Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Begets Veropedia
Ponca City, We Love You writes "October saw the launch of Veropedia, a collaborative effort to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited. To qualify for inclusion in Veropedia, a Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images after which candidates for inclusion are reviewed by recognized academics and experts. One big difference with Wikipedia is that Veropedia is registered as a for profit corporation and earns money from advertising on the site. Veropedia is supposed to help improve the quality of Wikipedia because contributors must improve an article on Wikipedia, fixing up all the flaws, until a quality version can be imported to Veropedia. To date Veropedia contains about 3,800 articles."
1. Search the web
2. Take contents and clean it up (and suck some blood)
3. Profit!
:(){
So thats no atricles on politics or religion then?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
From Veropedia, based on Wikipedia Oops!
We couldn't find the article: slashdot
Click here to go back & try again.
More details:
Page not found: slashdot
Query: SELECT page_title, page_id FROM pages WHERE page_title="slashdot"
Redirect query: SELECT page.page_is_redirect,text.old_text FROM page,text,revision WHERE (revision.rev_page = page.page_id) AND (revision.rev_id = text.old_id) AND page.page_title = "slashdot" AND page.page_namespace = 0;
Veropedia is based on Wikipedia, a user-contributed encyclopedia.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
\u262D = \u5350
Is it just me, or isn't there a similar slashvertisement every month? Even though you'll have to wade through crap on Wikipedia occassionally, it is still vastly superior to any clone that is out there.
So, forever and ever, each version of the Veropedia will have errors, intentional or not.
And they'll make money.
CAPTCHA: feeble
Dozens of sites mirror Wikipedia with ads. This is nothing new. There are already legitimate non-projects aimed at identifying and vetting important Wikipedia articles for CD creation and distribution.
Why not use Wikipedia and just ignore articles that still have cleanup tags? With Veropedia, one must first wait until the article is completed, then wait until it's transferred. On Wikipedia, you just have to wait until it's completed. The only advantage I can see in using Veropedia is that you get a "Page not found" error instead of a "This article is in need of cleanup" when you come across an incomplete article... and I'm not sure that's really an advantage.
"non-projects"
I think I meant "non-profit projects". The compression methods of my brain occasionally go too far.
ilovegeorgebush
Wikipedia is a beautiful thing. I feel like it is being raped. With ad based for profit corporate charm
The question remains... will English Teachers/Professors view Veropedia as a valid source? I somehow doubt it as they seem to be in love with print sources (atleast from my experience).
davejenkins.com |
So Veropedia requires that everything be vetted by its own panel of "experts" prior to inclusion, and the whole thing is supported by advertisers. However, this brings up all the same arguments against advertising that came up on Wikipedia. Basically, how can Veropedia confirm, or does it even intend to confirm, that their advertisers will have no effect on the content of the articles published? How do we know that part of the job of the "experts" isn't to make sure that none of the articles published on Veropedia will contain any disparaging information about the advertisers?
Even if Veropedia is completely above board in this respect, the advertising will produce a perception of editorial slant in favor of the advertisers. This perception can be just as damaging to credibility as an actual slant would be.
Such a project is totally useless. Ten seconds of google search (the website was already down) led to an error: under Hydrogen, there is listed the origin "Latin: hydrogenium". Hydrogen was derived from French "hydrogene". Although the construction "hydrogenium" does exist, it's a rare (possibly obsolete?) usage that was coined in English to emphasize in certain contexts the metal-like properties of hydrogen. And oops, Wiktionary could have told them that: Wiktionary on Hydrogenium
Does this not defeat the point of Wikipedia, and will Wikipedia see any of the profits made? Why do we even need this site? It's just for some unimaginative loser to make some money whilst pretending to be behind the information for all ideals of Wikipedia!
Furthermore, is there an expert in every field working in this 12 year olds garage too? How can they vet sites and say that they are correct? Encylopedia Brittanca is incorrect in places and look at the people there! No citation needed, no bad link is the most feeble and unarticulated way of deciding if a page is 'correct'!
User changes are the way of Wikipedia, and they progess to make a page as correct and informative as it can be. Taking this away and telling everyone that this is the definitive page on the subject is not going to help at all. Wikipedia blocks pages that are prone to vandelism anyway... So really??? What is the point??? Money I guess... do these people have morals? Why don't they go open a for profit branch of Oxfam or something?
