki myself. Not much there yet, but this is what it looks like:
#^https://development.guide/wiki/hubzilla/code/admin
It uses Hubzilla, so we can set it up so that anyone with a Magic Sign On (OpenWebAuth) compatible account can edit it. Similar to how Ibis requires someone to have an Ibis account. If Ibis adopted OpenWebAuth, people would be able to edit Hubzilla and Ibis wikis with the same account (although via different methods).
Whatever is used, I think it needs to be fediverse-enabled.
