Digital Universe (Upcoming Wikipedia Alternative)

[Pangloss]

Digital Universe is an upcoming, in-development alternative to the Wikipedia. Founded by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, DU attempts to address some of the shortcomings of the Wikipedia while maintaining the openness and flexibility of its predecessor.

 

The key element of the project is the idea that while anybody would still be able to post, special content advisors, called "Stewards", who shepherd content accuracy. Unsupervised content would still be accessible in a separated area.

 

From their web site:

http://www.digitaluniverse.net/reliable/

Reliable content is marked by the following characteristics:

 

* Created by knowledgeable experts

* Based upon trustworthy sources

* Supported by evidence

* Strongly collaborative

* Subject to peer review

* Open to public scrutiny

* Not influenced by ulterior motives

* Inclusive of diverse points of view

* Neutral

 

The Digital Universe aims to be the most reliable, complete, and up-to-date information resource possible. The information found on the Internet is becoming increasingly more commercial, promoting pay-for-placement search results to the top of the list or presenting content influenced by the advertisers who support the web sites (or blogs). The Digital Universe must maintain a neutrality policy, and remain strictly noncommercial. Neutrality and non-commerciality are very deliberately chosen features.

 

The DU will need a truly remarkable community in order to come into existence. The project must be able to attract and retain the absolutely necessary participation of many thousands of scholars and scientists, from every field of inquiry. Indeed, to secure their contribution, those scholars and scientists must participate in content review and selection. But a complete, enormous resource cannot be created and kept current by specialists alone. We will need the participation of, probably, millions of intelligent and talented people from the entire world.

 

Learning from Wikipedia, the DU will invite the public to contribute material, but at the same time recruit a worldwide network of experts and educators (called Stewards) who will vet and edit the public contributions for credibility and also produce original material of their own. The unvetted public contributions will be available to view, but be clearly distinguished from the expert-edited material, and a public polling and rating mechanism will be in place to semi-automatically remove material that is sub-standard. Stewards will be encouraged to regularly review public contributions in their areas of expertise and use that to continually expand and improve the vetted content.

 

 

CNet has a story on it here:

http://news.com.com/Wikipedia+alternative+aims+to+be+PBS+of+the+Web/2100-1038_3-5999200.html

 

And The Register ran a story on it today here, which was picked up by Slashdot:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/19/sanger_onlinepedia_with_experts/

 

 

I'm curious what you all think of the idea.

[bascule]

I always thought the solution to the credibility issue of Wikipedia would be to create all sorts of credibility metrics which would be used to calculate an overall "credibility score" for a particular edit. You could then color code portions of an article based on their credibility score.

 

But hey, as long as it has Semantic Web extensions (i.e. OWL, RDF, semantic interrelationships between articles) I'm all for it

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

This is originally what Wikipedia was going to be--the "sandbox" for a real encyclopedia. But then they decided it was good enough on its own, and got rid of the "real" encyclopedia project.

[cosine]

I don't know if I like the idea of making non-profits compete against each other.

 

Also, this reminds me of Nupedia, the first form of what Wikipedia evolved from.

[AL]

According to a survey by the journal Nature, Wikipedia has been doing quite well compared to traditional encyclopedias (in this study, Brittanica) regarding science-related entries.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69844,00.html

(This is sort of old news; I don't know if it's already been posted here, so forgive me if it has.)

 

I'm not sure what these content stewards could add that a potentially limitless internet pool of contributors could not, but I guess the proof will be in the pudding.

 

In any event, my favorite encyclopedia is still Uncyclopedia, if only because it's the most fun to read.

Check out their entry on Wikipedia.

[Pangloss]

That entry is a riot, thanks AL.