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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."
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.
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.
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
(Disclaimer: I wrote a good portion of the code that powers Veropedia.)
Yes, there are dozens of sites that mirror Wikipedia with ads. Actually, more like thousands, and most of those don't even bother giving any attribution. Veropedia is different. Whereas all those other sites mirror the most recent revision, Veropedia mirrors a specific revision that has been identified as good. This is where the editorial discretion and quality control come in, making it qualitatively different than other mirrors. In addition, Veropedia has rather strict rules on what can be imported, so after finding an article that you want to import, you often have to spend a good amount of time on Wikipedia fixing all the problems in the article. This is good for both sites: Wikipedia gets improved, and Veropedia gets the best revision.
As for there being other projects aimed at identifying and vetting important Wikipedia articles, that's good, but you can never have too much improvement. There's always room for more people trying to fix up and improve Wikipedia. Whereas those other projects are non-profit, Veropedia aims to generate revenue using text ads, thus freeing us from the beggar's paradox of Wikipedia. It also gives us cash we can use to reinvest back into Wikipedia, something we have already started doing by sponsoring best article contests with cash prizes.
The wiki model is great for building up something from scratch, but once you reach a decent level of quality, it becomes difficult. Wiki rot, the accumulated negative influences of vandalism, biased edits, and poor quality edits, is a serious problem, and oftentimes the best version of an article was written years ago, and the author simply lost the patience to keep reverting and fighting off all of the lesser editors who have come since. Wikipedia has needed to go to a stable versions model for a long while, but has been dragging its butt for way too long. That's where Veropedia comes in.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable