The idea of a federated, decentralized Wikipedia alternative is intriguing, but implementing it successfully faces major hurdles. Federating moderation policies and privileges across different instances seems incredibly complex. I believe it would also require some kind of web of trust system. Quality control is also a huge challenge without centralized oversight and clear guidelines enforced universally.
While it could potentially replace commercial wiki farms like Wikia/Fandom for niche topics, realistically replacing Wikipedia’s dominance as a general reference work seems highly ambitious and unlikely, at least in the short term. But as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.
That said, ambitious goals can spur innovation. Even if Ibis falls short of usurping Wikipedia, it could blaze new trails and pioneer federated wiki concepts that feed back into Wikipedia and other platforms. The federated model allowing more perspectives and focused communities is worth exploring, despite the technical obstacles around distributed moderation and content integration. The proof-of-concept shows the core pieces are in place as a starting point.
More critically, the proof-of-concept so far appears to lack any real work on moderation tools or implementing a web of trust system. These would be absolutely vital components for a federated encyclopedia to have any chance of controlling quality and avoiding descending into a sea of misinformation and edit wars between conflicting “truths.” Centralized oversight and clear enforced guidelines are key reasons why Wikipedia has been relatively successful, despite its flaws.
Without a robust distributed moderation system in place, a federated encyclopedia runs the risk of either devolving into siloed echo chambers pushing various agendas, or becoming an uncoordinated mess making it impractical as a general reference work. The technical obstacles around federating content policies, privileges and integrated quality control across instances are immense challenges that aren’t obviously addressed by this early proof-of-concept.
While novel approaches like federation are worth exploring, straying too far from Wikipedia’s principles of neutral point-of-view and community-driven policies could easily undermine the entire premise. Lofty goals of disrupting Wikipedia are admirable, but successfully replacing its dominance as a general reference work seems extremely unlikely without solving these fundamental issues around distributed content governance first.