If one of the requirements is no dead links, what happens when a link goes dead after it's put in Veropedia?
Wasn't Nupedia basically the same thing, after Wikipedia was created?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Chuckle. You have to love this fake alternative-community lingo.
A collaborative effort: In regular English, "a collaborative effort" that is a business enterprise is known as a "company." I'll take away points because they missed the ever popular "grass roots."
written by Wikipedia contributors: Hopefully you won't notice that anybody can call themselves a "wikipedia contributor" so that means nothing. Nice touch how they try to spin it as if a garden-variety Wikipedia contributor is somehow better than an expert.
verofied: Oh, Colbert! What hast thou wrought?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I wonder why it took so long. But how long do they honestly think that it will work? Some hacker will make it his mission to wreak hell on veropedia, and soon it will be in the same state as the former. Not to say that wikipedia doesn't work on the average, but that it will be plagued with idiots who have nothing else to do.
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
Why do I need to have Javascript enabled to click on the Veropedia link in the top left to return to / ?
It's just annoying. Same as Wordpress: http://teapot.ekynoxe.com/
There is no earthly reason for needing Javascript for that. Dynamic, client-side stuff, sure.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Google search for "Veropedia", and the main website is 9th on the search results. In fact, this story is 3rd. Good job. I find that quite awesome.
:D AWESOME.
Few things I've noticed about this...thing.
- It's orange. Ugly ugly layout of orange. It actually makes me want to murder people.
- It only takes FOREVER to load. I've been loading it for the last 10 minutes.
- They have a link right on the sidebar (that has actually loaded) to donate to Wikipedia, saying "Support free knowledge! Donate to Wikipedia today!" Am I the only one that finds that slightly ironic?
- It still hasn't loaded.
- I think the servers are run by child labor because it is taking so long to load a single page.
- Oh wait. It seems it's not Safari friendly thanks to bastardized uneeded php scripts.
- Apparently Veropedia hates everyone that can't speak either English, Spanish, or French. Because that's the only languages I see on their site. Now to jump over to Wikipedia... I'm only FLOODED with languages.
- Apparently Christopher Reeve died on my birthday. Huh. What a strangely satisfying birthday gift. *cough*
All in all, this Veropedia is just capitilizing off Wikipedia's open source information. I seriously wonder if the ads on the site ONLY pay for hosting costs. Somehow, I highly doubt it.
Wikipedia forever. Less than 3.
There's a lot of fucked up shit on the internet. And I've downloaded it all.
I tried to click on the link, but Seamonkey is spinning while trying to load some amazon link? Maybe advertising is a bad idea?
The wiki is written by those who got in first, sucked Jimbo's cock the most, and got adminned.
Everything else flows from that point - the immense left-wing pressure for articles, the ridiculous whitewashing and removal of anything that is provably factual but 'looks bad' for certain religions...
I mean, come on. The page for the so-called "Oxford Capacity Analysis" doesn't even list properly the fact that it is in NO WAY connected to Oxford (despite the lies of $cientology scam recruiters when they use this blatantly false "test" on unwary victims).
And on the disambiguation page for OCA it's listed as "Technical" with the connection to $camintology not even mentioned.
And of course they completely ignore the destruction of Jewish archaeological relics by Palestinian "scientists"; undeniably proven when temple-era artifacts were unearthed from THE GARBAGE DUMP that the Muslims had shipped the items they were breaking to.
Well sure you might think of Wikipedia as a fad, question is if the ideals of community driven knowledge are also a fad. I think Wikipedia will fail economically before its ideals fails.
down to 10th now... has any advert on \. ever actually caused a site to get 'less' popular before?
IIRC one of the Wikipedia GFDL's terms is that anyone using the content of an article should include a link to the source (i.e. the original Wikipedia article), partly as an acceptable method of attributing the content's authors. This particular ${insert_name_here}opedia clone site doesn't seem to. (This is one reason why I've given up contributing to Wikipedia).
This particular site looks just like any other ${insert_name_here}opedia which clones Wikipedia content. They haven't landed on the GFDL Compliance page yet though...
the complete opposite of Conservapedia.
I predict this will be another one of those domains we will learn to skip in all google results, like experts-exchange or whatever that crap is, or answers.com. Just as looking at a wikipedia article often causes you to have to follow the source links at the bottom, looking at this will cause you to have to look up the wikipedia article.
