Digital Universe a Wikipedia Alternative 241
Augustine J writes "A new alternative to Wikipedia called Digital Universe is the brainchild of, USWeb founder Joe Firmage and Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's earliest creators. This new site differs from Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public.
"The vision of the Digital Universe is to essentially provide an ad-free alternative to the likes of AOL and Yahoo on the Internet," said Firmage. "Instead of building it through Web robots, we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world.""
I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone has intel on this, please provide it. They say it's "based on Wikipedia" but will be like an "add-free AOL or Yahoo". AOL and Yahoo are not Wikipedia. So is it an encyclopedia? Or a new search engine?
At least this will make people happy as when Digital Universe posts an article with incorrect information, someone can actually sue a corporation with money that has a static location.
Also, I don't watch PBS, so I don't know what the hell that means. They should have used a reference that people actually understand. Like "It will be the Slashdot of the Information World." Of course what is meant by that?
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.digitaluniverse.net/experience/ [digitaluniverse.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Universe [wikipedia.org]
I won't consider Digital Universe an alternative to wikipedia. The content is more interactive in nature. I doubt that it'll be as vast in scope as wikipedia though. Let's see.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the people behind this Foundation have been working on other, possibly revolutionary (in a REALLY BIG way) physics research. Check it out: http://www.calphysics.org/ [calphysics.org] .
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:2)
It means animal sex and human boobies on video. Also, you can see all of the breasts that you want but they must either be old ones (preferably diseased or mid-surgical procedure!), or, more often, saggy ones from some aborigine wiculture.
Nice boobs cause quite a rucus with those who don't have them anymore and leads to lots of phone calls and letter-writing campaigns.
This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems likely to me that "acknowledged experts," at least the ones contributing to this new site, think that Wikipedia is NOT an enormous body of good source material, and do NOT want to contribute to it.
It especially seems likely in light of the fact that Langer Sanger, who left Wikipedia bec
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia would have to develop what is essentially a caste system so a user could only edit what has been written by people in the same or lower level as them, protecting expert knowledge from armchair scholars.
Experts already contribute to Wikipedia, and many have left because of edit wars with other users who really don't know what they are talking about. Until Wikipedia begins to show offical recognition of authoritive sources, this will continue.
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
Much better project (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:2)
I am a working academic in a particular area of literature with a number of respected articles to my name. This is not hypothetical, it's true. When I look at the articles on one of the best known literary works in this area -- and I mean well-known enough that I am sure over 50% of readers of this page will have read one of them -- I cringe at how abo
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that this study over-estimates the accuracy of Wikipedia because it was limited to natural science topics. My impression is that Wikipedia is pretty accurate in this area because people tend to know whether they know what they are talking about or not and people who really don't know anything aren't very likely to write about something like chemistry. Where Wikipedia seems to me to have more of a problem is in areas that people who really don't know what they are talking about think that they do, which is more common outside of the natural sciences. My own field of linguistics is like this. Pseudo-experts seem to be particularly common in historical linguistics. I'd be interested to see a study like the one cited but covering areas like linguistics and psychology.
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:2)
"Silly" ideas are what make the Internet great (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does there have to be a wrong direction?
It's trying something new. Either it will work out or it won't (and if it does work out, there will probably have to be revisions to the idea).
There is an *incredible* number of incredibly useful information systems that do not exist that have the potential to exist, now that we have the Internet widely available. They could be the next most important way to exchange information -- someone just has to come up with the system and nurse it. We haven't yet scratched the surface -- we don't have any idea what can be done.
In the past few years, I've seen the rise of:
* MMORPGs -- "virtual reality" with huge numbers of people actually existing in real life, playing, exploring and talking together, without regard for physical location. I have a number of friends that have fanned out across the United States, but can still spend more time together than people they live next door to, just because they have forums to do so now.
* Instant Messaging systems -- A system that grants the ability to contact most people with almost zero delay time, collaborate (pasting text and links), carry on masses of real time conversations at once, etc.
* blogs -- A way to rapidly publish, identify, and propagate new memes, with a reputation system built in (if someone has written good articles before, perhaps they will continue to do so). CNN isn't my sole (or primary) source of interesting information any more, which means that control of information channels is *much* weaker than it was even recently.
* reddit -- collaboratively rated "blog". A truly adaptive "content of interest" stream. IMHO, the next generation beyond just reading RSS feeds of blogs.
* del.icio.us -- collaboratively rated bookmarking, useful for researching a topic quickly.
* Wikipedia -- whether you call it an "encyclopedia" or not, there's no denying that this store of overview-level knowledge on many, many topics is incredibly valuable.
* Freenet -- we have (abeit still not in a particularly Joe-Sixpack-usable package) truly anonymous interaction offered us.
