if you read both articles, the most damning thing is that the 6 or so paragraphs cover the same parts of his life in the same order.
but in it's defense, there are only so many ways you can say "X owns Y" "X was a senator" "X has 5 kids".
I'd vote it wasn't plagarism because you can't plagarise facts, and both the other sites are very to-the-point.
You can't copyright facts. But you can plagiarize text which consists solely of facts. If you copy something from another source, even if you paraphrase it, and even if it is public domain, you are still supposed to clearly acknowledge that source.
There's more fluff, so it reads differently, but the same facts are there. It's not a copy-paste job, but it looks like the wikipedia article writer only read one source getting his facts, and then wrote it in his own words.
Well, I doubt either of the two locations I presented was the original. More likely *both* texts were plagiarized. Also, if you look at the history, you'll see that the major changes were made *after* the copying. This is something that happens in Wikipedia all the time. Someone plagiarises something, and then someone comes in after them and changes around a couple words. This doesn't resolve the plagiarism, but it does make it harder to detect.
I think Wikipedia should strongly consider tightening its citation policy. Every time anyone adds *anything* of substance they should be revealing their source in the edit summary. This way if someone comes back later and claims plagiarism it is much easier to show strong evidence otherwise. Wikipedia should have a much *higher* standard than newspapers - almost as high as an academic paper.
But hey, I'm not Jimmy Wales, and he obviously has his own way of doing things. I'd say at least Jimmy's style has gotten him this far, but up until a few months ago he basically sat back and let the community do whatever it wanted - it's not until recently he began screwing everything up.
"Davis, who now lives lives in the rural Fentress County village of Pall Mall, also owns a construction business, Diversified Construction Co., which builds homes, apartments and offices. Davis and his wife Lynda, an elementary school teacher, have three daughters, Larissa, Lynn and Libby, and five grandchildren, Ashton, Alexia, Andrew, Austin and Adam."
"Davis, who lives in Pall Mall, also started a construction business, Diversified Construction Co., which builds homes, apartments and offices. With his business, he has provided jobs and opportunities for decades in the same district he serves.-more-
Davis and his wife, Lynda, an elementary school teacher, have three daughters, Larissa, Lynn and Libby, and five grandchildren, Ashton, Alexia, Andrew, Austin and Adam."
Why is it that you consider getting caught to be the greater sin? Have you been watching too many heist movies and they have given you the impression that crime is ok as long as you dont get caught?
Some crimes are worse than others. Failing to cite sources in a newspaper is pretty low on the totem pole.
If you notice plagiarism on Wikipedia, you can delete it at once.
And someone else can add it right back.
Think that'd never happen? I've personally witnessed *Wikipedia admins* who have argued that it's perfectly OK to copy something from another source, change around a few words, and not even bother acknowledging that source. In fact, one of them told me I must not write a lot, because this is how things are supposed to be done.
I've submitted a few high quality stories to slashdot - relevant,
I think you've hit on the problem exactly. But the solution is more difficult. I imagine Slashdot must be receiving way too many submissions to be able to take a good look at all of them. So submissions like yours slip through.
Limiting submissions could help, but "Beatles Beatles" apparently only submits an average of 4.2 submissions a day. A limit of 1 submission per day would probably be better. But then some people are going to get around that limit with multiple accounts, and trying to stop them will just take up more editor time.
Some sort of moderation, just as a filter if nothing else, would probably be good. Let users see the raw submissions and moderate them. Then let the editors use those moderations to guide them as to which submissions deserve a closer look. If something gets 80% "duplicate" moderation, then it's probably a duplicate and can be discarded. If something else gets 80% "troll", the editor can reject it without even looking at it.
I'm sure there are other places for improvement, which are dependent on the specifics of how Slashdot currently works. I can't imagine all the submissions are just dumped raw into a bin for the editors to sort through. There have to be some sort of tools designed for organizing things. I mean, this is a tech site, isn't it?
They're working on number 4 (trolling by "anons"), and they'll probably solve that one to a large extent (there is a semi-protection scheme already in place, although there is still argument about when it should be used). The rest of the problems though are somewhat systemic to the way Wikipedia runs. The common problem, I believe, is that there is no real separation between the raw notes and the actual final work.
My objection is that Linux is running the Googleplex today, which is hugely parallel and handles quantities of data for which our language doesn't have adjectives. Any OS that can do that is decently future-proof.
Maybe in a decade Google will be the next Microsoft, because Google's system is far from stock Linux. If so, it'll be interesting to see how the licensing issues get handled.
