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."

It's this easy:

[hsdpa]

1. Search the web
2. Take contents and clean it up (and suck some blood)
3. Profit!

Donations?

[ilovegeorgebush]

As Veropedia earns money from the content, will it be donating money to Wikipedia? I sure hope so. The following FAQ item doesn't say much about it:

Why does Veropedia have advertising? Our goal is to collect the best free content available and make it accessible to as many people as possible. This costs money, just as the liberation of content costs money. Rather than ask for donations from our primary target audience of teachers and students, we believe that unobtrusive advertising is preferred. The money earned will be used to keep this site alive and vibrant, to sponsor contests to improve content, and to support other efforts to bring high quality free content to people everywhere.

As an aside, does this mean Encyclopedia Britannica [britannica.com] is even more obsolete?

Re:Why?

[dunstan]

Just as these people [theregister.co.uk] appear to have not done. The issue with Wikipedia is not that articles can contain spurious errors, it is that people who should know better don't bother to check when they really need a more authoritative source. Veropedia won't protect us from lazy journalists.

Re:Wikipedia-killer of the month?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear fellow ./ers:

As an educator, if you are looking for something for schools, at home use with children, etc., this has already been done:
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1548 [tectonic.co.za]

You can even download and install on your computer (both a lite version and a full version with images, etc.), already checked, etc.
Quite nice. I like it. (let's try to stay up-to-date on these kinds of things, ok? :-))

Forget the wikipedia-business-of-the-month club subscriptions.

Re:And?

[Ignorant Aardvark]

(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.

Re:Incorrect.

[alexgieg]

And of course they completely ignore the destruction of Jewish archaeological relics by Palestinian "scientists"; undeniably proven when temple-era artifacts were unearthed from THE GARBAGE DUMP that the Muslims had shipped the items they were breaking to.

I think you should take care to distinguish between different Muslim sects. The fundamentalist nuts who destroy ancient Jewish relics are the same who are actively destroy Islamic relics on Muslim countries [westernresistance.com]. Who come and destroy places and artifacts from Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hinduist origins which actual Muslims were preserving for more than 1500 years are the most radical members of a 18th-century heresy [wikipedia.org]. These guys, and no one else, are the culprits.

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 [wikipedia.org] is the most direct cause (other than the House itself) for its prosperity. Think of ways to break this relationship and you're set.

Re:No need to fork, just add mediawiki features

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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.

Re:English Teachers

[ral315]

Click the "permanent link" link on the left side of the page, and you'll get a link to a version that will not change.

Re:Incorrect.

[alexgieg]

Moderate Muslims believe that lands taken for Islam are theirs to run as they see fit, just as Wahhabi do.

Just as all religions do. There's no exception. The notion that religion and politics shouldn't go together is a modern view. For 1500 years no one inside Christianity even thought of this idea. When the concept appeared amidst the religious wars of Modern Europe, it was unanimously fought against for other 300 to 400 years. Only on the transition from the 19th to the 20th century it finally became a common idea among Christians, and even so, nowadays there are still a lot who just "don't accept it, period".

Besides, "to run as they see fit" doesn't mean "destroying other's religious sites and artifacts". It means "as they see fit". If they "see fit" to preserve these things, as most Muslims did for more than 1500 years on most places they ruled, that's exactly what they'll do. Otherwise, no. Both options are just that: options. There's no strict rule determining for one or the other to be selected.

Re:Useless; error-filled

[famebait]

The error is, I'm afraid yours. 'hydrogenium' is the latin name for hydrogen. All elements have such a name, which is the only naming that consistenly correlates with the abbreviations used as symbols for the elements. It would be a poor listing of elements that did not include these names.

Now, the origin of those names, that's a different and quite diverse story. But that is not what the article claims it to be, and hydrogen is hardly alone in being identified and named long after Latin was a dead language, or even the language of science.