Domain: citizendium.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to citizendium.org.
Comments · 147
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Already exists?
What the author describes sounds a lot like Citizendium.
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Re:Wikipedia does not need more editors
Larry Sanger is an asshole and a hypocrite and I'll never use his piece of shit just out of principle. Fuck that petty attention whore and his retarded waste-of-bandwidth knockoff that no one cares about. Enjoy those keywords Larry, because that's probably the most links you'll ever get in a single post. Feel free to report me to the FBI for something if you think it'll make you any less irrelevant.
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Re:Wikipedia does not need more editors
Larry Sanger is an asshole and a hypocrite and I'll never use his piece of shit just out of principle. Fuck that petty attention whore and his retarded waste-of-bandwidth knockoff that no one cares about. Enjoy those keywords Larry, because that's probably the most links you'll ever get in a single post. Feel free to report me to the FBI for something if you think it'll make you any less irrelevant.
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Re:Wikipedia does not need more editors
Larry Sanger is an asshole and a hypocrite and I'll never use his piece of shit just out of principle. Fuck that petty attention whore and his retarded waste-of-bandwidth knockoff that no one cares about. Enjoy those keywords Larry, because that's probably the most links you'll ever get in a single post. Feel free to report me to the FBI for something if you think it'll make you any less irrelevant.
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Re:Wikipedia does not need more editors
Larry Sanger is an asshole and a hypocrite and I'll never use his piece of shit just out of principle. Fuck that petty attention whore and his retarded waste-of-bandwidth knockoff that no one cares about. Enjoy those keywords Larry, because that's probably the most links you'll ever get in a single post. Feel free to report me to the FBI for something if you think it'll make you any less irrelevant.
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Re:Wikipedia does not need more editors
No it doesn't want those mostly. It doesn't privilege experts. NuPedia or later http://en.citizendium.org/ make use of experts. The experts that are willing to deal with non-experts on an equal basis for an extended conversation are cranks. The way to handle cranks is to have multiple cranks and use them to achieve balance.
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Re:Awesome Job
When I look over the history of the Bristol Palin article, I see a prod, which was removed by the very next editor (not you), and an AfD [wikipedia.org] which, well, saying one had to fight ones way to keep it is not really the reality of that discussion
You are looking too late. The discussion was getting the article off 6 months of semi-protection and getting the right to create it and.... I'm glad after having to put up with all that nonsense the AN/I was a non event. The article was on my userspace during that early time so there wasn't going to be an AN/I.
This is the important part. I think the Wikimodel is an amazing model at creating content to solidly mediocre to pretty decent levels. To a very good level, not so much. Maintaining a very good level, even much less so.
Well that wasn't wikipedia's goal. Wikipedia was supposed to be an almost infinite collection of so/so article. Nupedia was supposed to be the collection of awesome articles. http://en.citizendium.org/ could play that role. Wikipedia even today isn't great content and can't be because of the "no original research" strictly applied combined with anonymous editors. Good encyclopedias have a few true experts write great articles with a professional editing team. Wikipedia changed the world by writing about the 10m topics for which there weren't true experts.
The threshold for joining the community has almost certainly risen. We're working on it though, and to attempt to steer back to the original topic, making at least one hindrance easier to overcome - the arcane editing interface.
I agree fully that's a good thing. A person's wikipedia interaction starts with them making minor changes to articles correcting a fact here or adding a reference. The next phase though is usually an overhaul or creation of an article and that's where they are likely to get turned away. My first article was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux . It never would have written under today's rules.
A bad article was more and more seen as a problem, rather than as a start for something great.
Exactly! People don't even use redlinks anymore to indicate "you should put an article here". The idea was that all articles started as stubs and grew.
so much better is it now for its readers.
I don't know about that. If wikipedia had kept on growing it could have something like 200m articles and hundreds of thousands of editors. I'd love to be able to get a good or even so-so quality article on every piece of networking equipment. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every command in every programming language. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every major building in the world. How are the almost 200m articles better for me?
How we can get the energy and spunk of the earlier years back, while maintaining the relevance and overall higher quality of the more recent years is the great challenge Wikipedia currently faces.
You can't. The more wikipedia requires great quality the more it becomes a job and not a hobby. People get paid to do work. In the case of wikipedia after 2007 the payoff has been for many people being able to be cruel and crush other people. By 2010 there was no group of newbies left in large enough numbers. So suddenly the community wasn't big enough.
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Hmmm...
I wonder why Larry Sanger could possibly have an interest in making WP look problematic.
