I'm posting this in the general area because I want some thoughts. What are the other Wikis like Encyc, Citizendium, Wikipedia Review, etc? I don't want to know "____ was created in ____" but more of the general views. What are the positives? The negatives? We talk about these competitors in piecemeal, but never anything as a whole.

I would like a mixture of responses from personal experience on the different ones. Is there an actual "rival" to Wikipedia? Are they all isolated and too small to amount to much? Or are they fringe, angry people like Conservapedia? Can any be trusted? Do they have the same problems as Wikipedia?

As I said before, at this point (if ever) it's unrealistic for there to emerge a single competitor to Wikipedia which has a chance in hell of displacing it. However, I do think that specialized Wikis on narrow topics and disciplines can chip away at the Wikipedia monopoly until eventually there's little left. That's the way to go, and in fact that's usually how incumbent monopolists tend to loose their position in various industries (of course sometimes the process works in reverse).

One example I've used before is http://www.ganfyd.org/index.php?title=Main_Page , which is essentially a medical Wiki, with editing restricted to registered medical practitioners. Now of course, this kind of set up is not feasible for every kind of topic and if this "thousand little wikis" model does work out, it's quite likely that there'd be a lot of diversity in the approaches and so also quality.

While we're on the topic of Encyc, I've been wondering for awhile why someone hasn't started a "World War II" wiki - there's certainly a lot of interest for it out there and splitting it off would allow the interested parties to avoid a lot of the present dysfunction of the Wikipedia. And there is a lot of good material you could scavenge from Wikipedia itself to start with.

None of these existing alternative wikis will unseat Wikipedia, with the possible exception of Citizendium (or a similar "experts-only" model), if it were to be taken over by a large university and funded properly.

I'll speak for Wikipedia Review.

Wikipedia Review is not intended to be an encyclopedia, but rather a collection of both single-writer "Directory" pages that express an advocate point-of-view about a legal entity, as well as collaboratively-written "Main space" pages written with an inclusive point-of-view about general subjects. Because it is a semantic web wiki, search engines tend to rank some of its pages higher than you'd otherwise expect them to be accorded. (For example, search Google for 'Bible story of Job'.)

Because of these search advantages and because of the hands-off approach of the owner of the site, the site has become inundated with "junk" content pages that highlight things like "Arizona DUI lawyers" and "Bounty paper towel coupons".

The positives are that you can use Wikipedia Review to serve as a publishing platform for anything appropriate for children as young as 13 years of age, without any meaningful worry that your content will be molested by other editors. As long as the site is maintained, your "Directory" page will endure for perpetuity in the state you wished to leave it.

The negatives are that your content will be hosted among pages about Arizona DUI lawyers and paper towel coupons, and (I'm told) the name of the site is grating to some people.

"Trust" is not an important priority among Wikipedia Review readers or writers. I would say that "exposure" and "message" are the higher priorities.

Unfortunately, Jimbo Wale's other project Wikia already controls most of the "specialized Wikis on narrow topics" niche. Wikia owns most of the gaming and media wikis.

For some strange reason or other when I do a search none of the other sites get on the first page, and I've never seen a wikia link crop up.

When looking for information I tend to use wikipedia for basic facts like dates, places, times. I wouldn't try to understand an unfamiliar subject from a wikipedia article as most articles of any complexity are, I find, impossible to read. The work is quite simply unreadable. I've mentioned before that some months ago I booted up 1999 CD version of Britannica and was bowled over by how lively and vibrant the articles were in comparison to the tedium on WP.

Should I want specialist information then I go to specialized sites that I've learnt to trust and where I can ask questions of subject experts. Which is where I think things will go. Wikipedia has far too many issues for it to retain a vibrant editor base outside of sport, celebrity, and other forms of popular culture. The history articles are a hopeless morass, and far too often you come across sections that have been lifted wholesale from some work that was published before George Washington was born.

Here is an example of what makes WP unreadable and will finally kill it as a laughing stock: "Never married – became an abbess. No issue. Died of the Plague"

Who the fuck in the 21st century writes like that? Who ever compiled that table ought never had been allowed to escape the condom, or should have been drowned at birth. Unfortunately its not just one person and almost all similar articles have this issue of "issue" in section heading at least. The project will never rid itself of such twaddle, return in 10 years time and crap like that will still be there.

Sadly, an awful lot of people write like that.

To answer Ottava's question: none of the other wikis have anything like WP's gravity because WP sucks up all the potential like the big black hole that it is. The WMF is at this point a very well endowed organization that wants to be in charge of this whole "setting knowledge free" phenom.

To answer Ottava's other question: yes, if there ''were'' a real competitor, they'd probably ban you too.

1. genealogists

2. Canadians

Oh, snap.