The major flaw of the wikipedia isn't that ihas too much crap. It is that they throw out too much crap, lock articles, and generally restrict the amount of information going in.
Many of those articles that are thrown out as "vanity" articles, or having no relevance, or whatever, are stuff I would like to see. If the editors believe they are just internet garbage, they should simply tag them as such. The front page search could exclude those articles, and people such as me could select some option to include them.
There is this tendency about wiki-nazis to whorship some abstract idea of scholarship and authority, often embodied by the Britannica encyclopedia, and they feel they are struggling against unfair prejudice to get admission to the professor's smoking club or something. In fact this ideal of unbiased authoritative encyclopedic scholarship DOES NOT EXIST and HAS NEVER EXISTED. For proof, take your self to a good university library, which has access to older stuff in the stacks, and look up the Encyclopedia Brittanica article "Negro" for every decade starting at 1900's, 1910's, 1920's, etc.
The best an Encyclopedia Brittanica, or the Wikipedia if they continue there editorial idiocy, can be is a compendium of society's current "official" views. That's not very useful, and well handled by many other sources, so there is no need for the wikipedia to do that. However, a people-generated compendium can have much greater depth and breadth than the E.B. or others can, and seeded within it can be the kernels of truth that go against the grain of society, so that instead of simply re-enforcing what everybody already "knows" or believes, the wikipedia could be something that helped society.
Being a couple of gigabytes of "Whut he said" crap isn't useful. Trimming it down to a few hundred megabytes of "Whut he said" is even less useful.
I had that once. Couple rounds of penicillin cleared it up, though.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Veropedia: Pedia is the Greek leftover from Encyclopedia, and Vero is supposed to be from the Latin verum for "true". Of course, vero is also an adverb in Latin, meaning "but". as in, "This is from Wikipedia, but/em it's not Wikipedia". So, it's supposed to be true, but their title is a god-awful mix of Latin and Greek (cf. the word "Scientology"), and it doesn't mean what they think it means.
To qualify for inclusion in Veropedia, a Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images after which candidates for inclusion are reviewed by recognized academics and experts"
and that leaves them with what, exactly? the "About Us" page?
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Working for Veropedia without getting paid.
1) Create a free online encyclopedia "anyone can edit" because it will save the world;
2) With the help of the vast skills of millions of users, The Central Limit Theorem, The Law of Large Numbers, and The Wisdom of Crowds the seemingly random content mysteriously has useful value;
3) Take the most stable articles and create an online encyclopedia "anyone can buy advertising for" (including your dedicated contributors!);
4) ???
5) Profit!!!
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Are you suggesting that VA Software is biased in favor of Microsoft just because The Borg advertises both here and other VA Software properties?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Without non-free images, an encyclopedia can capture the state of the world as it existed on December 31, 1922. I don't see how a detailed article about, say, the movie industry (since the introduction of sound) or the video game industry can be written without identifying works that were created on or after January 1, 1923.
Hmmm - so much for lofty ideals. The second article I looked at on Veropedia ("Microsoft") contains a bunch of 'fair use' images of the Microsoft logo down in the gallery about two thirds the way down the page.
So much for careful screening, etc.
Now that they have a stable version that is static, the possibilities are endless. Conceivably, they could now print these things as books! I imagine this will be a lot of content, but they could split it up in to multiple books for each letter of the alphabet. That way, we can have access to this information 24/7 without the need of the Internet! Truly, amazing times we live in.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Since people own the content they create, is anyone sending DMCA takedown notices over articles they've contributed to?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Okay, so Wikipedia could conceivably do the same thing...and on top of it, have the open Wiki page along with the "certified" info page essentially alongside it.
Imagine going and looking up an article regarding Elephants on Wikipedia. You'd land on the the common wiki entry there, but there could be a banner header that has something to the effect "Check out the certified entry here." with some cute marketing graphic to boot. The link takes you to a non-editable article on the exact same subject, and there's a link to a form to submit suggestions about the article to the official keepers of the "certified" information.
Are there bugs to iron out? Sure. The point is that if Wikipedia wanted to do such a model and run it side-by-side with the classic Wikipedia, they are in one very good position to do so at this point.
