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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.""
Joe Firmage? As in "we got all our technologies from space aliens" Joe Firmage?
Think I'm joking?
link
If u did some google search you would have found the following
http://www.digitaluniverse.net/experience/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Universe
I won't consider Digital Universe an alternative to wikipedia. The content is more interactive in nature. I doubt that it'll be as vast in scope as wikipedia though. Let's see.
sarchasm
Yes, but...
The old model isn't really the old model. There was a time, that ended around World War 1, that the best enyclopedias tended to have articles by really top experts in their fields, i.e. Thomas Edison writng about his own inventions, or Woodrow Wilson about European geopolitics. That didn't necessarily eliminate bias (sometimes far from it), but it did often greatly boost quality in other ways.
Here's an online version of one of the best examples - the "Love to Know" encyclopedia, based on the Britanica 11th edition, for those interested in seeing what encyclopedia meant once:
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/
By 1940 or so at most, the overwhelming majority of new encyclopedia articles were by staff writers, who were generally not known for any original (as opposed to synthetic) contributions to the fields they addressed, who sometimes interviewed really primary sources directly, but were often at third remove or more. For articles updating older entries, there was almost never new deep research done. An update on Relativity, for example was likely to involve taking the opinion of an easily accessable local college professor as to how an older version should be rewritten for modern readers.
Digital Universe could be very similar to the late era print model, and have entries mostly by academics for 'major' subjects and hobby writers for 'minor' ones, or it could deliberately leverage the hypertext-like online model, the ease and speed of modifying flawed entries and seeing the corrections propagate, the easing of editorial space restrictions for 'minor' subjects, and other net-typical advantages to go back to the older old model, which (IMHO), would make the results much more tolerable.
Who is John Cabal?
Just a correction: I did not raise $10 million for new Stewards, as The Register quite absurdly reported. Rather, something like that is the amount that mainly Joe Firmage raised (or himself gave) toward the development of the platform. Moreover, I am working as just one member of pretty big team; it's hardly just my project. Please, please, wait a couple of weeks and we will be in a position to talk a lot more.
I'm just going to correct some items of fact in some of the posts here. "So is it an encyclopedia? Or a new search engine?" Neither, exclusively. It will be a comprehensive web portal that will include an encyclopedia. It has been loudly billed as an encyclopedia (not by us) for reasons that might be obvious. But it will be more than that. "...someone can actually sue a corporation with money that has a static location..." Well, the Digital Universe Foundation has filed for nonprofit status, so it's a little misleading to call it a corporation. But you're right that it will have a static location. Or rather, several static locations, because the so-called information coalitions (each devoted to a different branch of knowledge) will be more or less independent of the DU.