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Digital Universe a Wikipedia Alternative
Augustine J writes "A new alternative to Wikipedia called Digital Universe is the brainchild of, USWeb founder Joe Firmage and Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's earliest creators. This new site differs from Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public.
"The vision of the Digital Universe is to essentially provide an ad-free alternative to the likes of AOL and Yahoo on the Internet," said Firmage. "Instead of building it through Web robots, we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world.""
If someone has intel on this, please provide it. They say it's "based on Wikipedia" but will be like an "add-free AOL or Yahoo". AOL and Yahoo are not Wikipedia. So is it an encyclopedia? Or a new search engine?
At least this will make people happy as when Digital Universe posts an article with incorrect information, someone can actually sue a corporation with money that has a static location.
Also, I don't watch PBS, so I don't know what the hell that means. They should have used a reference that people actually understand. Like "It will be the Slashdot of the Information World." Of course what is meant by that?
Difference between a brave man and a smart man: a brave man will die for his country. A smart man kills for his.
Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, plans to launch a project called Digital Universe that will take advantage of public input for its content but rely on acknowledged experts to edit the submissions. Material will be free, with subscription fees for access to copyrighted materials. Sanger has raised $10 million in start-up funding. This strikes me as a silly idea and a move in the wrong direction. Wikipedia was found to be mostly accurate compared to its closed brethren. Wikipedia in my view is fine as it is. It has its issues and as time goes it will evolve and get better.
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Let's embrace an Intentional Web.
"Digital Universe - The sort of free encyclopedia. Editable by some, and only after approval."
It sounds like they're basically going right back to the old model of encyclopedia authoring, and the only real difference is it's online.
This idea isn't horrible, only problem is just WHO gets to decide who is an 'expert'? Some would argue that Daryl McBride is an expert in lawsuits, because he's filed so many...but you know...
Setec Astronomy
Sanger said this in 2001 about Nupedia:
"The reason Nupedia is having trouble right now is that we've had trouble convincing academics that it is indeed a bona fide cathedral. If we were to convince them of that--which I think we will, eventually--you'll see just how wrong you really are (that Nupedia is a failure)."
Well, he was wrong. Experts have little time to waste on stuff like this, and Nupedia died. Will this die? Who knows.. but Sanger has been wrong before.
What makes an expert though? I've got a huge knowledge of many things which is really far beyond "normal" knowledge. Does this make me an expert or just someone who reads a lot of stuff?
What one person calls an expert someone else calls them an idiot.. so what defines it in this case?
I like muppets.
And I bet the average article will contain 3 errors per entry just like Encyclopedia Britannica which has expert reviewers as well. Compare this to Wikipedia's longer articles which contain 4 errors per entry.
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http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/
Seems to me that expert reviewer/writers don't really make much of a difference.
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You know, the ones Joe saw in his hotel room one morning?
9 90111.eifirmage.htm
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The Internet batches of relatively free information is really surprising to me. Not only is the information available freely, but it was created freely. As a blogger and a newsletter writer, I find that I make more money the cheaper my product gets -- even when it hits the limit of zero (my newsletter may actually become a newsletter that pays its readers, though). My question is, how will these things last in the long run when people start realizing their time preference makes writing freely costlier than they had expected?
When things are new and fresh, we take very good care of them -- look at the car you may have bought new. When things age, we tend to take care of them less, or start to look at them with a crooked eye, even. As Wiki and Digital Universe and blogs and all the other good freely made/freely available text starts to age, will there be another generation willing to continue carrying the torch? Or will Google or AOL or MS find ways to subvert the cause, take them over, and add ads all over the place?
I know many sites exists solely on donations -- I should donate to Wiki. Is this enough to keep them going? Do companies that have a vested interest in selling competitive products to Wiki/DU/blogs have a way to control or regulate these writings?
That's my big fear. As an anti-State anarchocapitalist, I just know the day will come when all speech is regulated in some way, and it will be very hard to market our products. The line between what is political speech and what isn't is a fine one -- and the new FEC laws that will come up over the next 3 years will soon be so restrictive that any blog that earns AdSense dollars will likely be restricted in what they can say. This has happened on the radio and in newsprint, I expect it will happen on blogs. When the topic of a blog/wiki could be considered political, expect hammers to drop. Want to talk about Sony? Well, that's political, you can't.