They're reversing direction. The idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit seems to be too much of a problem, so they're doing a silly little dance to get around the fact that now they're hiring a staff, implementing a hierarchy and control procedures, and publishing a finalized product...... just like Encyclopedia Brittanica does, but without academic titles behind the articles.
technical writing / development
Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images
I'm not sure of the last time I saw a wikipedia article that didn't have one of those.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
As I write this, I'm using Kubuntu. It's made by a for-profit corporation (Canonical) who have pieced together a number of GNU (and other) licensed packages that were freely available to create a distribution. And people love it, they rave about it.
It does the job people want from an OS.
Sure, you could piece this stuff all together yourself. You could gather all the pieces of software you need, you could build them. You could check for outstanding bugs and backport fixes from the CVS version. You could integrate them nicely together to create a useable system. You could create an installable live CD to whack this down onto your computers when required. And you could continue to monitor all the upstream Free-licensed packages you've used to backport further security updates and bugfixes. But who wants to do all that work? The Free-licensed upstream is there alright - and it's valuable that you could access it directly - that anybody could do this if they wanted to, or if they needed to. But getting all the upstream packages in a good state; doing QA on them; checking they all work well together - that's a lot of work that you don't want to do unless you have specific needs. Thanks to the efforts of Canonical, I largely don't need to deal with upstream. If I want, I can send them patches, compile new versions from CVS, etc - but mostly I just leave the minutiae to the package maintainers.
The beauty of it is, If I don't like the job they do, I can still go upstream. I'm still Free because everything I'm using is open to me. I'm just getting someone else to do the grunt work. If they don't do a good enough job for me, I have options. I can choose to do it myself - I can compile apps on my Ubuntu system if I don't like the Ubuntu packages. I can build my own distro from scratch. Or I can switch to another distribution. I could switch to OpenSuse, say - it's also put together largely by a corporation in a similar manner. Or I could switch to something largely community driven like Debian. They have different focuses: up-to-date vs very strictly QA-ed, general purpose vs specialised. I'm spoilt for choice!
What's this got to do with Wikipedia vs Veropedia? Well, how about we substitute "package" with "article"? Wikipedia is the "upstream" provider of Free licensed content. What people are calling "vampire" sites are actually distributions of Wikipedia, just as Ubuntu is a distribution of GNU/Linux and related code. Some of them are just repackaging Wikipedia content in a more-or-less friendly UI and raising money through advertising. They have the right to do that, just as they have the right not to contribute anything back upstream themselves: the Free licenses don't force you to be a very good citizen. This situation is familiar from Free Software - we might not all approve of Xandros or Novell's deals with MS but they're still free to use the Free code as long as they stick to the license.
Which brings us to Veropedia. It's a new up-and-coming distribution of Wikipedia. It's small at the moment but growing. They're taking Wikipedia content and attempting to add value by doing some of the QA and integration work themselves, rather than leaving you to do it: they're trying to ensure quality articles are immediately available to users, without their having to check references, do mental sanity checks on the information, be generally skeptical. Just like the Linux distributions, they're doing some of the work that Freedom allows you to do, on your behalf. They're taking something you could already get for Free and they're making money (from ads in this case) in order to cover their costs - but they're trying to add something on the way. Doe
"Wikipedia has needed to go to a stable versions model for a long while, but has been dragging its butt for way too long."
This is no reason to fork. The "stable version" addition to Mediawiki has been discussed for quite a while now, and is definitely feasible. When articles reach a certain quality, they can be protected so that certain editors (such as IP editors or week-old accounts) can still make changes, but those changes will not be visible until approved by an administrator. There will essentially be a stable live version, and an unstable edited version.
How do they plan to maintain ad revenue? Given Wiki's license any site could mirror an ad free version, and let Veripedia do all the leg work and then siphon off users by offering an ad free experience.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I wonder if they played the funeral march with a slight variation - repeating the last phrase louder, and raised by a jaunty (major 5th?) interval?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
This reminds me a bit of when CDDB became Gracenote.
--
Toro
I don't see an article history or any hint who wrote the article on Wikipedia. This is clearly a violation of the GFDL.
It's gonna suck then... most articles that are worth reading on wikipedia have tons of disambugations...
While wikipedia certainly has it's flaws, at it's heart, the core concepts and ideals are sound.
Yes, content can be vandalised, erroneous facts can be added, political motivation can play a part in content, BUT...
Isn't this the very nature of human knowledge?
If anything, Wikipedia simply mirrors how human knowledge is documented and spread, albiet at a MUCH faster pace than old traditional methods.