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Re:Powered by... Coal?
Coal plants are 35-45% efficient, where your stock car engine is about 20% efficient.
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Re:Deep Thought
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Re:Isn't it obvious?
>I've got a PhD in cosmology
Speaking of which, could you have a look here and here, and comment and pros and cons of both semi-vetted pages regarding astrophysics?
If you could remove ego from it, I could see a system in which someone like you could write the condensed matter physics page as a "placeholder" until someone in the field was able to come by and replace it. Unfortunately, the human ego is both a vanishingly small and vastly huge thing at the same time, and it throws a monkey wrench into that plan. Scientists don't get a whole lot of money, all they have to go on is recognition, hence accounting for the huge egos in science.
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Citizendium
A fork of Wikipedia exists, with the stated intention of encouraging high quality contributions from everyone, including academics. It's called Citizendium, and it's rather good. No edit wars, no wikilawyering, no deletionism. Everyone should use it and contribute, as it's a real shame it's not more widely known.
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Re:Citizendium
OK, I'm glad I went to the end looking for a mention of Citizendium before I did so myself. They only have 15725 articles, but they are vetted by real subject matter experts.
Amazing how the discussion got this far without someone saying that Wikipedia must obviously have gotten the idea from Citizendium, as it's growing a good bit these days.
I think it could do with some marketing, because very few have heard of it (and maybe they should have chosen a "something-pedia" name).
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Re:You want academics?
You might like: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium
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Citizendium
I can't understand how Citizendium ( http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium ) hasn't come up. Citizendium is a wiki, like wikipedia which ranks editors based on subject area knowledge. Everyone posts under their real name and links to a real resume. Who you are determines how much authority / deference you are given with respect to a topic.
Frankly, academics working in Citizendium and Wikipedia citing Citizendium strikes me as a good model to accomplish the goal in a practical way.
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Re:Fork it already
So delete all articles without credible sources.
Oh, but don't delete articles! That's rude and makes people teh sadz.
So we start finding sources for the articles instead.
But that takes time. A lot of time. Much more time than making things up and creating Wikipedia articles. The list of unsourced articles is piling up. I can't use this crap.
So we stop all new submissions until all current articles are properly sourced.
Wikipedia just got incredibly outdated. I don't need an encyclopedia telling me Mubarak is the president of Egypt. And anyway, even when you're done, you're gonna get the same problem again.
So we create a process where all submitted articles and changes need to go through a process of proper sourcing, verification, and editing before going live.
Congratulations, you just created Citizendium!
So why don't you use that instead?
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Re:Fork it already
It sounds like you're describing Citizendium.
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Just because it's shocking doesn't mean its true.
Your claim that Jimmy has been rewriting history is pretty much rubbish.
Sanger left the project in 2002, long before most of the most significant growth and development, and his own attempts to rewrite history long after his departure to reflect a greatly increased importance are trivially documented. Larry's self-promotion only began after he started seeking VC funding to build Wikipedia competitors— which he's had several more or less failed attempts.
Sure, Larry was around for the inception but he contributed almost nothing to the character, policies, or procedures that drove Wikipedia into exponential growth (having left several years before said exponential growth began). And if you're only looking to credit someone for the inception of a collaboratively developed free content encyclopedia, you ought to be giving Richard Stallman, of all people, at least equal billing because he was calling for this a long time before Jimmy and Larry were on the scene and he worked extensively with Jimmy early on (hammering out the licensing and such).
Really, a lot of people deserve credit equal to or even more than Jimmy for their early stewardship of the project. Larry, as one of Wikipedia's first quitters, is not really one of the most significant of them.
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Re:very disappointing, but perhaps inevitable
I highly recommend Citizendum. It was created Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. (He was disappointed with it too.) People use real-world names, and real world credentials there. Articles are peer reviewed before published. Of course being more selective means there're less articles.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Introduction_to_CZ_for_Wikipedians#Citizendium_is_not_a_mirror
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Re:Hmmm ....
Agreed, but hard to see how it's even sabre rattling. I thought we were marginally above such displays of hubris, if only because it's about as revolutionary as walking out into a field and firing a canon. The first submarine-launched ballistic missile was the Polaris A1 in 1960 with a range of 1000 nmi. The cat is out of the bag.
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Re:One of Commodore's best sellers
That's not really the complete story though... Commodore bought out MOS after they'd already made the 'lawsuit compatible' 6502...