It will be an interesting future, if we can get to it.
Absolutely nothing. This will die, just like Nupedia did.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
sounds like a good idea I see no problem with competition It will be nice to compare the same subjects on the two
A PhD does carry weight. The question is, how many PhDs? It could very well be a small number of accurate pages versus Wikipedia's enormous number of acceptable pages. I'm interested to see how this plays out. Could Wikipedia possibly strike back with its own anal^H^H^H^Hpeer-review system?
Sunday sunday SUNDAY!
The battle of the internet encyclopedias! Buy your ticket NOW at the following Ticketmaster locations...
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
Wikipedia's stregnths lie in the fact that it's editable by everyone. These stregnths or the merit of these stregnths are debatable, but if wikipedia has an edge, it's through this.
Digital Universe is simply an online traditional encyclopedia. I am of the opinion that Wikipedia is a great place to get started or to learn about relatively non-controversial topics. No one source should be used for anything, and that goes for Wikipedia as well.
But for Digital Universe to compete with Wikipedia, or vice versa, they have to share the same niche. They don't - Digital Universe aims to be traditional, just online. There's no way it'll have anywhere near as many articles as Wikipedia, but the content of these articles will be very trustworthy. I'd likely use both, because each does something different and unique. Just as I use Urbandictionary.com to search for words like "1337" or "Slashdot", I'd use wikipedia to search for obscure or pop-culture topics. Just as I use the OED to get 27 variations on the word "Rights", I'd use Digital Universe to get specific information on "The history of Computing", etc. I'm not saying there's no overlap, but at least for me, these two services would do two different things.
Just my 2 cents.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
And if you wanted medical journals for example, wikipedia doesn't do those, these guys do: Medical Journals So sure, there are many sites offering you ways of posting/sharing information, but they are definetely not the one and only and as soon as people start realizing that and looking for themselves independent of those sites, they'll see that there are many ways of finding info, not just Wikipedia, or this. Digital Universe though is an alternative, so what?
Why is it that Linux pretty much took off from the beginning and Hurd languishes? It is because people are willing to contribute to the one and not to the other. If something is too much of a pain, then people are going to avoid it. Wiki works because it is relatively pain-free to use. Digital Universe? We'll see.
My wag is that it won't even begin to approach Wiki in size or accuracy. We had the recent story that word for word, Wiki is much more accurate than it's dead tree brothers.
My advice to anyone who wants to replace Wiki: Don't bother trying.
...how many times did the founder edit his biography?
My website
Google: A Patriot's Letter
we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world.
Like St. Wonko's Institution for the Criminally Insane?
What about that? I just heard on NPR that one of the founder of the Digital Universe project is also involved in some extraterrestrial intelligence believer group... I didn't quite get the details unfortunately. Does anyone have more details. It could affect the credibility of this project, couldn't it?
It seems to me that "acknowledged experts" is both the key to respect and the bottleneck for any on-line encyclopedia. The question is how does a online content system get acknowledge experts. One solution is to hire experts from the meat-space world -- those vetted by traditional academia, etc. Unfortunately, I'd argue that it's simply too costly to hire enough "real" experts to maintain 800,000 articles.
In contrast, wikipedia seeks to create content without this overhead to officially-hired experts. The greatest strength of wikipedia is that anyone can add to it. This encourages content generation. The greatest weakness of wikipedia is that anyone can add to it. This encourages vandals and idiots to add errors into entries.
What projects such as wikipedia need is a mechanism for creating experts and signaling expertise within the context of a corpus created by an open network. This means a better karma system and mechanism for filtering/de-editing entries. Perhaps the easiest mechanism would be a text color-coding scheme. Edits made recently by editors with no track record for stable contributions would be color coded red to caution the reader. The longer the edit lasts, the darker it becomes. Edits that we're made by those with a long history of non-edited additions would see their text quickly become normal black. Done well, such a system could even track contentious frontiers of knowledge -- showing both variants of contested facts in red until one side marshals enough evidence to induce stability.
Readers might even be able to pick which rendering of the wiki to view. They might ask to see only the content that has survived X viewings without an editorial incident (retraction or rewrite) or see only content written by contributors with some threshold level of expertise karma.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What's keeping these "acknowledged experts" from contributing _now_ to Wikipedia ?