I think the problem will be this: Linux and MS-Windows and Mac OS X are all "good enough." For the forseeable future, there's little incentive to create a consumer edition of a Plan 9 knock-off.
Yahoo and Alta-vista were "good enough" too. Maybe some grad students will discover a whole new twist on operating systems. Or maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
tell that to the people that have lost their jobs.
That was *after* the bubble. During the bubble, it was lots of fun.
Of course, I saved a lot during the whole time, and I managed to take that savings out of the stock market long before the bottom, so the crash didn't hit me that hard financially. But I'd love a chance to do it all over again.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to happen for a long time. The venture capitalists seem to have drawn all the wrong conclusions for the problems that occurred.
...if by "dangerous" you mean there is non-zero risk.
If you put it in the money market account, there is no insurance of any kind.
Just like any money-market mutual fund. It's still a damn safe place to put your money.
If the money is not in money market (no interest) then there is pass-through FDIC insurance WHICH DOES NOT COVER FAILURE OF PAYPAL. ie the insurance is only in case the bank goes broke, not if PayPal/Ebay goes broke.
If the executives at paypal steal your money out of the bank accounts and then Paypal goes broke, you're out the money. Otherwise the money is sitting there in the bank account, and Paypal isn't allowed to touch it simply to pay off its own debts (and the parent company eBay has no long-term debt anyway). It's basically the same thing with the money market account too. Your real risk is that the fund is going to collapse, which pretty much means the entire US economy collapses in a completely unprecedented way. If eBay goes broke (not sure how this would occur without lots of prior warning, such as them losing a massive lawsuit, since eBay doesn't have any long-term debt), they still can't tap their money market account to pay those debts, and the holders of the money market accounts would be one of the first in line in the bankruptcy proceedings. Yes, there's a non-zero chance of losing some or all of your money. But it's a really freaking small chance.
In either case, this is no comparison to the many fully FDIC insured high interest savings / CDs available. They will just as much interest without putting the money at any risk.
Well, none of them offer anywhere near the liquidity of the Paypal money market account. There is a federal limit on transactions you can make with bank savings accounts, I believe it's 6 per month (but it might be lower). On the other hand, I make about 25-50 transactions through my paypal debit card every month.
Add in no minimum balances, no monthly fees, 1% cash back on every purchase (though personally I'm grandfathered in at 1.5%), and a non-introductory interest rate of 4.25%, and I agree with you that there's no comparison to anything being offered by a bank. I can't even find a bank money market account giving that high an interest rate as a non-introductory rate. There probably is one, though.
Maybe the money market account isn't a great deal for Wikipedia, but you seem to be implying that it's not a good deal for anyone. I keep about $500 in my paypal account at any time. I've had thousands of dollars in it when I was about to make a large purchase, such as when I paid tuition for a class.
There is tremendous risk in storing such large amounts of capital in Paypal, as the company could go broke or hiccup or otherwise wipe out the balance. Because Paypal is not a bank, AFAIK there is no insurance on deposits there (no FDIC insurance).
You can store your balance in a no-interest account eligible for FDIC pass-through insurance, or you can store it in an interest bearing account which isn't.
The risk on the interest-bearing account is miniscule, about equivalent to a money-market mutual fund, and at a better interest rate. But you're probably right that the Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't be using it. By using the no-interest account they're giving up about $20/day in interest.
I assume they're only keeping the money in that account on the order of a couple weeks (they've raised $250,000 in 18 days). Assuming they're using an FDIC pass-through insured account it's not *that big of a deal*, about $180 in foregone interest income.
Numbers are _very_ approximate, based on ballpark capacity of the system today (about 6,000-8,000 pages per second, 500 million per day) and ballpark equipment costs to get there, adjusted for guestimated efficiency improvements.
500 million pages served per day. 5 million edits made per month. If this isn't an argument for having separate sites for editing and for static page display, I don't know what is.
Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?
I believe they have tried to buy wikipedia.xx for every single top level domain name. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names. They went nuts on domain names. It was relatively expensive (though not much compared to the rest of their budget).
On the secound point, I don't think that makes much sense. I experts shouldn't work directly on Wikipedia, then who should? random people with only a vague idea of what they are talking about?@!
Well, Sanger's point wasn't really about whether or not experts *should* work on Wikipedia. I think he agrees that they should. His point was that experts don't want to work on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia hasn't fostered a good environment for their contributions.
