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Stanford's Authoritative Alternative To Wikipedia
eldavojohn writes "For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia. It might even be considered closer to a peer-reviewed journal, since you have get submissions past a 120 person group of leading philosophers around the world, not to mention Stanford's administration. It has several layers of approval, but the authoritative model produces high quality content — even if it only amounts to 1,200 articles. Content you can read straight through to find everything pertinent — not hop around following link after link like the regular Wikipedia. You might question the need for this, but one of the originators says, 'Our model is authoritative. [Wikipedia's] model is one an academic isn't going to be attracted to. If you are a young academic, who might spend six months preparing a great article on Thomas Aquinas, you're not going to publish in a place where anyone can come along and change this.' The site has articles covering topics from Quantum Computing to technical luminaries like Kurt Friedrich Gödel and Alan Turing. The principal editor said, 'It's the natural thing to do. I'm surprised no one is doing it for the other disciplines.'"
I've sat in on several United States Armed Forces meeting where they were writing documentation for the software I was working on. A bunch of GS-12+ civilian employees arguing for half an hour over where the place the word 'the'. It's not just academics, you get any large enough group trying to compile a document at the same time and it's going to be a clusterfuck.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
There's room for -- and need for -- both this sort of site *and* for Wikipedia or something like it.
The article wants to cast this as some sort of competition, and tie into existing anti-wikipedia bias, but there's no particular reason that this is actually a zero-sum game.
In fact, Wikipedia's strength is partly in its policy of _never_ being authoritative. You want that, you follow the citations. And this is a great example of a site that Wikipedia can refer to.
I don't know if you're in a uni and what your field is, but as physics master I certainly can attest that 95% of 'teachers' in phys and math are like that. Perhaps it's related to the fact that I'm not in a top10 university, but I guesstimate this phenomena is widespread.