Ok, who is the expert who will catalog all the pokemon?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
For further information, see the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Universe
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Isn't this the same as DMOZ?
This strikes me as a silly idea and a move in the wrong direction.
Why does there have to be a wrong direction?
It's trying something new. Either it will work out or it won't (and if it does work out, there will probably have to be revisions to the idea).
There is an *incredible* number of incredibly useful information systems that do not exist that have the potential to exist, now that we have the Internet widely available. They could be the next most important way to exchange information -- someone just has to come up with the system and nurse it. We haven't yet scratched the surface -- we don't have any idea what can be done.
In the past few years, I've seen the rise of:
* MMORPGs -- "virtual reality" with huge numbers of people actually existing in real life, playing, exploring and talking together, without regard for physical location. I have a number of friends that have fanned out across the United States, but can still spend more time together than people they live next door to, just because they have forums to do so now.
* Instant Messaging systems -- A system that grants the ability to contact most people with almost zero delay time, collaborate (pasting text and links), carry on masses of real time conversations at once, etc.
* blogs -- A way to rapidly publish, identify, and propagate new memes, with a reputation system built in (if someone has written good articles before, perhaps they will continue to do so). CNN isn't my sole (or primary) source of interesting information any more, which means that control of information channels is *much* weaker than it was even recently.
* reddit -- collaboratively rated "blog". A truly adaptive "content of interest" stream. IMHO, the next generation beyond just reading RSS feeds of blogs.
* del.icio.us -- collaboratively rated bookmarking, useful for researching a topic quickly.
* Wikipedia -- whether you call it an "encyclopedia" or not, there's no denying that this store of overview-level knowledge on many, many topics is incredibly valuable.
* Freenet -- we have (abeit still not in a particularly Joe-Sixpack-usable package) truly anonymous interaction offered us.
That's just off the top of my head. There are new ideas just bubbling up all over. What's the cost of trying something wrong? Maybe someone insults your idea and you pay some server fees. The Internet is a *long*, *long* way from being a mature environment -- there are new, completely untapped things coming into being every day.
I don't think anyone thinks that Digital Universe is going to be unilaterally better than Wikipedia, but who knows? Maybe it will work, and maybe it will be better in some ways than WP. In any event, is has the ability to feed off Wikipedia, and provides a mechanism to access copyrighted content (whereas WP is limited to public-domain and free-use content).
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
. . . these debates . . . create a neutral point of view that presents all the important facts.
This statement is so staggeringly devoid of value to this discussion as to beggar description. Such debates may or may not result in a consensus regarding what constitutes a fact and its relative significance. Scholarly debate, whether or no sanctioned by the academy, whether by encyclopaedists professional or amateur, whether electronic or carbon-based, is scholarly debate, friend.
Debate, by its nature, can create nothing but consensus or its lack.
illegitimii non ingravare
Joe Firmage? As in "we got all our technologies from space aliens" Joe Firmage?
Think I'm joking?
link
It would be nice if there were some kind of way that people could subscribe money if they wanted to so that they could provide a pool of money for scientific research. Stuff like this could provide an alternative source of research funding for some people. There could be public votes on how much and where it should be distributed to, votes by the public and other scientists. Even if it's a paypal account. Then each year a research body would put in its submissions to get some of this cash and the public would vote.
Task Mangler
This sounds similar to DMOZ in that experts are in control of their field. DMOZ was built by the people for the people and the system provides a lot of value, particularly for SEO. Unfortunately DMOZ is ripe with corruption. Editors realize their power to approve or deny submissions have value so they sell their once free service to approve links under the table. I wonder how Digital Universe will avoid the same problem.
That's precisely why I don't become a teacher. I know ...way off-topic, but stick with me. It's such a pain in the ass to become a teacher. The local Gov's want all these letters of recomendation, background checks, and other really obtrusive things. I just said, "Fuck it!" The teacher "shortage" will have to continue. I have better things to deal with than this shit! BTW, I'm male. That makes it MUCH more difficult, because everybody knows that every guy who becomes a teacher is a pedophile. Fuck that! I'm not a criminal and I'm into older chicks (30+) anyway!
How is this different from Nupdedia?
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
For some reason I don't see this as being NEARLY as large as Wikipedia, especially since it is going up against the existing giant.