"MOS Technology, Inc was a microprocessor manufacturing company founded by entrepreneurs leaving the Allen-Bradley company, most famous for its creation of the ubiquitous 6502 processor. It was acquired by Commodore International in September of 1976, and was brought into Commodore's umbrella subdivision Commodore Semiconductor Group (CSG)."
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/MOS_Technology (which is sourced from the book 'On the Edge: The Rise and Fall of Commodore')
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Re:Citizendium
That is the most overtly slanted article I've ever seen. Since when does one random person's comment on a blog consititute a useful citation about (eg.) all of academia? It's nothing more than an attack piece, plain and simple.
The statistics are vastly more useful, and speak for themselves:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:StatisticsCZ continues to grow. Contributions continue, and it's most certainly not all (or even mostly) homeopathy, or any other nonsense you can name.
CZ is certainly far lower volume than WP, but those kinds of comparisons completely and totally fail to account for quality, where there is practically no vandalism of CZ, and an overwhelming majority of edits to WP are related to exactly that.
Even if it does eventually fail, that won't prove whether the model is a good one or not, anyhow.
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It's been tried: Nupedia. Citizendium.
I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried. In fact, Wikipedia originated as Nupedia, "an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content." After three years, perhaps 100 articles were close to completion. Wikipedia was originally conceived as a source of draft articles to be reworked into Nupedia.
The assignment of credit for Wikipedia between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger is a matter of dispute. The two, sometimes described as co-founders, have squabbled publicly. Sanger is probably responsible for some of the cultural foundations of Wikipedia that have led to the surprisingly high degree of accuracy it has.
In 2006, Sanger, unhappy with Wikipedia's undervaluing of expertise, launched Citizendium, an expert-approved wiki-based encyclopedia, which is said to currently have "We currently have 14,722 articles at different stages of collaborative development, of which 148 are expert-approved."
I am not saying Stanford's experiment can't succeed. I'm not saying Citizendium has failed. But I know where I got for answers, and it's not Citizendium. (And it's not Knol, either). The traditional encyclopedia--Encyclopedia Britannica--was able to pay contributors, using money it earned by selling print volumes. The social ecology of free web encyclopedias is tricky. There is probably more to success than saying "We'll be just like Wikipedia, but we'll restrict participation to experts." Experts usually want to be paid in something more than ego-boosting.
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Citizendium
Centizendium is the half-way point between the free-for-all of Wikipedia, and the extremely stuffy "authoritative" wikis (at that point, really, why bother?).
With CZ, you are required to use your real name, and if you largely write an article and hang around to maintain it, you do get a degree of ownership to it, with etiquette and policy dictating that any other contributors merely suggest their recomended changes to the original author via the talk page, rather than everyone willy-nilly making changes as if they're all experts on the subject.
Similarly, articles are reviewed by experts (required to have a degree) and those reviewed version are the ones which stick, while you have to go out of your way to see the revised versions.
For the details, and an indictment of all that is wrong with Wikipeida, see: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F
If nothing else, CZ is the only other wiki with a Wikipedia founder behind it. "Suffice it to say that he learns from his mistakes."
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Photo gallary
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Re:No. Just pay up
What's so impossible about taking the h264 frame for frame and turning out the same quality video in Theora?
Lossy codecs selectively discard information, and H.264 and Theora are vastly different, so no chance of a special code to allow skipping some of the steps, and offering fast and/or lossless conversion from one format into the other. If you want exactly the same quality, you can use a LOSSLESS video codec like Huffyuv, but you'll find the file sizes are far larger than the input.
Ever tried making a copy of a copy, of a copy, with an audio tape? Each generation adds on to the artifacts before it, and adds it's own. Advanced lossy codecs have the same issue, but much, much worse.
If that doesn't explain it sufficiently for you, you'll just have to take my word on it, and take some time to learn the details of lossy video compression. I would recomend starting with http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/MPEG-1
The version on WP also hasn't been too badly damaged yet.
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Re:No conflict of interest there
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Re:Alternate statement
Geez! That page you sent has links to explosives, even nuclear weapons. That's totally uninformative and it establishes a clear link to terrorist groups.
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Re:Alternate statement
Geez! That page you sent has links to explosives, even nuclear weapons. That's totally uninformative and it establishes a clear link to terrorist groups.
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Citizendium sensibilities
One fundamental principle of Citizendium is family-friendly. This has caused some confusion amongst the editors. I find that concept to be quite ill-defined.
Links (well, they obviously go to that site) http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Fundamentals http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php?topic=49.0 forum link, to a discussion spanning many years. It's about "offensive content".
