Wikipedia Begets Veropedia 259
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."
Missing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia-killer of the month? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
IM VERIONTLY ILL (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is a good place to start in a research project, and is a great way to find small tidbits of information that aren't particularly important. If you're looking for some information on which to base a major decision or to include in a research paper, Wikipedia might be your first stop, but it can't be your last. Of course, anyone who was required to write a research paper after about the third grade should already know that encyclopedias aren't valid as final sources of information. Information found in any encyclopedic work (including Wikipedia and "Veropedia") must be confirmed using more reliable and complete sources.
Advertising leads to corruption (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Surely this is not good (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, is there an expert in every field working in this 12 year olds garage too? How can they vet sites and say that they are correct? Encylopedia Brittanca is incorrect in places and look at the people there! No citation needed, no bad link is the most feeble and unarticulated way of deciding if a page is 'correct'!
User changes are the way of Wikipedia, and they progess to make a page as correct and informative as it can be. Taking this away and telling everyone that this is the definitive page on the subject is not going to help at all. Wikipedia blocks pages that are prone to vandelism anyway... So really??? What is the point??? Money I guess... do these people have morals? Why don't they go open a for profit branch of Oxfam or something?
Re:English Teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
The question remains... will English Teachers/Professors view Veropedia as a valid source? I somehow doubt it as they seem to be in love with print sources (atleast from my experience).
No. The fact that wiki is user editable is not the reason professors dislike it. It's because wiki is an encyclopedia. While an encyclopedia is a fine place to get background on a research project, it isn't a primary source and hence isn't citable. Note that the same is true for Britannica.
The point of a research project/paper isn't to provide a regurgitation summary. It's to come up with your own angle on a topic based on original evidence, which isn't something one can glean from an encyclopedia synopsis.
If you're out of middle school, you shouldn't be citing encyclopedias.
Re:It's this easy: (Score:4, Insightful)
OTOH , if I am writing about some political or historical person for some paper, i must be VERy careful with Wiki, because of vandalism, bias, everchanging "facts" and so on. In this case some "official" encyclopedia uses to be (often) a lot more neutral (because official encyclopediae have neutrality as a global goal).... So bring the new one on.
Re:English Teachers (Score:3, Insightful)
Not useful (Score:1, Insightful)
The major flaw of the wikipedia isn't that ihas too much crap. It is that they throw out too much crap, lock articles, and generally restrict the amount of information going in.
Many of those articles that are thrown out as "vanity" articles, or having no relevance, or whatever, are stuff I would like to see. If the editors believe they are just internet garbage, they should simply tag them as such. The front page search could exclude those articles, and people such as me could select some option to include them.
There is this tendency about wiki-nazis to whorship some abstract idea of scholarship and authority, often embodied by the Britannica encyclopedia, and they feel they are struggling against unfair prejudice to get admission to the professor's smoking club or something. In fact this ideal of unbiased authoritative encyclopedic scholarship DOES NOT EXIST and HAS NEVER EXISTED. For proof, take your self to a good university library, which has access to older stuff in the stacks, and look up the Encyclopedia Brittanica article "Negro" for every decade starting at 1900's, 1910's, 1920's, etc.
The best an Encyclopedia Brittanica, or the Wikipedia if they continue there editorial idiocy, can be is a compendium of society's current "official" views. That's not very useful, and well handled by many other sources, so there is no need for the wikipedia to do that. However, a people-generated compendium can have much greater depth and breadth than the E.B. or others can, and seeded within it can be the kernels of truth that go against the grain of society, so that instead of simply re-enforcing what everybody already "knows" or believes, the wikipedia could be something that helped society.
Being a couple of gigabytes of "Whut he said" crap isn't useful. Trimming it down to a few hundred megabytes of "Whut he said" is even less useful.
Re:Advertising leads to corruption (Score:5, Insightful)
When the users of a service pay for the service, they are the customers, and the service is the product. When advertisers pay for a service, they are the customers, and the users are the product. The service itself is relegated to a loss-leader; bait to attract users so they can be sold to the advertisers.
