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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.
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
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.
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."
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.
Wikipedia's stregnths lie in the fact that it's editable by everyone.
edit:
Wikipedia's strengths lie in the fact that it's editable by ninjas.
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
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.