In my opinion, Sanger is trying to ride on a high horse. ( That sounds bad, my English is failing me.) -
Citizendium sensibilities
One fundamental principle of Citizendium is family-friendly. This has caused some confusion amongst the editors. I find that concept to be quite ill-defined.
Links (well, they obviously go to that site) http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Fundamentals http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php?topic=49.0 forum link, to a discussion spanning many years. It's about "offensive content".
In my opinion, Sanger is trying to ride on a high horse. ( That sounds bad, my English is failing me.) -
Alternate statement
For reasons totally unrelated to the (unsubstantiated) rumors that I am deeply bitter that no one has even heard of my self-evidently superior encyclopedia, Citizendium, I have discovered that it is my solemn duty under Federal law to attempt to have Wikipedia's servers seized by the FBI, thus inevitably thrusting the 121 properly expert-approved articles of Citizendium back into the spotlight where they bel--ah--I mean, thus saving...the children...from Jimbo.
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Re:Oh, you can tell
The fallacy is referring to "Wikipedia" as if it was some single entity. The problem is between the editors - and when you edit, that includes you. There's no you-and-them, as the them may well be other people who are complaining about "Wikipedia", when by "Wikipedia" they actually mean their experience with you.
The problem is not between two individuals... The problem is a system which has an extremely cumbersome bureaucratic process for (eventually) addressing conflicts between editors.
Wikipedia is not meant to be a "he who pushes hardest, wins" anarchy, but in reality, that's what you're left with these days.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_betterAs well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_WikipediaI'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
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Re:Oh, you can tell
The fallacy is referring to "Wikipedia" as if it was some single entity. The problem is between the editors - and when you edit, that includes you. There's no you-and-them, as the them may well be other people who are complaining about "Wikipedia", when by "Wikipedia" they actually mean their experience with you.
The problem is not between two individuals... The problem is a system which has an extremely cumbersome bureaucratic process for (eventually) addressing conflicts between editors.
Wikipedia is not meant to be a "he who pushes hardest, wins" anarchy, but in reality, that's what you're left with these days.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_betterAs well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_WikipediaI'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
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Completely backwards...
The summary is utterly wrong. It wasn't lack of rules that made Wikipedia popular. It was simply that the rules rarely had to be utilized when there were fewer people, and therefore, fewer conflicts.
The rules are a total and utter mess. All the politicians in the world coming together in committee couldn't come up with something so wasteful, frustrating and time consuming.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_betterAs well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_WikipediaI'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
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Completely backwards...
The summary is utterly wrong. It wasn't lack of rules that made Wikipedia popular. It was simply that the rules rarely had to be utilized when there were fewer people, and therefore, fewer conflicts.
The rules are a total and utter mess. All the politicians in the world coming together in committee couldn't come up with something so wasteful, frustrating and time consuming.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_betterAs well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_WikipediaI'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
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Re:Just as bad as it is good.
I once heard that wikipedia was just a bunch of nerds roleplaying a bureaucracy, and I'm convinced that's true.
Bravo. It's the joke of a moderation system that convinced me to quick WP and never go back. However, that was just the final straw in a long chain of crap. I once started writing up a concise explanation of why WP is doomed, but I later found Citizendium (the current Wiki project of THAT OTHER Wikipedia founder who dare not speak his name in Jimbo's presence) had already explained it better:
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Re:And then it was proptly deleted
Right, I suppose "shuns experts" was a bit vague. Let me clarify. Wikipedia is the place where an expert's credentials and experience are no match for an unknown conspiracy theorist who has decided an article must include certain content _he_ believes is perfectly valid and useful to mankind.
And the conspiracy theorist has reliable 3rd party sources for his claims, and the so-called expert can't find anything to back his argument up? If you say so.
The last time I edited a Wikipedia article in 2006 my changes were reverted by one of those zealous article owners (which I'm told by people like you are not supposed to exist), and I was later banned from editing for three days by one of his administrator buddies. Not by him you understand, by his buddy. I was given the choice to "file a content dispute" or something like that. All over a paragraph added to the article about an 80s rock band from Argentina. With a perfectly acceptable backing source, by the way.
Link please?
And then we have the usual "all the important people don't contribute to Wikipedia, waah". Well, there are other encyclopedias that work via different means - perhaps you should look into http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium or http://www.scholarpedia.org/ where brilliant experts such as yourself will be welcomed with open arms, and no other expert will ever possibly disagree with what you have to say about an 80s rock band from Argentina, honest.
