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Posted by: qwerty

This is the question I ask myself over and over again. Why does nobody try to decentralize the wiki world by competing against Wikimedia? Many people complain about Wikimedia's projects, but they do nothing to compete against it. There's no initiative to build big wikis outside Wikimedia. Why?

Posted by: Selina

The biggest most obvious one has to be money, pure and simple - Look at the amount of money Wikipedia uses to keep running - It's easy to say "fork off", but nearly no one has the money required to run a working site with as much hardware and bandwidth requirements as Wikipedia...

Posted by: vulchy

I believe there are some lower-level sites that do, but the simple fact is, Wikipedia has a monopoly over this area, and not much can be done about it. This isn't a bad thing, of course.

See, all the cheap-o celebrity sites and/or biographical sites copy Wikipedia's info directly, as do the mirror sites. This is one of the major monetary incomes for Wikipedia, and it would be near-impossible for any competitor to take over.

It would need to be a site of much greater quality and comprehensiveness.

Posted by: Blu Aardvark

There is another alternative - a series of sites, all comprehensive on specific topics, and all interconnected via interwiki. This would actually be both cheaper, and in the long run, better, than a single site on general topics, which cannot be comprehensive by nature. In addition, it would solve many of the systematic problems present in the single-site model.

Posted by: Lir

Thats awful hypocritical of Jimbo, since he is the guy who said using taxpayer money to help victims of Hurricane Katrina was 'fascism'. Apparently, however, its ok if the taxpayers fund Jimbo.

Posted by: emesee

Good question.

You might check out

http://encyc.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://wikademia.org/Main

and http://wikademia.org/Decentralizing_wiki_technology

Cheers.

Posted by: Eva Destruction

Somey, please ban him from resurrecting threads. This is getting ridiculous.

Posted by: Limey

This is an intriguing idea, and I think you're absolutely right. Specialization would have many benefits, and it is certainly the norm of academia, etc. I think, though, that an even more interesting idea (if one were a businessman) would be to somehow link together specialized professional reference works into a single, high-quality encyclopedia (e.g., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Grove Dictionary of Art, and hundreds of smaller and even more specialized works).

If someone could create such a work and find a way to put in online for free, it would destroy Wikipedia almost immediately. Of course, it just might not be economically viable and figuring out to gain the rights to hundreds of different works would be a very difficult task. I think, though, if say Oxford University Press were to make a serious attempt at doing something like this, the results would be excellent. (Sadly?), they seem to have other things to do with their time.

Posted by: Guido den Broeder

Actually, some do.

Posted by: Kato

This thread is THREE AND A HALF YEARS OLD and needs to be closed.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

Fixed.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Zombie police!

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

But for the most part they only attempt to compete against small portions of Wikimedia projects, typically those which affect them personally or which they simply feel are poorly done. You and I can take a few pages and publish them in a manner modified to suit our needs and tastes, but what would we do for the other 99.999%:
A. Leave them blank because they are Shit We Don't Care About, and not pretend to be a serious competitor.
B. Import them from a database dump because we suppose any problems we inherit can be fixed more expediently on our fledgling wiki than in the original.
C. Wait for them to be written as a revenge platform by other people who are banned from WP (and whose POVs seem as irrational to us as ours do to them).
D. Other, please explain.

Posted by: sbrown

Ive checked them out already.

Posted by: emesee

Bless you!



That is why it seems to me that eventually ever Wiki-Communist Foundation Wiki have its own forked counterpart. That is including Wikia.



BLARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR



More powerz to them.



Yes, and immediate fix would be nice, but I guess we'll (or at least I) will have to be patient.

And to all trolls: go eat your trollishness with some vinaigrette and bacon bits.

Posted by: Guido den Broeder

Well, that latter criterium makes us target the lot.

Posted by: Emperor

Wow, Lir, qwerty, Selina, Blu Aardvark. Classic WR, kids, check it out!

Posted by: sbrown

Serious question why is qwerty shown as the thread starter when its Lir?

