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."

Comments

Non-projects?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"non-projects"

I think I meant "non-profit projects". The compression methods of my brain occasionally go too far.

Has anyone noticed?

[hikaricloud]

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.

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. :D AWESOME.
- 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.

Re:English Teachers

[General Wesc]

An internet-only source is inherently less credible because it allows any Tom, Dick or Harry with an internet connection to edit it.

Really? I think I'm going to head over to Whitehouse.gov and fix up a few errors (read: lies). Then I think I'll inform Amazon.com that I'm the actual author of the Harry Potter books. (Okay, the Whitehouse isn't Internet-only, I guess, but even most that are aren't wikiwikiwebs.)

Re:Not so bright

[muffen]

Guess they should have done a bit more verofication.

(yea yea, a bit lame but c'mon, it's Monday!)

Re:Missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody understands me, you insensetive clod!

--Victor

Whoops

[goldcd]

down to 10th now... has any advert on \. ever actually caused a site to get 'less' popular before?

Re:Wikipedia-killer of the month?

[butterwise]

Dear fellow ./ers

dot-slashers? I'll have you know I have nothing but respect for the Department of Transportation...

Re:moving toward subject specific wikis

[Rob T Firefly]

"Wikipediae?"

Re:Missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there's this: http://veropedia.com/vero/article.php?title=Flying+Spagetti+Monster

[citation needed] vandalism, here we come ;)

[Moraelin]

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 ;)