But seriously, I was just wondering about some of these for a while. I'm surprised that there isn't a Wiki that clones Wikipedia but "fixes" it. i.e. it takes only FAs or GAs, or tries to do that and have experts clean up other pages.

At moments like this WR makes WP look perfectly sane.

If you really want to see a badly-written Wikipedia article look at 'The Fame Monster, the album by Lady Gaga. Whoever demanded that the album gets presented only as an 'EP' has clearly managed to get their way - complete with article lock, auto-archiving (how many times is MiszaBot actually helpful or really needed?) absent tracks from the track listing information (it seems that what quickly became a double-CD is a 34 minute 8-track album she calls an 'EP' plus another 15-track one she originally called Fame), and hissy fits at the ready for every puzzled person passing. The upshot is that someone (ie me) looks at Wikipedia for what he thinks must be harmless and simple information about a currently-popular 'pop' artist - and becomes needlessly confused. How hard can presenting information like this be? The answer is clearly "impossible" on Wikipedia when dedication is mixed with some form of cultism - because on unpatrolled wiki, the whiners always win.

So I may glean more if I properly read the whole lengthy article? Why would I want to - it's confused enough in the intro, and Wikipedia always reads like shit anyway because it's been cobbled together by so many completely types of different people.

Did you try this?

Bible story of Job

I don't think you use the same definition of "controls" that most people do. See here for context.

Read up on Veropedia and how, tragically, Danny Wool killed that project's potential.

You may want to move over to this thread, Jeffrey.

The reason why I don't like Veropedia or think it fits my criteria above is this from Wikipedia: "Articles were uploaded when they met Veropedia's criteria. Articles were not edited once uploaded."

What I mean is to have a few specialized experts (grammar, organizing, etc. along with content) that take FAs and GAs and then improves them to meet an even higher standard and uniformity. Basically, an actually reliable and trustworthy Wikipedia that could be cited without any worries or being surrounded by crap. Veropedia didn't go above and beyond the Wiki, and thus it lived and died based on how good Wikipedia was. Since it was pulling from before 2008, that means a lot of crap.

Ha ha ha. You have just stumbled across one of Wikipedia's most pernicious weaknesses--
bigger-than-life female pop stars.

The Edge of Glory (T-H-L-K-D). 77k bytes, 110 references. For one song.
Telephone (song) (T-H-L-K-D). 81k bytes, 161 references. For one song.
Bad Romance (T-H-L-K-D). 88k bytes with 172 references. For one song.
Born This Way (song) (T-H-L-K-D). 117k bytes, 176 references. For one song.

The Gaga Wikiproject is still relatively young---only 128 articles.

Similar mountains of fanboy bullshit are posted on en-WP about many other scary women singers.
With every one of their songs dissected in obsessive detail.

Madonna: 238 articles.
(Her main article has 294 references, making her more referenced than any American president, except
for the last two, Bush and Obama--since their articles are perennial Wiki-dork battlefields.)

Whitney Houston: 93 articles.

Mariah Carey: 201 articles.

Beyoncé: 192 articles.

Celine Dion: 237 articles.

Britney Spears: 125 articles.

Cher: 151 articles. (Complete with circular categories.)

Miley Cyrus isn't even 20 years old, and she's already got 82 articles...not counting the Hannah Montana stuff.

It is another weakness of Wikipedia: it can't remember much further back than 10-20 years. The few
female singers to predate that with similar amounts of crazy coverage include Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin.
I think they were probably better singers, with longer careers, than Lady Gaga.

Maybe people realise that FAs and GAs aren't necessarily the best articles, and indeed that most FAs are damaged by being exposed on the main page.


Follow this link for a fine example of a missing apostrophe:

(Evidently not!)


I think a lot of people would agree there!

For me, the most interesting comparisons are IMDB and (from a different perspective) CDDB (and its open counterpart FreeDB. Both IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) and CDDB (the CD (Compact Disk) [music] Database) are commercial operations, with IMDB now benevolently owned by Amazon, and CDDB not-so-benevolently owned by Gracenote. Each of these is the "go-to" preference for its specific domain of information.

The thing that makes Wikipedia is being listed high on Google. This will also be what breaks it.

I agree with the "makes it" part.

It's hard to visualize how that will change though. Nor should it.


tim

IMDB was always a bit spotty for me. It goes right down to listing extras - but it doesn't seem to be any more accurate than even a stub-class Wikipedia article, even if it is narrower/deeper.

The first part is certainly true, but what I think will break Wikipedia will be a combination of things including a continuing decline in quality and poor financial health. WP is getting so big and so bad that it will be eventually be hit by majorly serious lawsuits and really wounding quality/contributor/personnel scandals, and people will eventually stop giving like they have. Internet laws are bound to tighten eventually. More of the media will start to turn against it, instead of being so naively positive/neutral with caveats.