Now, remind me how well those sites are doing compared to Wikipedia again? Wikipedia is the one struggling to get people to contribute, you say?
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Re:Obligatory
Expert: "I'm heading to Citizendium!" http://www.citizendium.org/
Where Larry Sanger has the 24 hour wiki-warriors in balance check...
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Re:You guys are missing the point
Try punching "experimental evolution" into Google. That only turns up 25 million hits but here are a few to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Bacteriophage_experimental_evolutionIt looks to me like these people are doing actual work to justify their conclusions. Now you can dispute their methods and conclusions but what they are up to isn't faith in a religious sense. Sticking lots of exclamation points on astounding ignorance doesn't rescue it from that state.
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Re:Citizendium
Posted further down, but I figure it's worth posting again.
Wikipedia - Homeopathy vs. Citizendium - Homeopathy. What quality?
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Be part of the solution!
I created the article at Citizendium and a talk page. I also mentioned this
/. article on the WP talk page. At least Citizendium editors can be reached for comment regarding the articles they edit. Who's UweBayern? Probably not even his real name. -
Be part of the solution!
I created the article at Citizendium and a talk page. I also mentioned this
/. article on the WP talk page. At least Citizendium editors can be reached for comment regarding the articles they edit. Who's UweBayern? Probably not even his real name. -
Re:1984?
I don't think Wikipedia's policies should be altered at all.
It is what it is... an encyclopedia that ANYONE can edit. If you want an encyclopedia that _most_ people can edit, that is supposedly more reliable, where articles are analyzed with scrutiny and the aim is reliability, you can use Citizendium http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium . It was created by the co-founder of Wikipedia because he thought that there should be a more reliable Free Encyclopedia than Wikipedia.
The only thing that needs to be adjusted is how people see Wikipedia... or MAYBE their citation policy. Wikipedia is not the end-all be all and any facts that you get from it that you're considering publishing should be checked against their sources. -
Re:bad idea
I don't think that's true. I think he is quite happy that either one worked out. Larry Sanger OTOH is much more concerned so he founded
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Britannica stopped being free
Back in the earlier day of the web encylopedia Americana was free. Britannica was a pay site. Then Britannica went free and it was dominant. But for most of this decade Britannica has not been a free site, which means links are low value.
Further:
1) Wikipedia has vastly more articles than Britannica. It isn't even close.
2) Wikipedia covers a wider range of topics.
3) Wikipedia articles are longer and more detailed
4) Wikipedia articles are much more web friendly with their "see also" web references.... In many ways playing the role yahoo used to play
5) Wikipedia articles offer history and talk pages which can provide tons of additional information
I can't see why Britannica would even think that in 2009 they should rank above Wikipedia. Wikipedia vs. Britannica discussions were interesting in 2005/6 and you could make a case. Today they aren't even close. Wikipedia functions reasonably well against specialized encyclopedias in their specialties.
I have always been a strong supporter of Britannica. I've bought lots of their products over the years and still use their encyclopedia on my laptop as a mobile solution. But they really aren't in the same league anymore as reference works. I think Columbia Encyclopedia makes a fantastic one volume reference work but I wouldn't rate it not to Britannica. Quantity matters.
__________
Even assuming they started to get a flood of content I don't see how they would deal with it. Are they really ready to fact check say 1000 pages of new content a day? If they want to do what they are talking about they need to do something like partner with http://en.citizendium.org/
Britannica could create a distinctive advantage for citizendium and at the same time Singer has put in place enough people to help with content additions. -
Re:i'm going to regret this but...
It exists as wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's citizendium. http://www.citizendium.org/
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The GPL was good enough, sigh...
It was unfortunate the GFDL licence was created, because the GPL was good enough for most textual works and certainly good enough for Wikipedia. (And plain MIT/X was also available.) It is unfortunate the FSF created a GPL-incompatible license with the GFDL. It's also unfortunate they do not fix this incompatability ASAP, since the line between code and content can get blurry fairly quickly sometimes. Some of these issues are at:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License
And then there are now endless versions of Creative Commons licenses to muddy the waters with incompatible versions.
And then there is the ambiguity of "no commercial use" licenses. -
Re:Wikipedia Validation Sites
Try Veropedia for verified articles. Also try Citizendium which is a fork of Wikipedia set up by ex-Wikipedian Larry Sanger and it protects its approved articles.
On Wikipedia itself, the German version is trialing a "watched" article system, which approves good article versions.
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Citizendium still kicks
Larry Sanger's Citizendium project still kicks, still gaining momentum without the association from Google.