A challenger to wikipedia

[Edric O]

And about time, too! I give you the (as yet embryonic) Digital Universe project:

www.digitaluniverse.net

It was only launched last month, but it has high hopes: It aims to build a repository of all human knowledge - much like wikipedia; it will allow anyone (all registered users, that is) to edit its articles - much like wikipedia - but, unlike wikipedia, all articles will be subjected to the scrutiny and review of experts.

And it boasts an impressive start-up fund ($10 million), as well as the active participation of wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[Andrew]

Looks familiar (someone linked to it before?).

Better to have 2 databases of the worlds knowledge than one.

Competition is good :)

[Acriku]

That's gonna be a large panel of experts... Management might become a problem, whereas wikipedia works with it: with enough of any type of user, the general balance of the article will be pretty valid. The parts where wikipedia flags as "disputed" or "outdated" or "unbalanced" are a good measure in balancing the validity of the articles, as well.

But more is better, and competing entities gives the user the rewards.

[Edric O]

It's not so much competition in the economic sense (none of these free encyclopedias gets any money from readers, so they have no financial reason to want to come out on top), as it is a competition of prestige. And a competition for people's attention spans, of course.

I make no secret of the fact that I deeply dislike wikipedia, because of the way that people with a fanatical interest in something and a lot of time on their hands can control articles. There are very few articles that are the result of equal input by several users. Most articles have been written by one user alone and just slightly tweaked by others.

Matthew White makes very good points: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm

[veK]

who cares if only 1 person wrote the whole article as long as I get the information I need from it. I mean, it's not like other users aren't able to edit them and add content - they just don't do it. so what makes you think this will change at another database? most people are lazy and alsways will be, even if some special brain plugin was able to type all their thoughts, many of them would still even be too lazy to re-read it, correct it and press the enter button. it's a problem of mankind, not of wikipedia.  :(

but anyway... I'll add digitaluniverse to the bookmarks and go there from time to time and see how it's going. layout looks nice and clean so far.

[Edric O]

who cares if only 1 person wrote the whole article as long as I get the information I need from it.

The problem is that a lot of that information may be false, biased, or both.

[veK]

that's the point...

that's why I think everything should be checked first... but this is a lot of work once the database has grown and then again we are at the point where a lot of people are needed to check the content... now how do you get so many people who do this work all day long? if you give them jobs, which means you have to pay them...

it's a vicious circle