This is one of the primary reasons why TV is such a wasteland, while the DVD landscape is so rich.
-Peter
Re:Has anyone noticed? (Score:2, Insightful)
- It still hasn't loaded.
- I think the servers are run by child labor because it is taking so long to load a single page.
As for the orange, Safari-brokenness, and Christopher Reeve--in the interest of remaining a contrarian--I say, not that bad, works in Firefox and huh?, respectively.
I should add that I'm not about to start using Veropedia or anything. I've just been up all night and am taking it out on some asinine comments.
Re:Wikipedia-killer of the month? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wookieepedia, not Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vampires? An alternative take... (Score:4, Insightful)
As I write this, I'm using Kubuntu. It's made by a for-profit corporation (Canonical) who have pieced together a number of GNU (and other) licensed packages that were freely available to create a distribution. And people love it, they rave about it.
It does the job people want from an OS.
Sure, you could piece this stuff all together yourself. You could gather all the pieces of software you need, you could build them. You could check for outstanding bugs and backport fixes from the CVS version. You could integrate them nicely together to create a useable system. You could create an installable live CD to whack this down onto your computers when required. And you could continue to monitor all the upstream Free-licensed packages you've used to backport further security updates and bugfixes. But who wants to do all that work? The Free-licensed upstream is there alright - and it's valuable that you could access it directly - that anybody could do this if they wanted to, or if they needed to. But getting all the upstream packages in a good state; doing QA on them; checking they all work well together - that's a lot of work that you don't want to do unless you have specific needs. Thanks to the efforts of Canonical, I largely don't need to deal with upstream. If I want, I can send them patches, compile new versions from CVS, etc - but mostly I just leave the minutiae to the package maintainers.
The beauty of it is, If I don't like the job they do, I can still go upstream. I'm still Free because everything I'm using is open to me. I'm just getting someone else to do the grunt work. If they don't do a good enough job for me, I have options. I can choose to do it myself - I can compile apps on my Ubuntu system if I don't like the Ubuntu packages. I can build my own distro from scratch. Or I can switch to another distribution. I could switch to OpenSuse, say - it's also put together largely by a corporation in a similar manner. Or I could switch to something largely community driven like Debian. They have different focuses: up-to-date vs very strictly QA-ed, general purpose vs specialised. I'm spoilt for choice!
What's this got to do with Wikipedia vs Veropedia? Well, how about we substitute "package" with "article"? Wikipedia is the "upstream" provider of Free licensed content. What people are calling "vampire" sites are actually distributions of Wikipedia, just as Ubuntu is a distribution of GNU/Linux and related code. Some of them are just repackaging Wikipedia content in a more-or-less friendly UI and raising money through advertising. They have the right to do that, just as they have the right not to contribute anything back upstream themselves: the Free licenses don't force you to be a very good citizen. This situation is familiar from Free Software - we might not all approve of Xandros or Novell's deals with MS but they're still free to use the Free code as long as they stick to the license.
Which brings us to Veropedia. It's a new up-and-coming distribution of Wikipedia. It's small at the moment but growing. They're taking Wikipedia content and attempting to add value by doing some of the QA and integration work themselves, rather than leaving you to do it: they're trying to ensure quality articles are immediately available to users, without their having to check references, do mental sanity checks on the information, be generally skeptical. Just like the Linux distributions, they're doing some of the work that Freedom allows you to do, on your behalf. They're taking something you could already get for Free and they're making money (from ads in this case) in order to cover their costs - but they're trying to add something on the way. Doe
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Veropedia concept totally flawed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, content can be vandalised, erroneous facts can be added, political motivation can play a part in content, BUT...
Isn't this the very nature of human knowledge?
If anything, Wikipedia simply mirrors how human knowledge is documented and spread, albiet at a MUCH faster pace than old traditional methods.
The beauty here, specifically for knowledge that is still being sought, or liable to change, is that the changes to the entries can be made AS these events happen.
An encyclopedia is often a starting point for research and should never be used as a single source of information. This has always been the case.
The veropedia model is fundamentally flawed, to quote:-
"clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited."
Ok, who is going to vet it?
Do we trust them?