The beauty here, specifically for knowledge that is still being sought, or liable to change, is that the changes to the entries can be made AS these events happen.
An encyclopedia is often a starting point for research and should never be used as a single source of information. This has always been the case.
The veropedia model is fundamentally flawed, to quote:-
"clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited."
Ok, who is going to vet it?
Do we trust them?
Right, so it can no longer be edited after being vetted, so if there's a mistake, who can fix it?
Effectively, this takes the concept of an online encyclopedia back a step, we've lost the single key concept that makes Wikipedia so special - the ability for ANYONE to edit content.
I doubt we need to worry much about Veropedia however, as Wikipedia is firmly entrenched in the public mindset and indeed the WWW.
Long live Wikipedia, for all it's flaws or perhaps because of them - we are just human, after all...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Does this not defeat the point of Wikipedia, and will Wikipedia see any of the profits made?
This does not defeat the purpose of Wikipedia, as Wikipedia allows other sites to reuse the Wikipedia content. Veropedia is not required to donate profits back to Wikipedia. However, Veropedia is offering to contribute content back to Wikipedia, unlike many sites which resell Wikipedia content.
The Wikipedia founders chose a content license which allows free distribution and reproduction of the content. During the discussions to choose the license, the founders were made fully aware of most ramifications of this license. I'm sure the founders were perfectly aware that sites like Veropedia might spring up and try to resell the content. They could have chosen a more restrictive content license which *didn't* allow free distribution and reproduction, or which required a percentage of profits to be given back to Wikipedia. In face of these questions, they still chose this particular content license, which means they don't have any major problems when other sites reproduce the Wikipedia content.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Thank goodness! Now we'll have yet another source of officially sanitized bullshit with "experts" and "academics" telling us what to think.
I'm sure that there are exceptions, but the Wikipedia articles that pertain to topics in hard science, mathematics, etc. don't usually contain "disputed" content or missing references. If someone has misrepresented Newton's laws or Euclidean geometry in an article, it's not going to survive long.
You typically see persisting dispute or "citation needed" on articles pertaining to history, religion, politics, etc. When it comes to topics that are inherently subjective, why is the bias of a "recognized expert" superior to the bias of a collection of people participating in the writing of the article? I'd much rather read content with full knowledge that some of the "facts" are disputed, or require references than to read something presented as the unbiased "truth" just because some "expert" or "academic" gave it a seal of approval.
Let the experts and academics spew their regurgitated crap through the major publishing houses and mainstream media outlets. Leave the Wikipedia's of the world to a plurality of interested amateurs.
"Begets" I (a non-English-speaker) thought that sort of language is only used in Bible-translations ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
My idea of a better approach for Wikipedia would be to have "tiers" of verification that would be kind of like a stack for a given article title. The bottom tier would be articles edited by users who are not logged in. The next tier up would be edited by people who login but have not been verified or vetted, themselves. Further up the ladder would be those who have a history of article editing with no significant issues. Still further would those edited by people who have been specially vetted, although do not have significant credentials. Above them would be editors with major credentials within a subject area (a professor of chemistry would not be considered to have credentials in religious studies). One more top tier would be those who run Wikipedia itself, or are members of a review board. There might be as many as 8 or 9 tiers.
For any article, a visitor can see any tier level. A generated (not edited) box at the top or side of the page would list all the tier levels available that different from the tier being viewed, and their date of last edit, and in cases of tiers edited since the current view, how many edits since the current view was edited. The default view for users who are not logged in is the highest tier available. Logged in users can customize what tier to view, and whether to go up or down if their default tier is absent. Anyone can click on any tier to view that tier. Articles can also be watched for changes by tier.
I believe this approach would give people the opportunity to select the level of verification they feel is right for them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Do a blank search...
http://veropedia.com/vero/article.php?title=
Pretty sure that sort of thing should be avoided.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
The Old Model:
Truth is absolute, and come to believe truth's we do not personally verify when they come from respected sources like Encyclopedias or the Bible.
The New Model:
Truth is relative, and only through a personal exploration of the subject can we understand it. We know Wikipedia is prone to errors, so we check it's references and page histories thereby seeing more information. By evaluating all of this we form our own opinion of the truth.
Veropedia is a step backwards. Their use of a latin word in their name is an appeal to authority indicative of their misunderstanding of this era.
