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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
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.
1 5/1352207
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/
Seems to me that expert reviewer/writers don't really make much of a difference.
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
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.
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.
Nothing prevents real experts from contributing to Wikipedia now. The difference is that they have no special status and may have to spend a lot of time and energy arguign with non-experts if they want to revise things. This proposal isn't about giving experts access, which they already have, its about giving experts authority.
How is this different from Nupdedia?
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Wikipedia: 850,000 articles, roughly $500,000.
Digital Universe: 0 articles, 10 million dollars.
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
"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." How it works out in the real world is that the "vandals and idiots" will usually have plenty more time on their hands to make sure their errors persist than the "experts" will have patience to make sure the article remains as correct as possible. The "experts" usually have better things to do in their schedule than to butthead to perpetuity with persistent "vandals and idiots". It's easy for "vandals and idiots" to invite their friends over to a wikipedia edit and revert war, not so easy for the "experts" whose friends would not appreciate the ludicrous invitation. I think from my experience with the Arabic numerals page on wikipedia that, as things stand now, without editorial control, Wikipedia is a lost cause for any topic in which strong biases are a potential issue.
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.
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.
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.