In the six-odd years of its existence, Wikipedia has spawned more than two million English-language articles, 252 encyclopedias in other languages and two competing encyclopedia sites created by former members of the Wikipedia inner circle.
One year after Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger created Citizendium, an expert-driven online encyclopedia, another high-level Wikipedian has left the flock and launched his own pointy-headed startup.
Danny Wool, who left the Wikimedia Foundation last spring after nearly six years as a contributor and system administrator, says his new startup Veropedia aims to take Wikipedia content and make it ready for prime time. (The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent organization of Wikipedia.)
The Wikipedia model of allowing anyone to edit any article, regardless of their expertise or intent, simply can't produce information people can rely on, says Wool.
"When we first signed on with Wikipedia our goal was to build a citadel of knowledge," says Terry Foote, another long-time Wikipedian who's working with Wool on Veropedia. "But now it's more like ancient Rome, and the Visigoths and the vandals are coming over the walls."
Wool says he was reading Wikipedia's article on René Descartes the other day when he found a quote in it from the Dilbert Blog, mistakenly attributed to the French philosopher. (It has since been corrected.)
"I love Dilbert," he says. "But when seventh-graders go to Veropedia, we want to make sure they get the most accurate information presented in the best possible way."
Wool's plan: Take articles from Wikipedia, verify their accuracy, revise them as needed, and then republish them on both Wikipedia and Veropedia. He hopes to improve the quality of the content while drawing enough traffic to fill his for-profit site's advertising coffers.
Unlike Wikipedia, however, articles on Veropedia can't be edited by the public. Instead, a hand-picked cadre of roughly 100 former and current Wikipedians are charged with clean-up duty. Wool says the beta site will eventually allow readers and experts to comment on each entry. He also plans to contact living figures featured in Veropedia and ask them to correct factual errors (though, he adds, "I don't expect to get a response from Osama Bin Laden or Charles Manson").
The result so far, however, is an idiosyncratic collection of content drawn seemingly at random. Of Veropedia's nearly 4,000 articles, we couldn't find any on Italy, the Theory of Relativity or the Bible at press time. (You also won't find Osama Bin Laden or Charles Manson -- Wool says he's placed a moratorium on adding living figures until the site works out some legal and practical issues.) But you will find articles on the song "Hey Jude," the videogame Donkey Kong and the 1966 horror film 'Manos' The Hands of Fate.
Wool says he's trying to steer Veropedia's volunteers toward more mainstream topics, but with only partial success. "We are still in early beta," he says.
Ironically, Sanger took a similar tack when he launched the nonprofit Citizendium in October 2006. Like Veropedia, the site started out by cleaning up Wikipedia's entries, but Sanger says the articles were in such poor shape he had to abandon that notion and start from scratch.
Anyone can add or edit articles in Citizendium, but unlike Wikipedia they can't do it anonymously. That's to discourage deliberate vandalism, says Sanger. The content is then vetted by a crew of some 240 experts -- largely academics who have been personally approved by Sanger.
The vetting process can be glacial. Of Citizendium's approximately 3,300 entries, only 39 have been "approved," while nearly 700 are tagged as "developed" but not yet finished. Even so, Sanger says the site's rate of article creation has doubled since July -- from seven articles a day to 14 -- and he firmly believes building a site that rivals Wikipedia's 2 million articles is within Citizendium's grasp.
"If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have been skeptical," he says. "Now I have every reason to think we'll enjoy same kind of exponential growth Wikipedia and other viral community sites have enjoyed."
Though office politics and internecine bickering abound at the Wikimedia Foundation -- one former insider described the atmosphere as "MySpace meets 'As the World Turns' for geeks" -- both Wool and Sanger deny that internal squabbles were why they started their own encyclopedias.
Whether their ventures fall prey to the same turf wars, bureaucratic quagmires and academic catfights as the site that spawned them remains to be seen. And if they do, well, someone is bound to launch a better version of Veropedia or Citizendium -- and start the process all over again.
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