Right, so it can no longer be edited after being vetted, so if there's a mistake, who can fix it?
Effectively, this takes the concept of an online encyclopedia back a step, we've lost the single key concept that makes Wikipedia so special - the ability for ANYONE to edit content.
I doubt we need to worry much about Veropedia however, as Wikipedia is firmly entrenched in the public mindset and indeed the WWW.
Long live Wikipedia, for all it's flaws or perhaps because of them - we are just human, after all...
Re:Useless; error-filled (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you determine whether an article is accurate or not? You can't practically fact-check for every article you read, and if you could, then you would go to the primary sources to begin with and never mind an encyclopedia. So fundamentally, it boils down to trust. In a traditional encyclopedia, you trust the knowledge of experts. In wikipedia, you trust the knowledge of the mob. In veropedia, you have neither. Once an article is imported from wiki to vero, it is deemed "stable" and you don't have constant feedback correcting its mistakes as you would in a regular wikipedia article. Whatever mistakes slip through remain.
Re:Incorrect. (Score:3, Insightful)
Among Jews this used to happen some millennia back, at the time they had power to actually go around destroying idols and temples from other religions, as the Bible records extensively.
Among Christians, this trend appeared in the first centuries, first against Greek and Roman imagery, then among Constantinopolitan Christians themselves, then some centuries later it reappeared among Protestants towards Catholic imagery, a sentiment that resurfaces now and then among Evangelicals. But no matter what, it always ends up being condemned by the majority of Christians.
And Muslims are no exception to the rule. They had their fair share of iconoclasm too, for sure. But as with Christians, in the end this ends up condemned by the majority of Muslims. Currently, the only actively Muslims iconoclasts are the Wahhabi. And the majority of common-sensical Muslims condemn them, as expected.
Wahhabism is the enemy. Not Islam in general.
Re:It's this easy: (Score:3, Insightful)
Where Veropedia positions itself on that scale is yet to be determined, but I'm guessing it ought to be closer to Britannica than Wikipedia.
A better approach (Score:4, Insightful)
My idea of a better approach for Wikipedia would be to have "tiers" of verification that would be kind of like a stack for a given article title. The bottom tier would be articles edited by users who are not logged in. The next tier up would be edited by people who login but have not been verified or vetted, themselves. Further up the ladder would be those who have a history of article editing with no significant issues. Still further would those edited by people who have been specially vetted, although do not have significant credentials. Above them would be editors with major credentials within a subject area (a professor of chemistry would not be considered to have credentials in religious studies). One more top tier would be those who run Wikipedia itself, or are members of a review board. There might be as many as 8 or 9 tiers.
For any article, a visitor can see any tier level. A generated (not edited) box at the top or side of the page would list all the tier levels available that different from the tier being viewed, and their date of last edit, and in cases of tiers edited since the current view, how many edits since the current view was edited. The default view for users who are not logged in is the highest tier available. Logged in users can customize what tier to view, and whether to go up or down if their default tier is absent. Anyone can click on any tier to view that tier. Articles can also be watched for changes by tier.
I believe this approach would give people the opportunity to select the level of verification they feel is right for them.
Bug (Score:4, Insightful)
http://veropedia.com/vero/article.php?title= [veropedia.com]
Pretty sure that sort of thing should be avoided.
Re:Wikipedia-killer of the month? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incorrect. (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't practice your religion openly, can't tell others about it, can't expand your places of worship, can't even rebuild if they "happen" to be destroyed by an "accidental" fire...
Oh, but if you tell Muslims they aren't allowed to practice in your lands? SAVAGERY! WE MUST MAKE JIHAD ON YOU!
Re:Vampires? An alternative take... (Score:1, Insightful)
Your analogy is only valid as long as Veropedia is sponsored by a space-loving billionaire. Canonical is nowhere near break-even, and likely never will be.
Re:And? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's this easy: (Score:3, Insightful)
When you are doing an academic paper and must have every detail right, neither wikipedia nor veropedia would be sufficient. Not even Encyclopedia Britannica is sufficient. You must check references and verify them personally. If it's not referenced, it never happened.