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. The experts are not the same people who are uploading the articles. Nor are they being "hired." The experts are people who meet a specific criteria (academically recognized - college professors) and (we hope) will be willing to volunteer their time to help spread free [accurate] knowledge. Also, the ads are Amazon.com ads, for books not like Google adsense where the ads are for other companies that would want to influence content.
Part of the point is that those cleanup issues get fixed. There are something like 85,000 articles tagged as needing general cleanup, more tagged as needing specific things and probably 10s of thousands that aren't tagged that still need cleanup - doing the work on Wikipedia before uploading means things like this as well as broken links and grammar/style issues get fixed.
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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.
The experts are not the same people who are uploading the articles. Nor are they being "hired." The experts are people who meet a specific criteria (academically recognized - college professors) and (we hope) will be willing to volunteer their time to help spread free [accurate] knowledge. Also, the ads are Amazon.com ads, for books not like Google adsense where the ads are for other companies that would want to influence content.
Part of the point is that those cleanup issues get fixed. There are something like 85,000 articles tagged as needing general cleanup, more tagged as needing specific things and probably 10s of thousands that aren't tagged that still need cleanup - doing the work on Wikipedia before uploading means things like this as well as broken links and grammar/style issues get fixed.