All that said, I kind of disagree with Sanger here. I don't think you have to be an expert to write a good encyclopedia entry, just a good writer with a good basic knowledge of logic and a bunch of good sources. I think Wikipedia was well designed for its particular niche, as a sort of fact search engine, (though its founder has recently begun throwing out much of that good open design to try to cater to a different niche). But for what Sanger wants to do, which is really to fill a different niche, I don't think Wikipedia is very useful.
Wikipedia will probably never be an authoritative source of information. I think that's OK, though. Digital Universe does want to be an authoritative source of information. I think that's OK too. There's room in the world for both.
It's too bad "number of errors per entry" isn't the sole factor in what makes a good encyclopedia. And I'd say "number of words per entry" isn't in itself a factor at all, as having more words can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
That's debatable. I'd say it's more like a website which is trying to make an encyclopedia.
If there's some outrageous claim, or some hotly disputed and debated topic- say, take your pick of sides on the topic Intelligent Design- Wikipedia's job is not to state who's right and who's wrong, endorse one side or another, identify what's really true and false, or anything like that.
Wikipedia certainly doesn't want to do that, but we certainly have a need for someone to write an encyclopedia that will. It seems to me that Digital Universe is being designed to serve a different niche than Wikipedia.
$10 million, support from some big names, the existence of an open collaboration project, ties to an ISP to generate more revenue, no influence by Jimmy Wales... It's pretty different, but it does have some similarities, of course.
This idea isn't horrible, only problem is just WHO gets to decide who is an 'expert'?
Joe Firmage, of course (though I'm sure he'll delegate this authority to some people who he thinks are experts at deciding who is an expert).
The world needs more than one encyclopedia. I hope this project succeeds tremendously. Doesn't mean I still won't go to Wikipedia if I want to find out about Pokemon or my favorite garage band.
Not only that, but why start from scratch when there is such an enourmous body of good source material?
The biggest problem with using Wikipedia as source material is that most of it has not been fact checked. And it's not like there's a whole lot of brilliant prose there. If you've got to fact check every sentence, rephrase most of them, and reorganize the whole article to not be a mishmash of random facts, you might as well start from scratch and avoid the ugliness of the GFDL.
This might be able to be fixed, or maybe a non-fact checked encyclopedia is good enough for most people (though probably not for Sanger). But this particular problem is somewhat systemic to Wikipedia. Wikipedia tends to do things backward from traditional writing - people are encouraged to write first and take notes later. Surely there is a reason that we're taught in College Freshman English and even before that in High School that the proper way to do research is to take notes first, record your sources, make an outline, and *then* write the paper (without even looking at the sources, but only your notes and outline). The wiki process turns that upside down, and it has worked somewhat well, but it's starting to become evident that the quality of work it produces has limits.
A better project would be to gather acknowledged experts, and get them to contribute to Wikipedia instead.
So that their work can be reverted by POV-pushing idiots? Read Larry Sanger's criticisms of Wikipedia and I think you'll understand why he doesn't want to take this approach. "Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts. This is not perhaps so bad in itself. But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best)."
I don't really agree with Sanger 100% on this particular issue, but it does answer the question of why he thinks the approach of getting experts to work on Wikipedia directly wouldn't work.
Well, the Digital Universe Foundation has filed for nonprofit status, so it's a little misleading to call it a corporation.
Most non-profit organizations (including Digital Universe) *are* corporations so it's not at all misleading. And according to your website you *are* a nonprofit, and have been since 2004 ("The Digital Universe Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 2004."). According to https://esos.state.nv.us/SOSServices/AnonymousAcce ss/CorpSearch/CorpDetails.aspx?CorpID=536438 there is a Nevada Domestic Non-Profit Corporation called "Digital Universe Foundation" with JOSEPH P FIRMAGE as director. It sounds to me like you've filed for income tax exemption as a 503(c)(3) charity, and that you already are a nonprofit corporation.
Sommer said that, with the emergence of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.
Translation: We can't intentionally add bugs to the Macintosh Operating System to break or slow down our competitors products like we do on Windows.
Alternative translation: We don't have a monopoly on Macintosh computers, so we can't use the same anti-competitive practices that we use on Windows, and of course we can't compete on the merits of our product.
Slashdot Mirror
if you read both articles, the most damning thing is that the 6 or so paragraphs cover the same parts of his life in the same order.
but in it's defense, there are only so many ways you can say "X owns Y" "X was a senator" "X has 5 kids".
I'd vote it wasn't plagarism because you can't plagarise facts, and both the other sites are very to-the-point.
