Mediawiki is an extremely complicated project with 1.2 million lines of PHP. For me it was much easier to implement this project with technology Im already familiar with. But of someone wants to create a Mediawiki plugin I would be happy to see that.
Thats a good question. Obviously the first place to look for articles would be those hosted by your local instance. Then the instance admin could also maintain an article with links to relevant articles. And I suppose later there could be some software features for discovery, but I havent thought about that yet.
Adding such functionality in Lemmy would be very complicated because Lemmy itself is already quite a complicated project. So it would require test coverage, pass code review, have a stable API and so on. Its better to experiment with this in a new project so I can write some quick and dirty code to get the basic functionality working. If it proves successful it can be integrated with Lemmy later.
Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.
The readme has some basic description how the federation works. Viewing articles from other platforms should be easy to get working. Edits from other platforms would also be possible, but would require changes so that they can generate diffs and resolve conflicts. So not exactly easy.
That structure is extremely corrupted though. And Lemmy shows that volunteers can handle this kind of stuff. Though Ibis will definitely need a lot of mod tools.
I dont speak French and havent heard about that drama. But its about the problems pointed out in this article among others.
If Ibis gets popular it will get listed higher in search results. Same as Lemmy which is also slowly going up in results. Before that it will most likely spread through word of mouth.
I think thats better than having our single “truth” controlled by a corrupt organization from a different country, different language and different culture. With federation there can be independent wikis for my local country or city.
I was waiting for someone else to create a project like this. But it didnt happen so I had to write it myself when things became a bit calmer with Lemmy.
Nowadays I can easily handle all Github notifications within less than an hour. After the Reddit blackout there were so many notifications that I couldnt even read all the issues, let alone respond. So I had to unsubscribe from issue notifications for some months.
[SOLVED: Updated every 24 hours] Display name and Bio updates don't seem to be federating
E.g.:...
Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative (ibis.wiki)
What is something lemmy can improve upon?