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!
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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.
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
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?
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.
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.
down to 10th now... has any advert on \. ever actually caused a site to get 'less' popular before?
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.
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.
You want to find sensible, rational, no-nonsense Muslims? Go search for the majority of non-Wahhabi ones. This is all there is to it.
You want a way to stop the spread of Wahhabism? Well, that's trickier, since USA's (previously the British Empire's) financial and political support for the House of Saud is the most direct cause (other than the House itself) for its prosperity. Think of ways to break this relationship and you're set.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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.
After the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, and during the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, plenty of Jewish and Christian holy sites were destroyed. Similarly, after the Muslim conquest of parts of the Indian subcontinent, plenty of Hindu sites were defaced. These events happened well before the rise of your 18-century heresy. Thinking that it is just Wahhabi followers who are that extreme is foolish, for a great deal more streams in Islam do the same.
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 !
Among Jews this used to happen some millennia back, at the time they had power to actually go around destroying idols and temples from other religions, as the Bible records extensively.
Among Christians, this trend appeared in the first centuries, first against Greek and Roman imagery, then among Constantinopolitan Christians themselves, then some centuries later it reappeared among Protestants towards Catholic imagery, a sentiment that resurfaces now and then among Evangelicals. But no matter what, it always ends up being condemned by the majority of Christians.
And Muslims are no exception to the rule. They had their fair share of iconoclasm too, for sure. But as with Christians, in the end this ends up condemned by the majority of Muslims. Currently, the only actively Muslims iconoclasts are the Wahhabi. And the majority of common-sensical Muslims condemn them, as expected.
Wahhabism is the enemy. Not Islam in general.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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.
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.
Indeed, that's part of the entire point of the slavery rite of Islam (known as dhimmi, sometimes referred to as "dhimmitude") towards those nonbelievers they "allow" to live in Islamic states.
Can't practice your religion openly, can't tell others about it, can't expand your places of worship, can't even rebuild if they "happen" to be destroyed by an "accidental" fire...
Oh, but if you tell Muslims they aren't allowed to practice in your lands? SAVAGERY! WE MUST MAKE JIHAD ON YOU!
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.
Besides, "to run as they see fit" doesn't mean "destroying other's religious sites and artifacts". It means "as they see fit". If they "see fit" to preserve these things, as most Muslims did for more than 1500 years on most places they ruled, that's exactly what they'll do. Otherwise, no. Both options are just that: options. There's no strict rule determining for one or the other to be selected.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.