You can't copyright facts. But you can plagiarize text which consists solely of facts. If you copy something from another source, even if you paraphrase it, and even if it is public domain, you are still supposed to clearly acknowledge that source.
There's more fluff, so it reads differently, but the same facts are there. It's not a copy-paste job, but it looks like the wikipedia article writer only read one source getting his facts, and then wrote it in his own words.
Well, I doubt either of the two locations I presented was the original. More likely *both* texts were plagiarized. Also, if you look at the history, you'll see that the major changes were made *after* the copying. This is something that happens in Wikipedia all the time. Someone plagiarises something, and then someone comes in after them and changes around a couple words. This doesn't resolve the plagiarism, but it does make it harder to detect.
I think Wikipedia should strongly consider tightening its citation policy. Every time anyone adds *anything* of substance they should be revealing their source in the edit summary. This way if someone comes back later and claims plagiarism it is much easier to show strong evidence otherwise. Wikipedia should have a much *higher* standard than newspapers - almost as high as an academic paper.
But hey, I'm not Jimmy Wales, and he obviously has his own way of doing things. I'd say at least Jimmy's style has gotten him this far, but up until a few months ago he basically sat back and let the community do whatever it wanted - it's not until recently he began screwing everything up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Davis
t ml
"Davis, who now lives lives in the rural Fentress County village of Pall Mall, also owns a construction business, Diversified Construction Co., which builds homes, apartments and offices. Davis and his wife Lynda, an elementary school teacher, have three daughters, Larissa, Lynn and Libby, and five grandchildren, Ashton, Alexia, Andrew, Austin and Adam."
http://www.tntech.edu/publicaffairs/rel/alums03.h
"Davis, who lives in Pall Mall, also started a construction business, Diversified Construction Co., which builds homes, apartments and offices. With his business, he has provided jobs and opportunities for decades in the same district he serves.-more-
Davis and his wife, Lynda, an elementary school teacher, have three daughters, Larissa, Lynn and Libby, and five grandchildren, Ashton, Alexia, Andrew, Austin and Adam."
Certainly looks suspicious.
Why is it that you consider getting caught to be the greater sin? Have you been watching too many heist movies and they have given you the impression that crime is ok as long as you dont get caught?
Some crimes are worse than others. Failing to cite sources in a newspaper is pretty low on the totem pole.
If you notice plagiarism on Wikipedia, you can delete it at once.
And someone else can add it right back.
Think that'd never happen? I've personally witnessed *Wikipedia admins* who have argued that it's perfectly OK to copy something from another source, change around a few words, and not even bother acknowledging that source. In fact, one of them told me I must not write a lot, because this is how things are supposed to be done.
I've submitted a few high quality stories to slashdot - relevant,
I think you've hit on the problem exactly. But the solution is more difficult. I imagine Slashdot must be receiving way too many submissions to be able to take a good look at all of them. So submissions like yours slip through.
Limiting submissions could help, but "Beatles Beatles" apparently only submits an average of 4.2 submissions a day. A limit of 1 submission per day would probably be better. But then some people are going to get around that limit with multiple accounts, and trying to stop them will just take up more editor time.
Some sort of moderation, just as a filter if nothing else, would probably be good. Let users see the raw submissions and moderate them. Then let the editors use those moderations to guide them as to which submissions deserve a closer look. If something gets 80% "duplicate" moderation, then it's probably a duplicate and can be discarded. If something else gets 80% "troll", the editor can reject it without even looking at it.
I'm sure there are other places for improvement, which are dependent on the specifics of how Slashdot currently works. I can't imagine all the submissions are just dumped raw into a bin for the editors to sort through. There have to be some sort of tools designed for organizing things. I mean, this is a tech site, isn't it?
News articles about Dell using AMD processors is the tech equivalent of crying wolf.
Slashdot needs something now that the semi-yearly rumors of Macintosh switching to Intel are over.
They're working on number 4 (trolling by "anons"), and they'll probably solve that one to a large extent (there is a semi-protection scheme already in place, although there is still argument about when it should be used). The rest of the problems though are somewhat systemic to the way Wikipedia runs. The common problem, I believe, is that there is no real separation between the raw notes and the actual final work.
My objection is that Linux is running the Googleplex today, which is hugely parallel and handles quantities of data for which our language doesn't have adjectives. Any OS that can do that is decently future-proof.
Maybe in a decade Google will be the next Microsoft, because Google's system is far from stock Linux. If so, it'll be interesting to see how the licensing issues get handled.