Posted by: Guido den Broeder

Emesee, I suggest that you stop account-spamming at Wikisage. In contrast to Wikipedia, there is no advantage to having more than one.

Posted by: Grep

If there's something interesting to be said on the subject, why care about when the thread started?

Posted by: Moulton

It's not the song. It's the singer.

Posted by: emesee

i suggest you stop labeling my behavior as "spamming". the path to getting to editing at your wiki appears to be so mangled, perhaps there is no hope for you.

no one will contribute simply because they can't. JEEZZ_Holy KITttens. "Number of articles: 1 " lulz.




but as obi-wan or princess leya said something liek something: """"""""""""""there is always hope"""""""""". so there.


and encyc is a waaaay better domain than "wikisage" ... but wikisage is maybe ok. that is all just my super silly opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. or a whole bucket of salt. yum.\

your splash page is crazy nice though.

Don't give up though, just make the sign-up process a bit easier.... the signing up is easy...


But THEN it says you need to have an email address entered to Edit - But I have one entered! So maybe you'll never get more than 1 article.

yikes.

Posted by: Moulton

Anyone up for a beer summit?

Posted by: SB_Johnny

To compete you'd need a big funding source (like a group of universities, a government, or somebody like Bill Gates or Google), and probably do something along the lines of Amazon Mechanical Turk to attract and retain good writers, editors, and admins.

Ah yes, the audacity of hops.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

But there has been no interesting posts on the topic since the necromancy, including this one. Just some meta comments on thread necromancy and one or two people replying with whatever is on the top of there head without even realizing they are talking with ghosts. Emesee acts as minor disorganizing force suppressing active threads and ticking up less relevant ones. It is not the worse thing in the world I suppose but I understand at least mild annoyance.

Posted by: Kato

The Wikipedia landscape now is not the same as the Wikipedia landscape of March 2006. March 2006 was pre-Citizendium, pre-Google Knol and pre any number of attempts to compete with Wikipedia. Those early posts lack the knowledge and hindsight needed to answer the question in a way that is relevant now.

Posted by: Moulton

Today, if you want to write an article of encyclopedic merit, there is Google Knol.

Today, if you want to push a point of view, there is Google Blogger.

Why would anyone go back to Wikipedia, except to exploit it as a real-time drama engine?

Posted by: thekohser

Google Knol lacks so many features that are an aid to any online encyclopedia. Perhaps simplest and foremost, how do I link from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikivoices&action=history to the Google Knol page about Talleyrand? Furthermore, how do I select http://knol.google.com/k/knol/system/knol/pages/Search?q=talleyrand&restrict=general&back=j751rvgxyrk5.8 about Talleyrand, when one hasn't been written?

For that matter, how do I select http://knol.google.com/k/knol/system/knol/pages/Search?q=France&restrict=general&back=j751rvgxyrk5.8 about France?

Do I sort by page views? (Can't do that.)

Do I sort by rating? (Can't do that.)

Do I sort by relevance? (Do I trust Google's ranking of these pages about France?)

Google Knol is a mess, and it's not visibly managed by anyone with any talent whatsoever in encyclopedia design. It's really just a blog forum or bazaar.

I can unabashedly state that if you want to write an article of encyclopedic merit, then Wikipedia Review is actually better than Google Knol.

Posted by: Moulton

Google Knol automatically lists (in the sidebar) other related articles, as well as the categories your articles belongs to.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Not just that but today there is a growing sense that there is no great virtue to be had in a mass collaborate project to produce an online encyclopedia. What Wikipedia has made clear is that the motivations for participation are so terribly tainted that no good can possibly come from such projects. The only appropriate use of wikis are small scale, time limited projects in which people who have IRL connections that pre-imposes a social system can collaborate. For this purpose wikis might successfully compete with other content management systems. In mass scale projects every feature (limitless scale, anonymity, avatar account creation, instant change, atomized edits, ease of revision/restoration, permanent edit record keeping, layers of users privileges, non-content related namespaces, etc) of a wiki becomes a social vulnerability.

