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.""

Comments

I don't get it

[Ginza]

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?

Re:I don't get it

[Larry Sanger]

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.

This strikes me as a silly idea.

[otavo]

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.

Re:This strikes me as a silly idea.

[Azarael]

Not only that, but why start from scratch when there is such an enourmous body of good source material? A better project would be to gather acknowledged experts, and get them to contribute to Wikipedia instead.

Re:This strikes me as a silly idea.

[belmolis]

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.

Re:This strikes me as a silly idea.

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:This strikes me as a silly idea.

[Larry Sanger]

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.

What's their motto?

[Spazntwich]

"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.

Re:What's their motto?

[Artifakt]

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.

Re:What's their motto?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Actually, they're going straight back to the model of Nupedia. It didn't surprise me at all that Larry Sanger was involved in this. Nupedia's problem is that they couldn't convince enough experts to join. I don't think Digital Universe will fare much better. Part of the attraction of Wikipedia is that if you make a change, it occurs immediately. If we wanted our changes to take effect later, we'd all be submitting information to Encarta's editors.

Moreover, Wikipedia has a network effect slash brand recognition: I remember Fred Bauder's Internet-Encyclopedia (now called Wikinfo). It was a great idea, but people were using Wikipedia already, so meh, why bother? The original premise was to make the main article sympathetic-POV, and allow other POVs and other authorships in parallel articles. Nothing wrong with the idea, but he couldn't convince people to switch from Wikipedia.

I don't think Digital Universe will attract many seasoned Wikipedia contributors, and its design seems to make it worthless without a good public user base (since we know from Nupedia's story that experts-only contribution won't work).

Well...

[Bishop, Martin]

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...

Re:Well...

[afree87]

Exactly. Wikipedia is known for its long and annoying debates, but these debates do something important: they create a neutral point of view that presents all the important facts. If you have, say, a Turkish scholar write an article about Turkey, there's a good chance that the resulting article will skip over the less wonderful things Turkey has done.

Re:Well...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

No, it waters down the facts so that both sides can both concede. When talking about stuff thats highly debatable (conspiracies, politics, wars, etc) the truth is sometimes shocking and far from a "neautral point", and once you water it down to the point that the other half stops editing, its not always even worth reading anymore.

Hasn't Larry learned anything?

[brian0918]

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.

Are "The Aliens" buillding it for him?

[winkydink]

You know, the ones Joe saw in his hotel room one morning?

http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?9 90111.eifirmage.htm

For further information...

[martinX]

For further information, see the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Universe

"Silly" ideas are what make the Internet great

[typical]

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).

Re:Not a true Alternative

[slashdotnickname]

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.

Facts, not Truths.

[FooAtWFU]

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It does not intend to be a repository of truth, but of facts. If it's truth you're after, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.

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.