The issue I tend to take with people talking down Wikipedia is that there are very few true "primary sources". Virtually all sources end up being "mostly likely to be accurate" sources. Research tends to be a lot like security. How valuable is what you are trying to protect vs. how much money does it cost to protect it. With research, it becomes how important is it to be accurate vs. how much time do you want to spend researching it. Of course when it comes to research in anything that is not a hard science, as often as not, Wikipedia is as good a source as one can find.
Besides we all know that....
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Patent Office, 1899
On second thought perhaps our understanding of the world is not perfect and people in the future would look at our view of the world as backward and deeply flawed as we view most reasoning we have discarded.
The real purpose of this site seems to be a attempt to control what people think and make sure it conforms to one coherent view of reality, their own.
I'M BLIND!
Hmmm... Veripidia should not be outputting things like this: More details: Page not found: sam_adams Query: SELECT page_title, page_id FROM pages WHERE page_title="sam_adams" Redirect query: SELECT page.page_is_redirect,text.old_text FROM page,text,revision WHERE (revision.rev_page = page.page_id) AND (revision.rev_id = text.old_id) AND page.page_title = "sam_adams" AND page.page_namespace = 0; I should add it as an example of what not to do on the wikipedia article for SQL injection.
The interesting point of your comment is that Veropedia leaches from Wikipedia, just like Ubuntu leaches from Debian. Ubuntu has only had a minimal positive impact on Debian, and I won't keep my hopes up that Veropedia will actually produce anything useful.
Your analogy is only valid as long as Veropedia is sponsored by a space-loving billionaire. Canonical is nowhere near break-even, and likely never will be.
Well, I wish the best of luck to them if they want to stick to only articles with "no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images" before even considering them for review.
;)
Already the average article on Wikipedia looks somewhat like this:
"Twenty-sided dice have by definition 20 sides [citation needed], meaning that they're Icosahedron-shaped [citation needed]. They're used as dice in many tabletop role-playeing systems [citation needed], such as the D20 system [citation needed] developped originally by Wizards Of The Coast [citation needed] for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. [citation needed] The Source Reference Document first edition states [citation needed]: 'You'll use twenty-sided dice for most rolls to determine the success or failure of an action.'[citation needed]"
That is, unless someone _also_ decided to flag it NPOV because it said "have 20 sides" instead of "are believed by many people to have 20 sides", or conversely flagged it as weasel wording if it did say "are believed by many people to have 20 sides".
Mind you, that's a made up quote, but it has the right "feel" to show what I mean. Some articles look genuinely like that.
I'd be tempted to see that as another form of vandalism, but then I remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I mean, I'd normally say noone is so stupid as to stamp a quote with "citation needed" in good faith, but... each time I assumed something like that about any action, someone selflessly volunteered to prove that indeed people can be even more stupid. The Darwin Awards are full of such selfless people, for a start
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...is that there exist far more wikis than the three that are indexed on Wikindex(MediaWiki, TikiWiki, and DekiWiki [whatever the hell that one is!]). How can you possibly derive "major trends" from such a small sample space?
BTW, if I'm mistaken about this, then the interface isn't really that intuitive, because all I see are three links, each associated with what appears to be a count, which also happens to correspond to the number of total wikis being paged.
Brilliant! If we don't edit the article then the external links can never break! That's how the internet works right?
I'm going to clean up a wikipedia entry for free so someone else can make money off it?
And they're going to make money off it, by making people suffer advertising to see the cleaned up article?
No thanks, I'll just stick to regular wikipedia thanks, even with its warts its a hell of a lot less beastly than this idea.
I would mod YOU insightful.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
All we need now is a Truthipedia to collect the worst of Wikipedia's partisan edit wars and lunatic fringe theories demanding equal consideration under POV rules.
Anyway, another truly profound misunderstanding of why Wikipedia is useful: all compendia of knowledge are full of bullshit, "expert" vetting can do nothing to prevent that. But, with Wikipedia you can see who and why stuck any particular instance of bullshit in there - that makes all the difference.
sic transit gloria mundi
I welcome your attempt. Here are my three points of criticism:
1. Advertising. This will kill you. Encyclopedias and advertising do not go together.
2. The name. A name including a reference to truth smacks of arrogance. There is no truth, just approximations of it.
3. There does not seem to be any link back to the same article on Wikipedia. People will still want to edit what they read. Fair enough they can't do it on your version but they should be directed back to where they can.
