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Digital Universe a Wikipedia Alternative

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the check-your-submissions dept.

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.""

8 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. What's their motto? by Spazntwich · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:What's their motto? by Artifakt · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?
  2. Well... by Bishop,+Martin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Well... by afree87 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Hasn't Larry learned anything? by brian0918 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. For further information... by martinX · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."
  5. "Silly" ideas are what make the Internet great by typical · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:I don't get it by Larry+Sanger · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.