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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."
So thats no atricles on politics or religion then?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
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.
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?
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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).
No. The fact that wiki is user editable is not the reason professors dislike it. It's because wiki is an encyclopedia. While an encyclopedia is a fine place to get background on a research project, it isn't a primary source and hence isn't citable. Note that the same is true for Britannica.
The point of a research project/paper isn't to provide a regurgitation summary. It's to come up with your own angle on a topic based on original evidence, which isn't something one can glean from an encyclopedia synopsis.
If you're out of middle school, you shouldn't be citing encyclopedias.
OTOH , if I am writing about some political or historical person for some paper, i must be VERy careful with Wiki, because of vandalism, bias, everchanging "facts" and so on. In this case some "official" encyclopedia uses to be (often) a lot more neutral (because official encyclopediae have neutrality as a global goal).... So bring the new one on.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
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.
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.)
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 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.
Veropedia exists because all of those promises of stable versions failed to materialize. I was present at a backroom discussion at Wikimania in August 2006 at Harvard Law School. All of the English Wikipedia bigwigs were there, including Jimmy Wales. They promised that stable versions were right around the corner. Well, it's been a year and months since then, and little progress has been made. How long are you willing to just sit around until someone else fixes something when you can do something about it yourself? Yes, stable versions on Wikipedia is a great idea. They've also been in discussion for years, so don't hold your breath.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
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 !