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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.""
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 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?
I cannot disagree with you, but I just have say that the more competition the better. Competition has a way of bringing out the best in people - generally speaking. I'm sure there will be plenty of exceptions posted after this....
I suspect that this study over-estimates the accuracy of Wikipedia because it was limited to natural science topics. My impression is that Wikipedia is pretty accurate in this area because people tend to know whether they know what they are talking about or not and people who really don't know anything aren't very likely to write about something like chemistry. Where Wikipedia seems to me to have more of a problem is in areas that people who really don't know what they are talking about think that they do, which is more common outside of the natural sciences. My own field of linguistics is like this. Pseudo-experts seem to be particularly common in historical linguistics. I'd be interested to see a study like the one cited but covering areas like linguistics and psychology.
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.
. . . 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
What's this "sort of free" you are talking about? From TFA:
This is basically Wikipedia, except with articles that are vetted by experts before being published. Which is exactly how Free Software works - with the maintainer being the "expert" vetting everything before it goes in. Not everybody gets to choose what goes into the Linux kernel - Linus has final say in that - but I don't see anybody calling Linux "sort of free".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Actually, last I heard, the founder of Wikipedia is closely involved in this project. So let's not waste bandwidth on why Wikipedia is better.
Also, the people behind this Foundation have been working on other, possibly revolutionary (in a REALLY BIG way) physics research. Check it out: http://www.calphysics.org/ .
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.
That would only work if Wikipedia also made fundamental changes to it's editing structure. Nobody is going to take Wikipedia any more seriously if a bunch of experts start contributing to it as long as any yahoo with a login can go in and change the articles they write.
Wikipedia would have to develop what is essentially a caste system so a user could only edit what has been written by people in the same or lower level as them, protecting expert knowledge from armchair scholars.
Experts already contribute to Wikipedia, and many have left because of edit wars with other users who really don't know what they are talking about. Until Wikipedia begins to show offical recognition of authoritive sources, this will continue.
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
Wikipedia has a policy for dealing with assessing the veracy of information. If there's a question about the accuracy of information, you first and foremost do not get into an edit war. You make a request for comment or page protection, perhaps call for a vote on the article's talk page, cite your sources and either your peers or The Wikipedia Powers That Be assess who's correct. If the editor putting up incorrect information persists in spite of a decision from the "higher-ups", they may be suspended from editing or banned altogether.
Alas, nobody seems to bother reading any of the editing policies, rules, and regulations, so you get such fun as edit wars an knowledgable people whose sole edits are large-print "THIS IS NOT A PRIMARY SOURCE, IT CONTAINS ERRORS, JOHN Q DOCTORATE PHD" across the top of a page. If the wikipedia fails, it's because people wade in, edit, and fail to realise that there are rules attached to it, not because the rules are themselves faulty.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yeah. NPOV doesn't work. Here's something a wrote about Wikis a while ago:
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Wikis and the tyranny of the most persistent
Current popular wikis such as Wikipedia offer no uncorruptable way to voice dissent with the contents of an article. Try to add such a voice, or even fix an article, and soon it will be reverted, and eventually the most persistent wins, or someone locks the article leaving it indefinitely in the previous state. Sure there are great ideals of NPOV, but it doesn't work in practice; it requires cooperation between hostile parties and interests. We all know that won't happen over the semi-anonymous internet.
What is needed is MPOV, or multiple point-of-view. Let's allow the initiator of an article to moderate edits to the article and give moderation permissions to others if she wants to, but let's also allow everyone to attach new alternative views to the article - the existence of such prominently mentioned at the top - that can also be moderated, this time by the person who added that view. This way each article is as trustworthy as its initiator, all points of view get a proper chance to get heard. Additionally the political and other leanings of the moderators and writers of an article or its alternative views are much more recognisable than from one pseudo-cooperatively written and alternatingly corrupted by proponents of different ideas, or just plain ignorant people.
Obviously this won't solve the spam problem, and doesn't prevent misconceived additions to an article as new views, but should help to make out them for what they are. Equally obviously additional mechanisms are needed to remove views that are simply spam or otherwise totally unrelated to the topic at hand, and ones that can be used to promote more informative views to the top, and to remove a view completely if a moderator does not respond in a suitable timeframe to a queue of change requests.
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This is the equivalent of the free software model. Everyone gets to be the moderating "expert", but everyone gets to fork an article too if the original author can't be worked with. The system could possible be conjoined with some kind of "was this view informative" voting/meta-moderation system to promote better articles to the top.
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some things presented as "facts" are pure and simple bullshit, for example because their authors deliberately omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie. Therefore a pure 'fact' must be described by a witness, not by simply copy/pasting 'published' information.
There is a major and very dangerous confusion between the 'fact' that something is published and the 'factual' status of the information published. All efficient propagandists take gain of this.
More explicitly: after reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body): ...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it "it's a fact, it's true".
Therefore anyone who thinks that (in non scientific or technical fields) only "published material" is factual must, in order to avoid relaying disinformation or misinformation, take care of his sources honesty and rigor.
I experienced such mess on an article published in Wikipedia fr: a press release published by a group controlled by an ONU agency was considered as a 'fact' (French) albeit anyone can demonstrate that its content, stating that a scientific study concluded that the Chernobyl accident will kill about 4000 people, is pure and simple bullshit (French): no work published, no authors, no peer review, results obtained in a very specific context and limited perimeter by unreliable methods (as stated in the report draft)...)
When an analysis of such a 'fact' arises I think that an encyclopedia must clearly state that the reported announcement is plain disinformation, and link to the demonstration.
There is a proposal to avoid this mess by informing the reader of the level of trust he choose, more or less directly, to give to the information source: WebDSign
In my opinion, it's not always possible to rely on the Powers That Be to ensure the entries are correct.
I got involved in an entry where a creationist posted some bogus criticisms of an argument; it went to mediation, and nothing was resolved. I think it was because the argument involved probability theory which the mediator didn't understand. Anyway, after extensive debate in which the creationist never got the point and the mediator did nothing, everyone gave up in exhaustion and the entry was left as-is.