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For an outsider it may be difficult to see why someone would start such a project that is so similar to Wikipedia. That is because Wikipedia claims to be written from a "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV). What that means is that Wikipedia is not supposed to have any ideological slant in any of its articles, instead all major viewpoints are to be represented fairly. In theory thats good, in practice it means that all Wikipedia articles have a laymen average American Joe slant, since Wikipedia is mostly edited by average American Joes. In disputes, there are no credentials to throw around except for numbers. Therefore the option favoured by the average American Joe always is the right option on Wikipedia since Wikipedia is mostly edited by average American Joes.
So it's not hard to understand why an academic would rather say "Go away! Troll Wikipedia instead, I got a Ph.D. in this subject - you don't." than have to deal with a large mass of uneducated opinionated individuals. The problem also gets worse over time because more people editing Wikipedia means that the uneducated mass is constatly growing.
For example, take Wikipedia's articles about the Palestinian conflict. There is a wealth of information about it, but then there is an 1000 times bigger wealth of pure propaganda being spread about it. There are a few dozen famous authors and schoolars writing about the conflict. Wikipedia being as it is, their viewpoint ofcourse is not represented in Wikipedia. Instead Wikipedia mostly mirrors the propagandaists stories since that is what the average American Joe believes and the number of average American Joes on Wikipedia outnumbers those who have studied the conflict by atleast 1000:1. It didn't use to be that way, a few years ago Wikipedia had a leftist slant because many of its editors were activists. But it has gradually shifted because of the people editing Wikipedia.
So while Wikipedia is often a good informational resource for technology or on such subjects where the average American Joe and the academic doesn't ha conflicting views, it definitely can't handle subjects in which there are multiple conflicting points of view. In those areas, an expert-edited encyclopeda may be the solution.
This seems like one of those instances where the tendency for people to prefer something that sucks to nothing at all will give Wikipedia enough momentum to trample on Digital Universe in terms of number of users, and breadth of content. Even if the information is inaccurate or completely wrong, people will be able to obtain results for their queries that will most frequently be "good enough" that they will see little reason to use Digital Universe.
Friction causes inefficiency. Granted, every system needs some kind of control but when the bureaucracy makes things not worthwhile, then the system quits working. It's the same process whether you are deciding to volunteer for a charity (all of which seem to want police checks these days) or deciding to become a teacher, or deciding to contribute code to an open source project.
I contend that a major factor influencing the success of Linux was Linus' relaxed attitude. We need a lot more of that. That's why Wiki works too.
...are there actually any experts on He-man ?
For more info look here.
The problem with Wikishitia is not that it's tremedously wrong, it's that it's tremendously fragile to agendas and spamming. If you don't make it accountable then it's critics are right and it's shit.
This new site differs from Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public.
As opposed to Wikipedia, who expressly bar experts from contributing or reviewing material.
Ummmm.... no.
Actually, what's happening here is that DU will bar the public from contributing further, after the experts have their say.
They should have a wikipedia "unstable" and a wikipedia "stable", which is vetted by a select base (released annually?) - even a few levels in-between if you like. Then everyone is happy with no duplication of effort.
Wikipedia: 850,000 articles, roughly $500,000.
Digital Universe: 0 articles, 10 million dollars.
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I'll put my faith in the Uncyclopedia any day. With in-depth and thoughful articles like the rise of Dino Jesus I'm always in the know!
I sometimes contribute on wikipedia. Will I contribute here? No. I do not expect to have to wait while my proletarian prose is vetted by some presumably second- or even third-rate "expert." (Who else are they going to get to watch each little tweak?) If I see something wrong on wikipedia, I'll fix it; I'll even start articles. But if you want me to invest my time, don't treat me as a second-class citizen.
For background: I am nearly finished with a doctorate in the sciences. I respect expert knowledge, peer review and all sorts of wonderful tiered knowledge systems. I just don't want to contribute to the version they have -- a version in which my anonymous submissions are vetted by a presumably unaccountable group of experts whose credentials I imagine are less than stellar.
That said, I wish them well. My guess is that they will end up relying very little on public contributions, and that this is a hook. In any case, again, well done for making a stab at improving the information quality of the web.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
looks like mozilla is running under the hood for thier browser...
cool...
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I hate when people mod you redundant.