Being so dependent on Google (and how the donations are as much for that Google search), Jimbo is surely trying to somehow expand into credibly profitable areas - as much as anything else (such as his innate megalomania) to be more financially self-supportive, but he will probably be ultimately hindered by Wikimedia's perceived ethos. An attractive new and professionally-backed fledgeling wiki model could also come along in this period to entice away the better editors and credible supporters. Probably linked to something mobile with colour e-ink and ereading software. Various people will make money. Technology and its software will advance, and Wikipedia will probably have intrinsic issues that stop it from evolving where it needs to, and look clumsy when compared to the competitor. Jimbo (starting to feel mortal) will move on into politics, and WP will hang around like MySpace and be even more full of bloated junk. Whatever takes over will have summaries and articles people can actually trust and understand.

Google, Amazon... all these huge companies are trying to compete with each other on whatever ground they can. They'll be seen as techno brands like Apple, Sony etc - if they are not already. Jimbo will never make the transition into a singular entity because the thing underneath him is too shit to support him. It's hard to visualize for sure, but something (ie progress) will happen in the wiki market. You look at Wikipedia and what do you see. I don't see progress or even stability myself.

For some reason, a gentleman from Scholarpedia made his way into the IRC Wiki room. I had a long discussion basically on the same topic. It appears that Scholarpedia is finally going to expand.

However, I never liked their model. I explained that I felt that it was better for both students and researchers to have an encyclopedia with constant footnoting so people can find out what each sentence is relying on so that the secondary sources (i.e. the criticism/scholarship) can be directly looked up if necessary. It is hard to find out what is the original thought and what is the scholarship in the old "Britannica" model (i.e. occasional references but the scholar basically giving something that could be off the top of their head.

He did say that there would be on expert in charge of each page. I don't know how I feel about it. Yes, I think that editing should be limited but mostly to preserve a standard "great" version of the page instead of having drive by non-experts randomly alter things. However, there seems to be some problems in just having one person, as they tend to put their own views above a summation of the scholarship.





But lets be honest, I pretty much believe that a perfect encyclopedia would be me and people copy editing for me on demand. ;/

Why shouldn't it change? It's down to the way WP manipulates the Google search algorithm. Many articles have huge numbers of inward links (providing Google juice) which are just internal links within WP or cross-WMF. If Google could find a way to discount such links, it would make a big difference. And Google also favours articles that get amended frequently, which is the exact opposite of what you want in most types of reference articles. Get an edit war over some idiotic point in an obscure article and - up it shoots in the Google rankings.




Apart from the missing apostrophe, I think that deserves full marks.

http://conservapedia.com/Special:Contributions/Ottava

Ottava, what's your opinion of Conservapedia so far?

I'm not sure yet. I'm waiting for when I get banned over defending an allegorical interpretation of the Bible.

Hello Ottava and thanks for your interest. I tried to respond by PM but it seems you have it disabled.

I'm trying not to post anymore to WR, but if you have any questions I'd be glad to answer them anywhere else.

I don't have it disabled. Somey has it disabled. It is part of my caged animal treatment.


My email should be easy enough to find if you look for my name or ask about. You can always feel free.

There will never be the potential for any actual "rival" to Wikipedia, except in the unlikely event of Google dropping the key Google algorithm that currently elevates Wikipedia to the highest stature in search visibility. Without Google, Wikipedia would achieve only a fraction of its reach; and the rapid ascent of WP would be vastly less "impressive".

I disagree. We would have said the same thing about Alta Vista before Google appeared. We might have said the same thing about MySpace before Facebook appeared.

The difference here is 10 years of building content. For a viable competitor to even have a fighting chance they would have to innovate significantly and convince people that their innovation makes them better than the established alternative. Now I know you're thinking, duh ... but the point is that it's not all that easy to do, especially when we're talking about an encyclopedia. No amount of computer programming genius or social relations savvy is going to enable such innovation. So where would it come from? How do you improve on the Wikipedia model in a way that will actually get people to work for you, for free?

By paying the 100 best editors about $8,000 per year?

By letting them write 1,361 articles about the Transformers franchise?

Like so?

I have always noticed that wikis seem much improved whenever they are in a language I cannot understand. Then I realized why not have a wiki in a language nobody understands? Have the text hashed upon submitting. Mask the content. Name the contributor. Wikipedia would still be that big refrigerator your mom puts your "valuable creaton" on with big colorful magnets. Nobody could fight about anything anymmore. I don't suppose anyone has actually used Wikipedia as information source in years. It's all good.

They're working on it. Large parts of Wikipedia, especially the non-article spaces, are already in a language that not many people can understand. (Consensus and civility, anyone?)

And of course there's always the hilarious Volapuk Wikipedia, which I'm sure that even Father Schleyer, the inventor of the language, couldn't follow, as they seem to make up the vocabulary as they go along.