Why isn't there a link from your site main page to Wikipedia's ?
Ran out of mod points myself, but this post deserves some attention.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
they should use conservapedia (the trusworthy encyclopedia) as their foundation rather than the liberally biased wikipedia.
Why is it that every wiki software has to reinvent the version control system? why not use existing, proven version control systems (Mecurial, Bzr, git, SVN, Darcs, etc) and maintain wikis, including wikipedia, like software source code? you know, with unstable development branches, a stable verified branch, maybe even a 'testing' branch that automatically receives tested^H^H^H^H^H^H verified copies of unstable pages. (yes, I'm a Debian user)
Think about it, instead of creating whole websites devoted to a single new branch, you just run 'bzr branch en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo', work on you're branch & push it to unstable. Editors take the place of testers, they're responsible for verifying and pushing changes into stable. Sure, 'bugs' in an encyclopedia aren't as cut'n'dry as bugs in software, but if this process can produce software as stable as Debian, surely it could produce a 'stable' encyclopedia. Yeah it'll be 2 years out of date, but when people start bitching about something they don't like, they can just make their own little branch that satisfys their personal world-view.
now, where did I leave that copy of the moinmoin source.....
I propose an even newer site concept reallyveropedia.org. Unlike veropedia, this sites articles will be checked for accuracy not once, but *twice*
I am amazed by the complete lack of insight of some entrepreneurs.
A for-profit enterprise can earn money in either or both of these two ways: 1) using inefficiencies of the free market to make money (which couldn't make in a truly free market) and 2) providing useful products and services and keeping clients, customers, and suppliers happy, while maintaining peaceful coexistence with competitors.
Most companies today go by way 1 as described above... where by inefficiencies I mean such things like lack of communication (especially between consumers, eg a shop in road A may sell shoes for 150 euros while a shop in road B may sell them for only 100 euros, then in a free market only the second shop would get customers but in reality today shops like the first shop in my example can still get customers because not everyone knows about the second shop), psychological irrational factors (higher price === better product!), evil government regulation (copyright and patents being a good example of the creation of government-backed monopolies), the lack of an enforced code of ethics in the marketplace, etc).
Successful companies must also find a way of doing business which is difficult to imitate by competitors. In Veropedia's case, their business model can be imitated very easily.
If Veropedia is the pet project of some Wikipedia/Wikimedia admins to help them raise some more money either for Wikipedia or for themselves without much work that's ok. But if they believe they can use it to become rich then that would be difficult.
I have thought of non-imitable ethical ways of running for-profit enterprises using Wikipedia's content (and if you are interesting I'm open to business partners). Practically speaking, the magic ingredient of a successful business today is in its community rather than its content. A business can be successful just by persuading a group of interesting people to join together in a physical or virtual place, then relying on them as seeds of gravity for attracting other interesting people within the group. That's how all successful Internet projects have won their place in our bookmarks, folks: Slashdot, eBay, GNU (the userland), Linux (the kernel), Second Life, Wikipedia itself.
Even if you collect the most interesting content of the world on a website, it will fail if you don't create a passionate community around it. It's the people that count, not pieces of text or images.
Even in adult entertainment, where the content is of extreme importance, the sites that have been more successful are those that created communities.
The most primitive and least effective way of approximating a community around your product is to get famous, for example by announcing your product to the media. As people who watch the same media learn about your product, they start to discuss it, and a crude form of a community is born around your product. This can help create some profits early on, but it is not sustainable as it is not a real community.
The way to create a passionate community is to engage and trust your customers, users, and suppliers. You must allow them to participate within the very heart of your own business.
If I understood Veropedia's business model correctly, it is that it will select some good articles from Wikipedia and serve them from its own server. I don't see any community building going on. Ok, I visited Veropedia's webpage so I am now one of their users... How can I participate? How can I engage with the articles? Can I meet other interesting people through their site? Can I discuss? Can I get entertainment? Can I get a sense of being useful to society? Can I project my creativity energy through their site? Can I fulfil myself and self-realise by using their site? I only see a notice in their FAQ that Veropedia was created by trusted Wikipedia editors and that if one wants to join them can send them an email and explain their contributions to free knowledge. I don't see this as a serious well-thought att
Veropedia is not positionned as a killer.