That's because mod points aren't intended as a means of criticising posts, they're meant to be used to change their visibility at a particular threshold. If there are a hundred posts expressing the same point of view, it doesn't matter to someone reading Slashdot (and therefore generating income from the ads) that all of the posts are valid, it's still boring.
If you want to express an opinion which is likely to be commonly held and don't want to be modded redundant, differentiate it from the pack. Make it funny, link to some useful information or try to look for a different angle.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
How ironic that Joe "aliens visited me on the eve of my .com IPO" Firmage is trying to create a more accurate online encyclopedia. Here is one world class whackjob (ask anyone who worked on TheWordIsTheTruth website, which was his version of the Book of Mormom, and aliens, and some New Age hoohah, or something). Whewie!
I'm interested in seeing how objective Digital Universe will be, considering Firmage's strong beliefs in alien intervention and that major innovations in microprocessor designs were actually gifts from intelligent and benign extraterrestrials.
Kevin Fox
about.com
Having been involved in reviewing academic papers, grant requests, and so on I can assure you that academics are as opinionated, biased, and incapable of "large view" thinking as your average american joe. Even in their fields of expertise. One of the areas of worst offense, for me, is that very few academics seem to understand the tools of their trades such as psychometrics, statistics, or sampling. They may have the theory of their field down cold, but if they don't understand research design or methodologies they can neither do nor understand good research.
Unfortunately, they are as likely as anyone else in their field to be asked to review papers for publication. Or for an online encyclopedia.
The experts should write the original articles so that they are complete and coherent, and then the public should edit out the bias and add alternative points of view.
You're right. The "editable by some" is a big thing against Digital Universe. Wikipedia has grown enormously in a very short period of time. I doubt if this new fangled Digital Universe will be able to demonstrate such growth.
Joe User can search for an article, see that it's missing and write one. Or if an article has mistakes or errors or missing information, s/he can contribute. Of course, it does take some time for the article to mature, but the basic idea remains that anyone can contribute. Now, as a Joe User, if I see that an article on something is missing or has mistakes in Digital Universe, what do I do? Umm, let's see, just about nothing.
This is a BIG thing in favour of Wikipedia - the ability for anyone to contribute. I think Wikipedia's success lies in this. I mean, I've contributed a very small number of articles and images in a few languages. And a lot more of users like me can just contribute an immense quantity of information.
Experts are often not willing to spend time on this. Combine it with the fact that a Joe User cannot contribute, you have a disjoint. This is not like the OSS model for code (i.e. a handful few maintaining code), where a specific module needs to be written. This is information, and you do not know what you know/what you do not know/what you are looking for unless you get right down to it. And often, you need not actually know about it, if you have good references.
Finally, if you are being an encyclopedia, you are trying to write up the sum-total of human knowledge, which IMHO is a lot more overarching than code. You cannot assign a few "experts" to do the task. It gets done faster by more.
One solution might be for certain sections of Wikipedia to evolve into this - that way, you would have a QA of sorts. But between the two, the "editable by some" is a big thing against Digital Universe. The "editable by all" is what made Wikipedia what it is. IMHO, of course.
My goodness, now that takes me back. But I haven't heard that name for years now. I used to edit a category there.
Don't mod this 'Funny', either -- I'm being serious! This is *proper* nostalgia! -- it's deeply and touchingly poignant.
Just take moment -- TAKE, I said, A MOMENT -- to sit there and imbibe the sheer humanity of it all...
Of course, these offshoot projects would be governed by the GNU Free Documentation license, which, if I understand it correctly, would require that the new improved edited-by-experts entries were available to the public to edit and mess with themselves. That, of course, is the biggest strength of the open source model in general, and it is the underlying reason I think Wikipedia is so important.
...you know what that sound is :)
My website
Is a comment that links to documenting evidence from a rather reliable source considered "flamebait".
The Truth is a Troll.
If there's some outrageous claim, or some hotly disputed and debated topic- say, take your pick of sides on the topic Intelligent Design- Wikipedia's job is not to state who's right and who's wrong, endorse one side or another, identify what's really true and false, or anything like that. Its job is to state that claims have been made, one way or the other, who made those claims, what sort of support the claims enjoy and what criticism they suffer, and other stuff relevant to the claims. That's all. I think that's a far more attainable goal for a volunteer encyclopedia project than Truth.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Wikipedia: ~$.60 per article.