That's just off the top of my head. There are new ideas just bubbling up all over. What's the cost of trying something wrong? Maybe someone insults your idea and you pay some server fees. The Internet is a *long*, *long* way from being a mature environment -- there are new, completely untapped things coming into being every day.
I don't think anyone thinks that Digital Universe is going to be unilaterally better than Wikipedia, but who knows? Maybe it will work, and maybe it will be better in some ways than WP. In any event, is has the ability to feed off Wikipedia, and provides a mechanism to access copyrighted content (whereas WP is limited to public-domain and free-use content).
Re:"Silly" ideas are what make the Internet great (Score:2)
Re:This strikes me as a silly idea. (Score:4, Informative)
What's their motto? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like they're basically going right back to the old model of encyclopedia authoring, and the only real difference is it's online.
Re:What's their motto? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's this "sort of free" you are talking about? From TFA:
This is basically Wikipedia, except with articles that are vetted by experts before being published. Which is exactly how Free Software works - with the maintainer being the "expert" vetting everythi
Re:What's their motto? (Score:2)
Slow down cowboy! It's been 7 hours and 16 days.. since you gave your lovin' away.. (oooh oooh oooh oooh.. oooh)
Re:What's their motto? (Score:2)
Re:What's their motto? (Score:2)
You just gave me a shudder as I imagined a wikilinux kernel...
Re:What's their motto? (Score:4, Insightful)
Digital Universe is gratis and most definitely not 'free'. Shame on the people who modded you up.
Important addendum: 'free' does not equate to 'better'.
Re:What's their motto? (Score:5, Informative)
The old model isn't really the old model. There was a time, that ended around World War 1, that the best enyclopedias tended to have articles by really top experts in their fields, i.e. Thomas Edison writng about his own inventions, or Woodrow Wilson about European geopolitics. That didn't necessarily eliminate bias (sometimes far from it), but it did often greatly boost quality in other ways.
Here's an online version of one of the best examples - the "Love to Know" encyclopedia, based on the Britanica 11th edition, for those interested in seeing what encyclopedia meant once:
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/ [1911encyclopedia.org]
By 1940 or so at most, the overwhelming majority of new encyclopedia articles were by staff writers, who were generally not known for any original (as opposed to synthetic) contributions to the fields they addressed, who sometimes interviewed really primary sources directly, but were often at third remove or more. For articles updating older entries, there was almost never new deep research done. An update on Relativity, for example was likely to involve taking the opinion of an easily accessable local college professor as to how an older version should be rewritten for modern readers.
Digital Universe could be very similar to the late era print model, and have entries mostly by academics for 'major' subjects and hobby writers for 'minor' ones, or it could deliberately leverage the hypertext-like online model, the ease and speed of modifying flawed entries and seeing the corrections propagate, the easing of editorial space restrictions for 'minor' subjects, and other net-typical advantages to go back to the older old model, which (IMHO), would make the results much more tolerable.
Re:What's their motto? (Score:2)
Re:What's their motto? (Score:2)
Not a very good alternative (Score:2)
You're right. The "editable by some" is a big thing against Digital Universe. Wikipedia has grown enormously in a very short period of time. I doubt if this new fangled Digital Universe will be able to demonstrate such growth.
Joe User can search for an article, see that it's missing and write one. Or if an article has mistakes or errors or missing information, s/he can contribute. Of course, it does take some time for the article to mature, but the basic idea remains that anyone can contribute. Now, as a Jo
Re:Not a very good alternative (Score:2)
I basically look at wikipedia as a source of amusement, *not* information, because the only thing you're getting is the prejudices of th
Re:Not a very good alternative (Score:2)
So, you can take the occasional mistake for a wider coverage, and a better chance of finding the information you need. If you are entirely dependent on Wikipedia, you must be nuts.
Re:Not a very good alternative (Score:2)
I'd rather have a smaller reliable source than a huge source where I couldn't rely upon any particular claim it makes. Wikipedia is definitely in the latter category.
Re:Not a very good alternative (Score:2)
However, the growth and evolution of a more flexible entity like wikipedia is faster than one that is not as flexible, owing to the fact that people can contribute quite easily.
Obviously, that is a double edged sword
Re:Not a very good alternative (Score:2)
By saying "all things being equal" you're implicitly making the argument that a random person's feedback is going to be as good as an expert's.
That's just silly, all things aren't equal. Random people are just as likely to degrade the quality of an article as increase it, especially on topics where ill-informed people with political or religious axes to grind are likely to want to edit.
Re:What's their motto? (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, Wikipedia has a network effect slash brand recognition: I remember Fred Bauder's Internet-Encyclopedia (now called Wikinfo [wikinfo.org]). It was a great idea, but people were using Wikipedia already, so meh, why bother? The original premise was to make the main article sympathetic-POV, and allow other POVs and other authorships in parallel articles. Nothing wrong with the idea, but he couldn't convince people to switch from Wikipedia.
