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

Not so bright

[Arthur B.]

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.

And?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that we see the natural continuation of information repositories like Wikipedia. Actually, it's probably easier to look at the development of programming languages to find out what's going on here. The major difference between Veropedia and Wikipedia is that Veropedia is essentially a layer of abstraction on top of the existing Wikipedia platform. To Veropedia, Wikipedia is essentially a big bucket of non-presentable information that needs to be modified in order to be usable. Similar to how Python masks out all of the things you can do with C and thereby allows you to easily make new programs without writing a lot of code.
 
You didn't think Wikipedia was going to last forever, did you? Surely, the information inside of Wikipedia will be here for a very long time, but I'm certain that eventually the site itself is going to be completely superseded by a new one that simply uses its information in a different or more useful way. (Although, Veropedia is perhaps not that site.)

Re:And?

[Ignorant Aardvark]

This sounds unlikely. You mirror a specific edit that an expert identifies as good? So what does the expert do, go through each version of an article until he finds one that is both factually accurate and comprehensive? Or does the expert simply tell you which sentences are inaccurate, and then you delete them? The result will be a hacked-up article lacking flow and depth.

Once you get a hang for using the History tool on Wikipedia, you'll see that you can go through vast swaths of the article's history with relative ease. It's not nearly as tedious as having to read each specific revision one by one. Looking at the diffs really helps. Veropedia encourages all of its contributors to edit Wikipedia (and indeed, tens of thousands of edits on Wikipedia are now directly attributable to fixing up articles for import to Veropedia). I don't see why the article would appear to be hacked up and lacking flow and depth, any more so than regular editing would. We're all veteran Wikipedia editors. We're not just hacking up articles poorly.

Wikipedia is one project with many editors. Veropedia is one of many subprojects, each with few editors; given a finite (and likely small) number of people interested in working on this, you are providing yet another outlet for people to essentially reinvent the wheel by once again vetting the same set of Wikipedia articles for your own encyclopedia. Instead of everyone working together to produce a profitable, accurate subset of Wikipedia articles, users are stuck signing up with one of many subprojects, to do the exact same tasks as the other subprojects.

The difference is, none of the edits are made on Veropedia proper. They are made on Wikipedia, and then that version is imported to Veropedia. So it's not really a division of labor. Wikipedia is still getting all of the fruits of our labors. I don't see how we're reinventing the wheel by "once again vetting articles". As far as I know, there's no one else doing what we're doing. Citizendium, for instance, does have vetting, but it is a fork rather than a stable versions layer. And it's not like our work isn't available under the exact same license that everything else on Wikipedia is available under (it has to be!). So the work we do to improve articles is immediately usable by everyone. So I really don't see any wasted efforts - any other sites working on vetting can simply use the cleaned up versions of articles that we've made, and likewise, we can use theirs.

English Teachers

[Tacobowl8]

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).

Re:English Teachers

[ducomputergeek]

One of the problems with Wikipedia is that the content can change and change rapidly. Today an article may say "XYZ". Tomorrow it maybe, "AQY". So if I went to check the figure or fact a student placed in a paper...

Do professors do this? I don't know, I'm only a TA, most of the time the answer is no. I don't go check every fact and figure, but rather check that they cited the fact or figure. Everyonce in a while a student turns something up that's interesting. That catches my eye, usually because it may have some relavance to something I am working on, and will go and verify the sources.

Even if the student cites a questionable source/study/number, if I can go check it and I say, yeah that's where they got the numbers/information from. With print articles, I can go and retrieve the article and check to make sure the student isn't just making something up.

With Wikipedia, yeah I can go and look it up, but will it be the same as it was when the student looked at it? On most things, yeah, probably, but on some subjects....

Really the same goes for the internet as a whole. Back when I was an undergrad, most profs let us cite at most two sources from the internet for the same reasons. It used to tick me off being a techie-geek back then, but six years later when I went back for a masters, it makes a lot more sense.

Re:Why?

[damaki]

Because there is no way to tell if an article is "good". There is no version freeze tag. One who has no knowledge about a subject cannot be sure that the content is not totally wrong.
It could be easily worked around with some kind of "stable version" tag, to get the lastest certified version, or to get a specific link about a version used in a publication. A "stable only" option in search would be really great. The only issue with such a system is to get a really neutral authority.

moving toward subject specific wikis

[davejenkins]

We started http://wikindex.com/ a while ago to see which wikis were big, and we have noticed some major trends:

• subject specific wikis (protein biology, Asian travel, etc) are much more vibrant (where vibrancy is measured as the ratio of updates to total pages)
  
• fictional universe wikis are insanely popular - Memory Alpha (The Star Trek wiki) beats all but a handful of the european language wikipediae, and the battlesar galactica wiki is even bigger.
  
• wikis are the new bulletin boards - TV shows are using them for all the complex character backfill. Have you lost track in "24" or "Lost"? Try the wiki, it's aaaalll in there.
  

Useless; error-filled

[Xerxes314]

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

Veropedia: Part of your healthy lifestyle

[xigxag]

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?

"and no fair use images"

[tepples]

From the FAQ:

The scope of fair use in Wikipedia has always been the subject of heated debate. We have decided to avoid that debate and go back to the core principles of the project by focusing on free content. Only by insisting on free content can we revert the current trend of extending copyright and encourage people to release their content to the public.

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.

No need to fork, just add mediawiki features

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"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.

Re:No need to fork, just add mediawiki features

[DerekLyons]

Note: This is a general comment, not particularly aimed at Ignorant Aardvark, just riffing off the points he raises.
 

How long are you willing to just sit around until someone else fixes something when you can do something about it yourself?

Is that not the whole point of the Wiki philosophy espoused by Wikipedia? If you see a problem, you are not only able but you are encouraged to go ahead and fix it. Is that not the whole point of the GNU Free Documentation License - to give anyone who chooses to do so the freedom to distribute and/or fork the material so licensed?
 
It is very interesting to see the response of folks when someone actually chooses to exercise these explicitly stated philosophies and rights. So far, here on Slashdot, it is almost universally negative. Which actually is pretty depressing.

Deja vu

[Torodung]

This reminds me a bit of when CDDB became Gracenote.

--
Toro

Violation of GFDL

[tmk]

I don't see an article history or any hint who wrote the article on Wikipedia. This is clearly a violation of the GFDL.

"recognized academics and experts"

[moeinvt]

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.