Digital Universe: Even their cost per article remains undefined.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
UFO people are crazy, but all the people waiting for Jesus to come down from the sky in a flaming chariot are normal.
Sometimes I feel crazy for having a working brain.
Who has no bias? Seriously, we all have them. It's just that when we get together the more extreme ones tend to cancel each other out and we end up with something kinda sensible in the middle.
I'd be interested in seeing who they get to do the editing before I make any judgements. I know that I'm often frustrated with Wikipedia because it says "stub found" gives me a bunch of options for adding on. Well, DUH!, if I already knew the answer, I wouldn't be searching for it.
Seriously, I'd like to see some of the folks recruited for editing write some of the articles and put them out for comment by the users with a meta-mod system like Slashdot. I think this would be far superior than waiting for someone who is a specalist in some esoteric field like medieval seige weapons to wander by and write an addition.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
I went to their download page and they listed Win2k and WinXP as the only 2 environments that they supported.
I own an ADM64 Linux box, a couple of Mac and a lonely old Windows machine.
I am also a 52 year old published author, a blogger and a podcaster. I figure after 25 years of doing OOP, I've figure that I've earned enough 'street cred' to tell them that a Windows only environment is not a smart move for an academic exercise.
I don't trust them.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
When a practical project starts with a PR campaighn and a "vision statement," as well as leadership
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I'm sure this will be addressed and who knows exactly what the ManyOne browser will be used for (if it will be required to view all pages, or just certain content or what), but this Digital Universe page talks about the browser.
... ..."
Looking at the link they provide:
"Minimum System Requirements:
* Microsoft® Windows XP or Windows 2000
Ewww. It almost sounds like a custom Mozilla + Macromedia Flash browser:
"Licenses
ManyOne Application Suite
Mozilla Public License
The ManyOne Application Suite software and source code fall under the Mozilla Public License v.1.1.
Macromedia License
The ManyOne Application Suite software and installer include Macromedia Flash Player. Copyright © 1995-1999 Macromedia, Inc. All rights reserved. "Macromedia" and "Flash" are trademarks of Macromedia, Inc."
But why require Windows to run it?
I still can't get if they're just trying to push/bundle their ISP service, or what... just what is ManyOne?
I don't see folks downloading a special new browser just to visit their website... unless a bunch of other websites get on that bandwagon.
Wikipedia's strengths lie in the fact that it's editable by everyone.
I found it quite interesting to follow the latest Wales/Sanger wars, initially on real topics as the effectiveness of the Wiki model and deteriorating to Wiki-update wars on who really came with name Wikipedia... But the bottom line as I see it is simple - I hope that when these silly bashing cease, the general public will benefit from a new publicly available source of scientific/historical information. But as always, only time will tell. If you're interested, a summary of the latest Wales/Sanger wars is available here.
The existing user accounts and articles history offers a way, through some automagic analysis, to detect existing 'Wikipedia experts'.
The analysis will calculate, for each existing user, an 'efficiency score' on each category based on the volume, age, audience and stability of his writings. On each category the one-per-thousand best writers (who produce good-and-stable articles) will be immediately promoted into some 'Wikipedia expert' status. Those experts will form the category's "council", able to 'promote' other users into the 'Wikipedia expert' status.
More at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/
The big problem with the wikipedia is that in order to perform a non-minor edit (I'd call a minor edit a clarification of phrasing, or a spelling fix, or something incontrovertible), you really have to sit down and discuss it on the talk page with the other editors. Heck, you might even need to get arbitration if you can't agree on a particular phrasing. This takes time and effort. The payoff is usually worth it- you become aware of errors or omissions in your own knowledge of the subject, while improving the article as a whole.
Unfortunately it's the sort of thing that the average professional gets paid to do. No matter how passionate, I don't think anyone in a particular field is going to want to work on an encyclopedia or textbook for free when they could be paid to do the same.
The choice is between paying for an encyclopedia by a collaboration of professionals, or recieving - for free - an encyclopedia by a collaboration of knowledgable amateurs.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Who has time for that?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
...if it is not enforced?
Just take a look how Turkish left and right wings play around with articles that have some relevance in relation to the Kurdish or the Armenian issues...
You need to compare all previous edits (which are too many) to get some accurate information out of the now-politicized poor wikipedia article...