I think the problem will be this: Linux and MS-Windows and Mac OS X are all "good enough." For the forseeable future, there's little incentive to create a consumer edition of a Plan 9 knock-off.
Yahoo and Alta-vista were "good enough" too. Maybe some grad students will discover a whole new twist on operating systems. Or maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
"The last bubble was lots of fun"
tell that to the people that have lost their jobs.
That was *after* the bubble. During the bubble, it was lots of fun.
Of course, I saved a lot during the whole time, and I managed to take that savings out of the stock market long before the bottom, so the crash didn't hit me that hard financially. But I'd love a chance to do it all over again.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to happen for a long time. The venture capitalists seem to have drawn all the wrong conclusions for the problems that occurred.
Either option at PayPal is dangerous.
...if by "dangerous" you mean there is non-zero risk.
If you put it in the money market account, there is no insurance of any kind.
Just like any money-market mutual fund. It's still a damn safe place to put your money.
If the money is not in money market (no interest) then there is pass-through FDIC insurance WHICH DOES NOT COVER FAILURE OF PAYPAL. ie the insurance is only in case the bank goes broke, not if PayPal/Ebay goes broke.
If the executives at paypal steal your money out of the bank accounts and then Paypal goes broke, you're out the money. Otherwise the money is sitting there in the bank account, and Paypal isn't allowed to touch it simply to pay off its own debts (and the parent company eBay has no long-term debt anyway). It's basically the same thing with the money market account too. Your real risk is that the fund is going to collapse, which pretty much means the entire US economy collapses in a completely unprecedented way. If eBay goes broke (not sure how this would occur without lots of prior warning, such as them losing a massive lawsuit, since eBay doesn't have any long-term debt), they still can't tap their money market account to pay those debts, and the holders of the money market accounts would be one of the first in line in the bankruptcy proceedings. Yes, there's a non-zero chance of losing some or all of your money. But it's a really freaking small chance.
In either case, this is no comparison to the many fully FDIC insured high interest savings / CDs available. They will just as much interest without putting the money at any risk.
Well, none of them offer anywhere near the liquidity of the Paypal money market account. There is a federal limit on transactions you can make with bank savings accounts, I believe it's 6 per month (but it might be lower). On the other hand, I make about 25-50 transactions through my paypal debit card every month.
Add in no minimum balances, no monthly fees, 1% cash back on every purchase (though personally I'm grandfathered in at 1.5%), and a non-introductory interest rate of 4.25%, and I agree with you that there's no comparison to anything being offered by a bank. I can't even find a bank money market account giving that high an interest rate as a non-introductory rate. There probably is one, though.
Maybe the money market account isn't a great deal for Wikipedia, but you seem to be implying that it's not a good deal for anyone. I keep about $500 in my paypal account at any time. I've had thousands of dollars in it when I was about to make a large purchase, such as when I paid tuition for a class.
There is tremendous risk in storing such large amounts of capital in Paypal, as the company could go broke or hiccup or otherwise wipe out the balance. Because Paypal is not a bank, AFAIK there is no insurance on deposits there (no FDIC insurance).
You can store your balance in a no-interest account eligible for FDIC pass-through insurance, or you can store it in an interest bearing account which isn't.
The risk on the interest-bearing account is miniscule, about equivalent to a money-market mutual fund, and at a better interest rate. But you're probably right that the Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't be using it. By using the no-interest account they're giving up about $20/day in interest.
I assume they're only keeping the money in that account on the order of a couple weeks (they've raised $250,000 in 18 days). Assuming they're using an FDIC pass-through insured account it's not *that big of a deal*, about $180 in foregone interest income.
Numbers are _very_ approximate, based on ballpark capacity of the system today (about 6,000-8,000 pages per second, 500 million per day) and ballpark equipment costs to get there, adjusted for guestimated efficiency improvements.
500 million pages served per day. 5 million edits made per month. If this isn't an argument for having separate sites for editing and for static page display, I don't know what is.
I'm sure they got tens if not hundreds of submissions from various cult members.
Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?
I believe they have tried to buy wikipedia.xx for every single top level domain name. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names. They went nuts on domain names. It was relatively expensive (though not much compared to the rest of their budget).
Considering that the budget jumbles together capital expenditures along with actual expenses looking at the budget at all is clearly wrong.
On the secound point, I don't think that makes much sense. I experts shouldn't work directly on Wikipedia, then who should? random people with only a vague idea of what they are talking about?@!
