What are the obstacles for a group of editors creating a Wikipedia fork, and making a successful and new encyclopedia. The idea is to start up a new encyclopedia, grab everything from Wikipedia, get proper editors on site, and create an exceptional encyclopedia with no BLP problems, and eradicate all POV from articles. No socks, and only editors with a confirmed email address can join. Can this be done successfully?

The best way to get started is to first propose a new set of policies and see if there is widespread support for starting another encyclopaedia using the revised set of polices.

I think a problem with Wikipedia is it has become too large. A better approach would be the creation of a set of wiki's specializing in particular subject areas.

There are many subject area experts who are unwilling to edit on Wikipedia. If a new wiki was created which is expert friendly, it would have quite a few expert editors producing content which would not appear on Wikipedia.

Setting up your own MediaWiki installation isn't all that hard. I mean, I've done it, and I'm hardly expert at this kind of thing.

In theory Wikipedia makes database dumps available. In practice I've heard that they get behind in doing this.

Even so I don't think it would be so hard to get the technical side of things going.

Getting the people that you would need to make it work, that would be like herding cats.

Also consider that if you exert too much editorial control over your beast then your Section 230 immunity becomes flimsy. Wikipedia management walks a fine line between being a "service provider" and being in charge of the "encyclopedia-building". I think that's why so many people get banned for "disruption", i.e. the only way they can boot you is if you're interfering with them supplying the service for other people.

Try to learn from Citizendium and other failed forks.

Of course not. Responsibility takes all the fun out of it.

But Citizendium is not really a fork. Yeah, Citizendium is likely to fail, too far behind. But to copy Wikipedia, and then rectify it, that would be the goal. It's on the cards, sooner or later, this may be the start!

Step 1: example how to "rectify" Wikipedia's problems.
Step 2: get people to agree with your plan to "rectify" Wikipedia.

The biggest obstacle to creating an encyclopedia starting from Wikipedia is YOU.

YOU are the problem. YOU are not scholars, have no experience of research, of editing or formal training in historical research.

YOU are ignoramuses who can't crack a book.

No proper scholar encyclopedia of any subject will appear on any wiki unless the contributors and reviewers are restricted to people who know what they are doing and are not bothered by fashions in current culture such as 24-hour rolling news and in Wikipedian terms, the gratification of immediately seeing an edit getting published as authoritative without any prior peer review.

Any attempt to fork Wikipedia, without dealing with the Wikipedian shibboleths will fail.

I doubt very much that wikis have any real value in the compilation of encyclopedias except as a demonstration of widespread ignorance.

How would you know that? I have an ancient history related degree. (I don't mean the degree is old lol although it's not the newest.)

Why on earth would you want to duplicate Wikipedia? Your fork would be considered less reliable than Wikipedia, because you forked it from the largest consensus. Duh.

If you want to "fix" Wikipedia start a website with a different editing model.

I'm not sure that makes you a scholar able to write authoritative encyclopedia articles.

Anyway, does anybody remember this post of mine, where I pondered a fork? I concluded that I couldn't really be a part of it, unless I was just a silent partner. Such a project would need a respected, globally-recognized scholar or intellectual as its leader. (Someone like William Safire or David McCullough...)

Greg

Well, two problems. One is that although the content on WP is public, in practice it's getting more and more specialized and hard to read generically, due to all those templates, specialized boxes, and generally illustrative crap. Even in HTML there are a lot of function calls which don't have anything to call when you port the WP Wikis to some other WikiWeb. This is going to take increasingly a lot of gnomish programming.

Second, while you need a SME level of review, you can't forget how WP got here. You need 1) registered contributors, 2) realworld identity confirmed contributors, AND 3) SMEs (all three classes). Of course, boot the IP people and make them get a password, so that now they're registered (WP refuses to do this, infuriatingly). But that still allows anybody to edit, and do so almost immediately.

WP was started as feedstock for SME-reviewed articles. That's still what it needs to be used for. But once the SME "seal of approval" is put on some version, we can't have that locked. That scares off the SMEs because it's too hard, and it's also unnecessary. A good SME-reviewed version simply needs to remain available, as a "last good SME-reviewed stable version". Some of this is available on WP, but not as easily as it could/should be (for one thing, WP has no way of even verifying who SMEs ARE, let alone figuring out how to use them). And every article also needs a "last good vandalproofed" version (which can be done by any proofer who's vetted in some way over time), and which version can easily be brought up, everytime somebody needs to get rid of some new crap (these editors will all be password-registered users, so not as much of this will happen-- but some). It also needs to work a section-at-a-time. People who edit anonymously add useful stuff-- don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But do make them pick a password, so that they are responsible for their histories.