And there is no cure for this in Wikipedia because it is PEBKAC!
Narrowing the sample population for editors to "acknowledged experts" seems like a great way to wind up getting more subtley biased articles. I expect the bias would come from the experts themselves and the bias of the selector. I guess a free encyclopedia is a nice thing, but Brittanica is only $36 / yr at this point. Nothing like the crippling $1000+ that the tree version costs.
I don't so much have a problem with getting information from Amateurs - I've always thought Wikipedia was a cool idea - not that it would be the highest expression of knowledge on any subject, but that it could give me a decent intro to any subject, with links/references to more expert works.
The problem, as the parent points out, isn't when someone just makes a mistake, because their knowledge is limited. The problem arises when people start editting Wikipedia articles, purposely introducing innaccuracies and/or opinions, to push an agenda, whether it is political, religious, sociological, or economic.
As it currently stands, Wikipedia is just too prone to being hacked by people who don't give a crap about Wikipedia, and just want to push their own agenda.
"This idea isn't horrible, only problem is just WHO gets to decide who is an 'expert'? "
:)
I can answer that.
Larry is still smarting from Wikipedia's wild success and has made it his life mission to prove Jimbo wrong.
My understanding is in Larry's eyes people fall into two clean categories-- "the elite" and "everyone else" He especially hates non-producers as many Randroids would literally exterminate them if they could. Of course they are responsible for arbitrarily defining that point ("coincidentally" and "objectiviely" including themselves) and never explain what would happen when the new subset arrives (i.e. Don't we now have new elites and new poor as the terms are just relative?)
It really strikes me as a new form of Aryanism but revolving around economic status rather than race.
Putting aside that we are all basically made of the same genes, speak the same language, basically have the same legal rights, etc.... he wants to believe he is "one of the chosen" for some psychological reasons that escapes me. Objectivists also seem to gloss over the fact Rand didn't invent the concept of capitalism, or happiness, or selfishness, or liberty, or A is A, or hedonism, or god-is-dead. She was a writer that mostly "adopted/stole" others powerful concepts and wrote a few books on how to be an egomaniac. If being a zillionare is very important to you (and practically nothing else)-- a very worthwhile read for modern day Machiavellians. A very good read also for those interested in the inner workings of some people's thought processes. Rand says a lot of deep things I believe completely but also a great many things that are utter nonsense. (like everyone else on this planet including yours truly
Her works generally attract an audience that are anti-altruistic, against tolerance and only concerned with making a buck. It's a great angle (especially in a capitalistic world) that dupes some rich people into being followers because they feel guilty for having money and not giving back anything to the system that made them.
Although Ayn herself uses the word "interests" they seem to relate everything to money and trade which is fine. Unfortunately they just can't understand that while trade is important not everyone wants to drone on a particular subject all day or relate everything to that subject. If they used the word "communication" I might find that more palatable.
While Jimbo is an Objectivst he does seem to advocate freedom is the foundation that must exist for the elite to shine and there is nothing wrong with freedom as far as I'm concerned. He views freedom as the tool that allows the best ideas to float to the top eventually. I have no disagreements there. Even were Larry's site successfully funded through corporate subsides and overtook Wikipedia (unlikely...more of a complement to it with far fewer articles) he can't win because ultimately Wikipedia's incredible success proved Jimbo's theory. Does this mean Wikipedia will always dominate? No! It just means it's a workable methodology.
And if the Objectivist collective (ha) wants to believe that someone who happens to score 2% higher on the SAT is Jesus and should be worshiped--- it's a free country so that too is OK by me. However it should be noted that empirical evidence would seem to indicate dwelling on these kinds of pedantic class concepts are what eventually lead to the anti-thesis (communism) and are regardless a real threat to our freedoms eventually because they create polarities were none exist. We've fought for centuries to eliminate class-warfare in the West and finally have built a worthwhile society because of it.
Like Jimbo though, I believe you have to allow people room to say their peace. Be they socialists, Objectivists, religious people, Nambla, the KKK, or whatever narrow corner of reality some people wish to define their entire existence into. Everyone needs to decide
I don't like Wikipedia's system and its edit wars and such. That's why I use Everything2 instead, because it doesn't have wiki's flaws.
It's too little, too late, even if your way is better.