/.ers have regularly pointed out the main : the smallest modification in Wikipedia goes straight to the million of everyday users, whereas with almost any other project there's a CVS / alpha / beta / rc /stable cycle. Lots of readers have mentioned that wikipedia should split such stable / devel branches.
In fact, it *needs* Wikipedia.
It's basically just a "stable / production ready" version of the much more active but also sometimes vandalised Wikipedia.
Think of Wikipedia as the CVS and Veropedia as the nice shiny shrink-wrapped commercial box distributing a stable version of the same software.
Think of Wikipedia as Debian/Sid and Veropedia as the Debian/Stable.
People have regularly whined on the web that the open-source model doesn't seem to work for wikipedia. Some of us
Maybe Wikimedia and Jimmy Wales failed to do it themselves, but Veropedia is bringing just that : a stable and trusty version that has been expert reviewed.
Most of the other "wikipedia-killer du jour" have failed, because the didn't recognize the fact that a unimaginable amount of time and effort has went into Wikipedia. And to create "yet another on-line encyclopaedia", they'll have to duplicate all this work, which is hard and takes a lot of time specially when done by a small group of experts instead of several thousands of web users.
Veropedia creators have realised this, and as stated in their FAQ they don't aim at recreating another Citizendum, they only try to vet pages and produce a stable version. The actual content development will still be done in wikipedia. With modifications being continually imported into Veropedia.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, I'd say it's not "just like" that. Ubuntu doesn't have a policy of implementing all improvements in the upstream source as part of the process of importing those improvements to Ubuntu. Veropedia apparently does, which means Wikipedia (should) automatically benefit from any useful work they do.
Your analogy is only valid as long as Veropedia is sponsored by a space-loving billionaire. Canonical is nowhere near break-even, and likely never will be.Well, I'd say it's equally valid when applied to e.g. Debian as the downstream of Linux + glibc + gcc + openssh ... The point I really wanted to make was that having a downstream distributor of code / media / encyclopedia articles isn't an inherently bad thing if they produce some kind of value-add and they act as good citizens in contributing appropriate resources (information, proof reading, bugfixes, server hardware, new users) to the upstream. It's possible in principle for both sides to benefit and we've already seen this happen in OSS software many times.
Of course, whether Veropedia live up to their lofty claims or turn out to be leeches and bad citizens (or even whether they're successful longterm or not) still remains to be seen. But I think the idea of downstream "distributions" based on wikipedia should eventually be sustainable and beneficial to both end-users and the wikipedia upstream.
In summary, what I really meant to say was: leeches are inherent in Free information, be it software projects or an encyclopedia. But what you get in compensation (aside from freely available information) is the potential to specialise and collaborate on that information with other parties who have different goals. This is what Linux distributors do for the upstream code, and it's what I hope we'll see people doing with wikipedia. Maybe I'm just an idealist, but I think it's doable - a guy can dream ;-)
Well I did something very interesting with quote tags there. Ah well :) I hope somebody finds it worth while to puzzle through all the blocking :-)
Though I agree that a snapshot of stable hi-quality Wikipedia articles is a good idea, the mentioned "fixing up all the flaws" and "version that cannot be edited" ideas seem about as misguided as can be. Here's what people who complain about the validity of Wikipedia don't get:
There is no such thing as the perfect version.
End of story. That doesn't mean that the pursuit of perfection is bad, but that's the point: it's a pursuit, and by definition a locked down version is stagnant and is no longer pursuing anything. For some articles that may be okay, but for many (most?) what makes Wikipedia's articles work is that they are editable. The benefits of adaptability outweigh the benefits of correctness, for many domains and uses.
It just weirds me out that so many people still don't get it. Oh well.
Cheers.
Yeah, that's right. What part of "Rather than ask for donations from our primary target audience of teachers and students, we believe that unobtrusive advertising is preferred.. the money earned will be used to keep this site alive and vibrant, to sponsor contests to improve content, and to support other efforts to bring high quality free content to people everywhere" don't you understand? Perhaps you missed the prominent link urging people to donate to the WMF on the main page of the site?
And who says that it's "someone else's work"? Almost all the articles I uploaded were fixed by myself, and almost all of them got FA status.
Obviously you didn't read the FAQ. The site is excellent because to upload to Veropedia, you need to have quality work. If you can't find a quality revision, then you must work on the article, then upload it.
Exploiting Wikipedia? I think not.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.