A lot of pure labor has gone into WP-as-we-know-it. The next incarnation of WP, also using Wikis, should not only not reinvent the wheel, but not re-do content, except as necessary. It's WP's culture that needs reforming. Some good fraction of the material can be used like cutting the mold off a peice of bread or a chunk of cheese. What's underneath is still just fine, and using it sure beats having to make bread or cheese from scratch.

Milt

Attempting to create a Wikipedia alternative is a lost cause. Part of Wikipedia's strength is the massive, massive amount of manpower it can bring to bear, particularly on new subjects and for minor things like spelling errors. Unless you can somehow convince a significant fraction of the world to stop visiting wikipedia and to visit your site instead, you're never going to get the critical mass you need to sustain a true wikipedia alternate. If you could pull that off, there are much more lucrative things you could do with your time, like buy stock in Coca-cola and get everyone to switch from Pepsi.

The only hope you have for competing with it in any sense is to create a specific, specialized version. There are numerous subject-specific ones already out there that you could use as a model, e.g. wipipedia.

Alternative Wiki encyclopaedias can be successful without trying to be a replacement for Wikipedia. I predict Wiki's such as Scholarpedia, Memory Alpha, and Wipipedia will be successful even though they will remain relatively tiny.

Actually, the massive work-force at Wikipedia is inefficient, and it appears this is by design. Working on a new structure that dispenses with the need for a tens of thousands of people would be a Good Thing. Let robots work on spelling errors and such, and humans can deal with things a robot can't do (yet).

New articles? Let's be honest here. At the top level, Wikipedia's coverage is complete. Maybe this is just me and my lack of imagination, but it's been some years since I have been unable to find any information on a technology, science, economic, political or even "popular culture" subject at Wikipedia. If others can show this is in fact true, then it strikes me that most new articles worthy of inclusion will be at a local level. And this segues into:



Yes. Someone needs to take a chainsaw to the current Wiki architecture. At the higher levels, the incisions are made along what you might call bureaucratic lines (science, history, etc). These databases can be hosted at appropriate (and willing) universities. As you drop down the "tree of knowledge", cuts can be made across geographic areas, and servers distributed accordingly.

Best of all, the diehard inclusionists will celebrate. They can finally document their corner store, each slab of cement on the sidewalk in front of their house, and the water level at the pond in the park.

In a world where Noam Chomsky is one of the most-cited and Howard Zinn among the top-assigned, by no means is a "respected, globally-recognized scholar or intellectual" a guarantee of worth.

I don't deny it lol, it was John who was saying it was the lack of any training in history, research or whatever that would hinder the creation of a new wiki encyclopedia which was any better than the last one. Unless he assumed that about Goldheart specifically?

My doubt about a new wiki would be that it would just generate a new clique of slightly "wrong" personalities at its head, and it's that which would lead to it having similar problems to the last one.

_________________________________

Wikipedia doesn't appear to have progressed much over the last 18 months or so, it seems to be heading toward stalemate, and stalling at a place of sub-mediocre entropy. If this continues, what's the point in trying to progress the project further, as resistance to progress builds all of the time. For example, a huge debate over the British Isles article is still going on, and that was raging 5 years ago too. This is the culture now at Wikipedia, in-fighting and POV pushing, and it is now the standard. WP either changes, or ceases to exist.

On the new site idea, editors could start ripping articles from Wikipedia, and build the new encyclopedia. It would be something positive for editors to do, as Wikipedia is about 98% inefficient, I guess. Articles would then be reviewed, re-edited, de-poved and then protected.

Citizendium went a little too far the other way, i.e. requiring real names and that all content be approved before it is posted. If you can walk a fine line between the openness that is Wikipedia, but add some adult supervision, but not quite to the extent that Citizendium has done, then it might be successful. I think having a powerful name behind it, like Google or Yahoo, probably would help a lot. IMO, that's what is eventually going to happen, Yahoo or Google will fork Wikipedia, invite the best editors (hopefully, not most of the ones listed in the "notable editors" section of WR"), and then go from there.

