You remember Google Knol? The Wikipedia-killer?



I maintain that the only reason that Wikipedia still exists, is because there is no better alternative with an economic model that works. Not Knol. Not Citizendium (I'm still waiting for an apology from Sanger et al who could not grasp the concept)

Wikipedia is still scraped across the Internet in a way that is an insult to knowledge, an affront to democratic freedom and a friend to the tyranny of well-organized cabals.

It's not as if there could not be a better, free-to-use, authoritative encyclopedia with a useful way of paying for itself. But some idiots gave $10 million to Larry Sanger and got something worse than Wikipedia at more than $1000 per article.

Did you know there's a Wikiproject dedicated to stealing Citizendium content?

The project members include two admins who are also Citizendium members.

There is also a Wikiproject dedicated to the handling of Wikipedia Review content.





But seriously, that project is sad. Someone should propose a WikiProject to steal Conservapedia content.

Huh?


JohnA, I don't know who you think you are, but you certainly come across like an idiot yourself.

Nobody ever gave me $10 million to start Citizendium. You are probably half-remembering an erroneous report about Digital Universe from 2006, which completely screwed up many facts. Joe Firmage, not me, had lined a large number of investors--I don't know, and very much doubt, that it amounted to $10 million. Not a cent of that money ever went to Citizendium, which all told has not spent more than $100,000.

Trust me, if someone gave me $10 million, I would produce a top-flight encyclopedia, with a model that worked. That's a promise.

I thought the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica was in the public domain and thus free.

Something about this comment tells me that you don't know why we use free content licenses. Wikipedia and other free content websites want to be scraped, forked, and mirrored. This is how we increase the accessibility of content. We license content under the CC-BY-SA license to get information out, not to keep it on Wikipedia.

Then it takes you ages of Google searching to find some resource that does not take its content from Wikipedia or its sister sites. It's even worse if it is misinformation that gets propagated through the Web and cited as fact because Wikipedia said it. Even if the information is corrected on Wikipedia, the scraper sites may delay correcting or not even correct their information. By then, the misinformation has spread far and wide and saturates the Google results which gives information illiterate people the idea that the information must be correct because Google says it is correct. It gets even more bizarre with you see Wikipedia articles citing a Wikipedia scraper site as a reliable resource. It's a strange, vicious cycle.

As Lenin said "A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

(If you're a video game fan, the Metal Gear games describe this phenomenon. )

Its funny to see how certain people (mis)attribute this quote to Lenin and others to Goebbels...

You thought right. Here are free (public domain) books available in Google books

Ironic, isn't it?

Wikiquote admits its a misattribution, but neglects mentioning Lenin and states that the quote may have come from Hitler's Mein Kampf.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Goebbels#Misattributed

WQ's Lenin article doesn't even mention the quote. Wikipedia hints that Lenin never said the quote at all at Proof by assertion (T-H-L-K-D).

The confusion is dispelled by Wikianswers who clarifies that the quote was actually made... by Michael Jackson.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_said_Repeat_...t_will_believed

Sigh... you can see how the cycle goes on. Knol, Veropedia, Citizendium, and other would-be successors of Wikipedia do not have the Google juice and scrapers to spread the word (good or bad). Google is king and sites that come up often will be seen as reliable because no one teaches good old-fashioned information literacy anymore. If they did, Wikipedia Review might not even need to exist as most people would know to take Wikipedia's information with extreme caution. Even more ironic is that Google probably killed Knol itself. I never saw a Knol article come up in my searches. Hence, for most lay searchers, it never existed. If you are not out there in the first or at least second results page, people will likely never find you. Sad, but true.

Given the kind of 'authors' they had writing the most amazing garbage unchallenged, I'm really not surprised. BTW, here's an interesting article from early 2008 which contrasts Knol with Wikipedia.

This is really disappointing. Some people put a lot of work into Knol and then for Google to turn around and give such a short sunset period is a slap in the face.

I suppose when Gmail becomes unprofitable we can expect less than a year between announcement and shutdown?

This is more evidence that large websites are really not any more of a safe place for your enduring contribution to humanity than are the smaller ones.

If I want real information rather than quick trolling fodder, say on insects then I'll go to diptera.forum, or the Natural History Museum forum, or the BWARS group, or the British Heteroptera group, or in fact anywhere but wikipedia.

The same is true for any other piece of information some other site is probably going to be more accurate. Recently this site started up:

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/

and yes they have a few of my photos, but I think that the information there will be less garbled than anything you'll find on wikipedia.

The solution isn't going to be another wikipedia it is going to be a specialist subject sites run by experts, possibly networked or interlinked together.