Well, Sanger's point wasn't really about whether or not experts *should* work on Wikipedia. I think he agrees that they should. His point was that experts don't want to work on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia hasn't fostered a good environment for their contributions.
All that said, I kind of disagree with Sanger here. I don't think you have to be an expert to write a good encyclopedia entry, just a good writer with a good basic knowledge of logic and a bunch of good sources. I think Wikipedia was well designed for its particular niche, as a sort of fact search engine, (though its founder has recently begun throwing out much of that good open design to try to cater to a different niche). But for what Sanger wants to do, which is really to fill a different niche, I don't think Wikipedia is very useful.
Wikipedia will probably never be an authoritative source of information. I think that's OK, though. Digital Universe does want to be an authoritative source of information. I think that's OK too. There's room in the world for both.
It's too bad "number of errors per entry" isn't the sole factor in what makes a good encyclopedia. And I'd say "number of words per entry" isn't in itself a factor at all, as having more words can be either a good thing or a bad thing.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
That's debatable. I'd say it's more like a website which is trying to make an encyclopedia.
If there's some outrageous claim, or some hotly disputed and debated topic- say, take your pick of sides on the topic Intelligent Design- Wikipedia's job is not to state who's right and who's wrong, endorse one side or another, identify what's really true and false, or anything like that.
Wikipedia certainly doesn't want to do that, but we certainly have a need for someone to write an encyclopedia that will. It seems to me that Digital Universe is being designed to serve a different niche than Wikipedia.
How is this different from Nupdedia?
$10 million, support from some big names, the existence of an open collaboration project, ties to an ISP to generate more revenue, no influence by Jimmy Wales... It's pretty different, but it does have some similarities, of course.
This idea isn't horrible, only problem is just WHO gets to decide who is an 'expert'?
Joe Firmage, of course (though I'm sure he'll delegate this authority to some people who he thinks are experts at deciding who is an expert).
The world needs more than one encyclopedia. I hope this project succeeds tremendously. Doesn't mean I still won't go to Wikipedia if I want to find out about Pokemon or my favorite garage band.
Those last three edits were actually made by Sanger while the page was a user page.
Not only that, but why start from scratch when there is such an enourmous body of good source material?
The biggest problem with using Wikipedia as source material is that most of it has not been fact checked. And it's not like there's a whole lot of brilliant prose there. If you've got to fact check every sentence, rephrase most of them, and reorganize the whole article to not be a mishmash of random facts, you might as well start from scratch and avoid the ugliness of the GFDL.
This might be able to be fixed, or maybe a non-fact checked encyclopedia is good enough for most people (though probably not for Sanger). But this particular problem is somewhat systemic to Wikipedia. Wikipedia tends to do things backward from traditional writing - people are encouraged to write first and take notes later. Surely there is a reason that we're taught in College Freshman English and even before that in High School that the proper way to do research is to take notes first, record your sources, make an outline, and *then* write the paper (without even looking at the sources, but only your notes and outline). The wiki process turns that upside down, and it has worked somewhat well, but it's starting to become evident that the quality of work it produces has limits.
A better project would be to gather acknowledged experts, and get them to contribute to Wikipedia instead.
So that their work can be reverted by POV-pushing idiots? Read Larry Sanger's criticisms of Wikipedia and I think you'll understand why he doesn't want to take this approach. "Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts. This is not perhaps so bad in itself. But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best)."
I don't really agree with Sanger 100% on this particular issue, but it does answer the question of why he thinks the approach of getting experts to work on Wikipedia directly wouldn't work.
Well, the Digital Universe Foundation has filed for nonprofit status, so it's a little misleading to call it a corporation.
Most non-profit organizations (including Digital Universe) *are* corporations so it's not at all misleading. And according to your website you *are* a nonprofit, and have been since 2004 ("The Digital Universe Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 2004."). According to https://esos.state.nv.us/SOSServices/AnonymousAcce ss/CorpSearch/CorpDetails.aspx?CorpID=536438 there is a Nevada Domestic Non-Profit Corporation called "Digital Universe Foundation" with JOSEPH P FIRMAGE as director. It sounds to me like you've filed for income tax exemption as a 503(c)(3) charity, and that you already are a nonprofit corporation.
Sommer said that, with the emergence of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.
Translation: We can't intentionally add bugs to the Macintosh Operating System to break or slow down our competitors products like we do on Windows.
Alternative translation: We don't have a monopoly on Macintosh computers, so we can't use the same anti-competitive practices that we use on Windows, and of course we can't compete on the merits of our product.