I don't think Digital Universe will attract many seasoned Wikipedia contributors, and its design seems to make it worthless without a good public user base (since we know from Nupedia's story that experts-only contribution won't work).
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Facts, not Truths. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Its job is to state that claims have been made, one way or the other, who made those claims, what sort of support the claims enjoy and what criticism they suffer, and other stuff relevant to the claims. That's all. I think that's a far more attainable goal for a volunteer encyclopedia project than Truth.
Re:Facts, not Truths. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Facts, not Truths. (Score:2)
p(x): x is a fact
q(x): x is a truth
If x is a fact, then it is a truth, so p(x)->q(x).
If x is a truth, then it is a fact (opinions are never always true since they vary from person to person), so q(x)->p(x).
Therefore, p(x)<->q(x), so "fact" is equivalent to "truth".
Are you telling me that somehow "fact" and "truth" are not the same thing?
Re:Facts, not Truths. (Score:2, Interesting)
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some things presented as "facts" are pure and simple bullshit, for example because their authors deliberately omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie. Therefore a pure 'fact' must be described by a witness, not by simply copy/pasting 'publish
Re:Facts, not Truths. (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that just journalism, not writing reference material?
Re:Well... (Score:2)
POV (Score:3, Interesting)
. . . these debates . . . create a neutral point of view that presents all the important facts.
This statement is so staggeringly devoid of value to this discussion as to beggar description. Such debates may or may not result in a consensus regarding what constitutes a fact and its relative significance. Scholarly debate, whether or no sanctioned by the academy, whether by encyclopaedists professional or amateur, whether electronic or carbon-based, is scholarly debate, friend.
Debate, by its nature,
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Hasn't Larry learned anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The reason Nupedia is having trouble right now is that we've had trouble convincing academics that it is indeed a bona fide cathedral. If we were to convince them of that--which I think we will, eventually--you'll see just how wrong you really are (that Nupedia is a failure)."
Well, he was wrong. Experts have little time to waste on stuff like this, and Nupedia died. Will this die? Who knows.. but Sanger has been wrong before.
Re:Hasn't Larry learned anything? (Score:2)
Re:Hasn't Larry learned anything? (Score:2)
Re:Hasn't Larry learned anything? (Score:2)
That said, it's possible that, especially with Wikipedia's high profile right now, the circumstances are different enough that it could work.
What makes an expert? (Score:2, Interesting)
What one person calls an expert someone else calls them an idiot.. so what defines it in this case?
Re:What makes an expert? (Score:2)
Are "The Aliens" buillding it for him? (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?
Re:Are "The Aliens" buillding it for him? (Score:2)
Ah, the alien formerly known as Jesus...
Re:Are "The Aliens" buillding it for him? (Score:2)
Free creations? (Score:2)
Not a true Alternative (Score:2, Insightful)
Digital Universe is simply an online traditional encyclopedia. I am of the opinion that Wikipedia is a great place to get started or to learn about relatively non-controversial topics. No one source should be used for anything, and that goes for Wikipedia as well.
But for Digital Universe to compete with Wikipedia, or vice versa,
Re:Not a true Alternative (Score:5, Funny)
edit:
Wikipedia's strengths lie in the fact that it's editable by ninjas.
Re:Not a true Alternative (Score:2)
edit:
Wikipedia's strengths lie in the fact that it's editable by pirates, or ninjas at the discretion of pirates.
Re:Not a true Alternative (Score:2)
Some have said that wikipedia's strength is in the fact that it's editable by pirates, but critics claim that ninjas only edit at the discretion of pirates.
(Why do all Wikipedia articles degenerate into this format?)
rvv, going back to Ruff_ilb edit. Typo. (Score:2)
Re:Not a true Alternative (Score:2)
Alternative... (Score:2, Interesting)
And if you wanted medical journals for example, wikipedia doesn't do those, these guys do: Medical Journals [freemedicaljournals.com] So sure, there are many sites offering you ways of posting/sharing information, but they ar
But the important question is... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:But the important question is... (Score:2)
SWOOOOOOOOSH!!!! (Score:2)
Institutions (Score:2)
Like St. Wonko's Institution for the Criminally Insane?
"acknowledged experts" is a bottleneck (Score:4, Interesting)
In contrast, wikipedia seeks to create content without this overhead to officially-hired experts. The greatest strength of wikipedia is that anyone can add to it. This encourages content generation. The greatest weakness of wikipedia is that anyone can add to it. This encourages vandals and idiots to add errors into entries.