What's up with the Knol proposal/project/whatever that Google announced? I haven't followed exactly where that stands, anyone have a capsule summary handy?

Universities bill themselves as distributors of knowledge but they have done a poor job in distributing knowledge to the general public (i.e. the typical Wikipedia reader).

It would be easy for a university department to create a Wiki in their subject area and quickly produce content superior to Wikipedia. There is no need to match Wikipedia in the number of words; most of the articles in Wikipedia are of poor quality and few of them are rated GA or FA. Instead, Wikipedia can be surpassed by the number of quality articles. The quality of the typical GA on Wikipedia is the same or lower than what would be produced in an undergraduate paper. In an academic year hundreds of GA articles could be produced by the undergraduates as part of their studies.

Yes, there's the famous "openculture.com" series, which are basically the great lectures from major universities, available as free podcasts. Some universities are simply having their students download these things and watch them on their laptops or iPhones or whatever. Of course, for a complete decent university course you need questions, feedback, testing, and so on. But this much (canned lectures, free and downloadable) is pretty amazing. See
http://www.oculture.com/2007/07/freeonlinecourses.html

Now the thing about doing this with a wiki-lecture ala web 2.0, is that there's a lot more 2-way interaction. For each printed lecture you can have a student section with questions and answers, and T.A.'s can take care of this (even other students can contribute). Also, unlike videotaped lectures, a wikilecture can be continuously refined and corrected and updated. So yes, all this is undoubtedly coming. Some of this is happening even now, without the university involved. A friend of mine took an anatomy class recently, and had to dissect a cat. She got online and bought her own preserved cat, to practice on, at home. They she got curious: is it possible that YouTube might has something as odd a video on how to disect a preserved cat, and identify structures? Turns out they do, technique tips and all. The YouTube series was even better than the city college lecture, for a lot of stuff.

I'm glad you picked up on this. I think it's a real problem for Wikipedia. If you can't read a Wikipedia article without going to their website, or at least copy and paste the text and have it make any sense whatsoever, then what's the point of the GFDL?

As an example, let's take the Wikipedia WWII article (the number one hit on Google for "world war ii" or "wwii"). Want to know who fought? Go click in the infobox on the links that say "Allies" or "Axis Powers". Want to change the infobox? Go to the special infobox template on another page. How about you'd like to copy the code for the reference list? Sorry, you have to deal with the reflist template. How about if you simply think that the use of the word "global" twice and "conflict" three times in the first two sentences is kind of silly. Think again, buddy, you have to understand that the silver padlock in the upper right corner means that as an unregistered user you can't SOFIXIT.

The fact is the registered Wikipedians have been there so long and are such a part of the bureaucracy that they are blind to these problems. The time is ripe for a new approach: (insert plug for your favorite project here).

Is that true ? Surely Universities bill themselves as providers of opportunities to learn ? Which is something very different from WP's grand notion of 'knowledge distribution' - whatever that might be.


Have you read many undergrad essays recently ? Intellectually most would be superior to the average WP content - but accessible to the ordinary reader, I don't think so. Still it would be good practice for students to have to write for a non expert audience, so with the right emphasis from the profs, a University created Wiki would be an opportunity for academia to climb down from the Ivory Towers.


AF

I wouldn't say it's like that in the UK. Not a few years ago when I was at uni. Remember 1 in 3 A-level students go to uni now in the UK, it has been dumbed down to allow for some people in IMHO- at least for some of the new universities and courses. Years ago, only 2% would get into university. It meant so much more then. Now people are expected to have a degree for a lot of jobs, it even has been made difficult for employers to tell who has a brain, as most people at some unis come out with at least a 2:1.

In my department at University- half of us passed with a first, the other half of us got a 2:1, except for one poor boy who got a 2:2.

Some of the wikipedia articles on maths or science in particular, I find completely incomprehensible, but then having an almost-classics degree what I learned was very specialized, largely irrelevant and now forgotten lol except a general knowledge of how to research and so on.

Want to be nice and spread your knowledge? You can without WP. There are full of places.

Citizendium is one place. If you have specialised knowledge, go to those websites. Cars, geography, history, law, medicine, video games, botany...there are message boards and website for those areas. They generally are more friendly and offer better information.

They have few POV pushers and no heavy handed admins.