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."
Not so bright (Score:4, Interesting)
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And? (Score:5, Interesting)
English Teachers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
It could be easily worked around with some kind of "stable version" tag, to get the lastest certified version, or to get a specific link about a version used in a publication. A "stable only" option in search would be really great. The only issue with such a system is to get a really neutral authority.
moving toward subject specific wikis (Score:5, Interesting)
Useless; error-filled (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And? (Score:2, Interesting)
You didn't think Wikipedia was going to last forever, did you? Surely, the information inside of Wikipedia will be here for a very long time, but I'm certain that eventually the site itself is going to be completely superseded by a new one that simply uses its information in a different or more useful way. (Although, Veropedia is perhaps not that site.)
Re:English Teachers (Score:5, Interesting)
Do professors do this? I don't know, I'm only a TA, most of the time the answer is no. I don't go check every fact and figure, but rather check that they cited the fact or figure. Everyonce in a while a student turns something up that's interesting. That catches my eye, usually because it may have some relavance to something I am working on, and will go and verify the sources.
Even if the student cites a questionable source/study/number, if I can go check it and I say, yeah that's where they got the numbers/information from. With print articles, I can go and retrieve the article and check to make sure the student isn't just making something up.
With Wikipedia, yeah I can go and look it up, but will it be the same as it was when the student looked at it? On most things, yeah, probably, but on some subjects....
Really the same goes for the internet as a whole. Back when I was an undergrad, most profs let us cite at most two sources from the internet for the same reasons. It used to tick me off being a techie-geek back then, but six years later when I went back for a masters, it makes a lot more sense.
Veropedia: Part of your healthy lifestyle (Score:5, Interesting)
A collaborative effort: In regular English, "a collaborative effort" that is a business enterprise is known as a "company." I'll take away points because they missed the ever popular "grass roots."
written by Wikipedia contributors: Hopefully you won't notice that anybody can call themselves a "wikipedia contributor" so that means nothing. Nice touch how they try to spin it as if a garden-variety Wikipedia contributor is somehow better than an expert.
verofied: Oh, Colbert! What hast thou wrought?
Incorrect. (Score:1, Interesting)
Everything else flows from that point - the immense left-wing pressure for articles, the ridiculous whitewashing and removal of anything that is provably factual but 'looks bad' for certain religions...
I mean, come on. The page for the so-called "Oxford Capacity Analysis" [wikipedia.org] doesn't even list properly the fact that it is in NO WAY connected to Oxford (despite the lies of $cientology scam recruiters when they use this blatantly false "test" on unwary victims).
And on the disambiguation page for OCA it's listed as "Technical" with the connection to $camintology not even mentioned.
And of course they completely ignore the destruction of Jewish archaeological relics [har-habayt.org] by Palestinian "scientists"; undeniably proven when temple-era artifacts were unearthed from THE GARBAGE DUMP [har-habayt.org] that the Muslims had shipped the items they were breaking to.
"and no fair use images" (Score:3, Interesting)
Without non-free images, an encyclopedia can capture the state of the world as it existed on December 31, 1922. I don't see how a detailed article about, say, the movie industry (since the introduction of sound) or the video game industry can be written without identifying works that were created on or after January 1, 1923.
Re:Nothing new under the sun? (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is that there are already 2 million articles in English alone. There is no way for even a fairly large organisation to go through that separating out the good from the bad. They could get to 3,000 articles fairly easily by starting with the articles that are already flagged as 'Featured' or 'Good' - but getting much beyond that number will require vast amounts of skilled workers. Since the VAST majority of the public who read Wikipedia don't give a rats ass whether the images are fair-use or whether the facts are cited or not...I don't see these guys getting enough page-views to attract they adverts they need to support a large staff of reviewers.
This is doomed.
No need to fork, just add mediawiki features (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:And? (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you get a hang for using the History tool on Wikipedia, you'll see that you can go through vast swaths of the article's history with relative ease. It's not nearly as tedious as having to read each specific revision one by one. Looking at the diffs really helps. Veropedia encourages all of its contributors to edit Wikipedia (and indeed, tens of thousands of edits on Wikipedia are now directly attributable to fixing up articles for import to Veropedia). I don't see why the article would appear to be hacked up and lacking flow and depth, any more so than regular editing would. We're all veteran Wikipedia editors. We're not just hacking up articles poorly.
Wikipedia is one project with many editors. Veropedia is one of many subprojects, each with few editors; given a finite (and likely small) number of people interested in working on this, you are providing yet another outlet for people to essentially reinvent the wheel by once again vetting the same set of Wikipedia articles for your own encyclopedia. Instead of everyone working together to produce a profitable, accurate subset of Wikipedia articles, users are stuck signing up with one of many subprojects, to do the exact same tasks as the other subprojects.
The difference is, none of the edits are made on Veropedia proper. They are made on Wikipedia, and then that version is imported to Veropedia. So it's not really a division of labor. Wikipedia is still getting all of the fruits of our labors. I don't see how we're reinventing the wheel by "once again vetting articles". As far as I know, there's no one else doing what we're doing. Citizendium, for instance, does have vetting, but it is a fork rather than a stable versions layer. And it's not like our work isn't available under the exact same license that everything else on Wikipedia is available under (it has to be!). So the work we do to improve articles is immediately usable by everyone. So I really don't see any wasted efforts - any other sites working on vetting can simply use the cleaned up versions of articles that we've made, and likewise, we can use theirs.
Deja vu (Score:3, Interesting)
--
Toro
Violation of GFDL (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No need to fork, just add mediawiki features (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that not the whole point of the Wiki philosophy espoused by Wikipedia? If you see a problem, you are not only able but you are encouraged to go ahead and fix it. Is that not the whole point of the GNU Free Documentation License - to give anyone who chooses to do so the freedom to distribute and/or fork the material so licensed?
It is very interesting to see the response of folks when someone actually chooses to exercise these explicitly stated philosophies and rights. So far, here on Slashdot, it is almost universally negative. Which actually is pretty depressing.
"recognized academics and experts" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure that there are exceptions, but the Wikipedia articles that pertain to topics in hard science, mathematics, etc. don't usually contain "disputed" content or missing references. If someone has misrepresented Newton's laws or Euclidean geometry in an article, it's not going to survive long.
You typically see persisting dispute or "citation needed" on articles pertaining to history, religion, politics, etc. When it comes to topics that are inherently subjective, why is the bias of a "recognized expert" superior to the bias of a collection of people participating in the writing of the article? I'd much rather read content with full knowledge that some of the "facts" are disputed, or require references than to read something presented as the unbiased "truth" just because some "expert" or "academic" gave it a seal of approval.
Let the experts and academics spew their regurgitated crap through the major publishing houses and mainstream media outlets. Leave the Wikipedia's of the world to a plurality of interested amateurs.