What projects such as wikipedia need is a mechanism for creating experts and signaling expertise within the context of a corpus created by an open network. This means a better karma system and mechanism for filtering/de-editing entries. Perhaps the easiest mechanism would be a text color-coding scheme. Edits made recently by editors with no track record for stable contributions would be color coded red to caution the reader. The longer the edit lasts, the darker it becomes. Edits that we're made by those with a long history of non-edited additions would see their text quickly become normal black. Done well, such a system could even track contentious frontiers of knowledge -- showing both variants of contested facts in red until one side marshals enough evidence to induce stability.
Readers might even be able to pick which rendering of the wiki to view. They might ask to see only the content that has survived X viewings without an editorial incident (retraction or rewrite) or see only content written by contributors with some threshold level of expertise karma.
Re:"acknowledged experts" is a bottleneck (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"acknowledged experts" is a bottleneck (Score:2)
On the whole I like your idea... the problem is mainly how d
Re:"acknowledged experts" is a bottleneck (Score:2)
Pokemon (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Pokemon (Score:2)
For further information... (Score:5, Funny)
Space Aliens (Score:2, Informative)
Think I'm joking?
link [com.com]
shades of DMOZ (Score:2)
Re:shades of DMOZ (Score:2)
DMOZ was a good idea, but poorly implemented and even more poorly admini
Nupedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Great (Score:2)
For some reason I don't see this as being NEARLY as large as Wikipedia, especially since it is going up against the existing giant.
On Wikipedia only persistence counts (Score:2, Interesting)
I am wondering... (Score:2)
It's about accountability (Score:2)
New and improved! (Score:2)
As opposed to Wikipedia, who expressly bar experts from contributing or reviewing material.
Ummmm.... no.
Actually, what's happening here is that DU will bar the public from contributing further, after the experts have their say.
Let's Compare (Score:4, Insightful)
Digital Universe: 0 articles, 10 million dollars.
Even more telling.. (Score:2)
Digital Universe: Even their cost per article remains undefined.
PC? NPOV? The hell with that... (Score:2)
will I contribute? -- no (Score:2)
For background: I am nearly finished with a doctorate in the sciences. I respect expert knowledge, pe
Objectivity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Objective or Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be interested in seeing who they get to do the editing before I make any judgements. I know that I'm often frustrated with Wikipedia because it says "stub found" gives me a bunch of options for adding on. Well, DUH!, if I already knew the answer, I wouldn't be searching for it.
Seriously, I'd like to see some of
Re:Objective or Bias (Score:2)
How can you get an encyclopedic-quality entry on medieval weaponry without waiting for an expert on medieval weapons to come by? Do you really think we all have enough cultural knowledge to get by?
In this example the wisdom of crowds would probably result in an article that has more in common with the D&D Player's Handbook than historical fact. (Wait, yo
What? That's backwards (Score:2)
Then why aren't they using open source? (Score:2)
I own an ADM64 Linux box, a couple of Mac and a lonely old Windows machine.
I am also a 52 year old published author, a blogger and a podcaster. I figure after 25 years of doing OOP, I've figure that I've earned enough 'street cred' to tell them that a Windows only environment is not a smart move for an academic exercise.
I don't trust them.
ManyOne browser - only available for Windows (Score:2)
Looking at the link they provide [earthportal.net]:
"Minimum System Requirements:
* Microsoft® Windows XP or Windows 2000
Ewww. It almost sounds like a custom Mozilla + Macromedia Flash browser:
"Licenses
ManyOne Application Suite
Mozilla Public License
The ManyOne
Re:errors (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:errors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:errors (Score:2)
Re:Business as usual ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing prevents real experts from contributing to Wikipedia now. The difference is that they have no special status and may have to spend a lot of time and energy arguign with non-experts if they want to revise things. This proposal isn't about giving experts access, which they already have, its about giving experts authority.
Re:Business as usual ? (Score:2)
What do you do when two experts disagree? (As is often the case)
Re:Willing volunteers needed. (Score:2)
What we had was a comparison of 42 articles on science and something less than a ringing endorsement of the Wikipedia. Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's [theregister.co.uk].
Truth is, meaningful details about this "peer revuew" of the Wikipedia are hard to come by even on Nature's own web site: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head [nature.com]
If something is too much of a pain, then people are going to avoid it. Wiki
DMOZ! Oh, the nostalgia! (Score:2)
Don't mod this 'Funny', either -- I'm being serious! This is *proper* nostalgia! -- it's deeply and touchingly poignant.
Just take moment -- TAKE, I said, A MOMENT -- to sit there and imbibe the sheer humanity of it all...
Re:UFO nut (Score:2)
Joe got out when the gettin' was good, so to speak. At age 28 and worth hundreds of million$, he stepped down from his position shortly after the CKS deal to pursue the truth about UFO's.
In fact he wrote a rather lengthy online book about his theories, called "The Truth". Loo