Posted by: dtobias

You're reading your own ideology into it, and I think you're way off base regarding what the public has "realized". It's true enough that the "techno-utopian" excitement of the earliest days of Wikipedia has long faded, and some of the problems with Wikipedia are well-known enough that the likes of Colbert joke about them, but it's far from true that the public thinks "no good can possibly come" from it; in fact, people use it as much as ever, though participation in editing it does seem to be slacking off. There may be a long, slow decline ahead, and at some point somebody with a better model might supplant them (though none has surfaced yet), but that's a long way from it being universally recognized as a total failure.

----------------
Now playing: http://www.foxytunes.com/artist/holly+conlan/track/you+are+goodbye
via http://www.foxytunes.com/signatunes/

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Stupid people use it. Smart people make fun of stupid people for using it. True, there is no shortage of stupid people.

Posted by: Moulton

Wikipedia is useful as an accidental experiment in online dramaturgy.

I happened to be doing some research on Drama Theory and found WikiCulture to be a rich source of raw material on the subject, albeit far more than I could possibly analyze.

It occurs to me (and apparently to others) that Wikipedia has morphed into a magnet for people who find the drama far more alluring than the original attraction of sincerely helping to craft an authentic encyclopedia.

Posted by: Limey

It's not so different as all of that. Neither Knol nor Citizendium is a viable competitor to Wikipedia; they both have (at least so far) failed to reach critical mass, and I doubt that either ever will.




I don't really know how you define stupid, but I think you need to reexamine your assumptions. I know a number of tenured professors at major universities, some of them giants in their respective fields, who use Wikipedia for introductory research on topics with which they are not familiar (I don't know anyone who would actually cite it, though). None of these are stupid people, they just don't really know much about Wikipedia and they find it "good enough for government work" most of the time.

Posted by: emesee

this is getting too off topic. is it? (like I'm one to speak? ! ) let's try to bring it back.............

so are you saying that a fork of the wikicommunist projects should use flagged revisions and have verified experts be able to approve articles if they are willing? I could be totally off base in my interpretation of what you are saying.......

Posted by: dtobias

This is probably yet another "No True Scotsman" fallacy, where "stupid" is being defined in a way to make it a circular argument.

Posted by: JohnA

That's true. In the absence of a plausible alternative, Wikipedia wins by default. Not because its particularly good, but because its got lots of Google juice and lots of Japanese railway stations and Pokemon.

Posted by: Emperor

We're getting there. Just give us a little more time.

Posted by: Cock-up-over-conspiracy

Yes, but all those Japanese railway stations are really inaccurate and biased ... (irony alert).

This is a worth topic to resurrect from time to time.

• The first question arises ... "is it not more economical, and fun, to make them fix it than having to start up a new one?"

• The second question arises ... "ethically speaking, is it not their responsibility to fix it as in the universally accepted 'MAKE THE POLLUTER PAY' approach".

Here you have the equivalent of a mass, multi-national conglomerate spewing shit out into the environment without care or responsibility that, as we have seen, IS MOST CERTAINLY COSTING real life and innocent third parties real costs.

Its a simple matter of making them apply full cost accounting to Jimbo Wale's robber baron capitalism theft of other people's efforts, ideas and information and limiting its negative effects on the intellectual environment of the world ... Making others, and the Mediawiki Foundation, aware of its responsibility to internalize its currently unaccounted external costs (externalities).

Attempting to establish an alternative "ethical" Wikipedia is a bit like attempting to transform Hong Kong into a 100% sustainable eco-heaven, parked as it is under the belly of the soot chugging Guangzhou industrial zone.

(BTW, the opinion above is OBVIOUSLY the rantings of a racist)

Posted by: Cock-up-over-conspiracy

Racist ... merely because I said something "nasty" about China's terrible record of environmental despoliation and likened the Wikipedia's effect on the intellectual realms of future generations to it.

Posted by: Somey

Well, sheesh, don't make it easy for people - you've got to make them work for it, give them a challenge. If you just go and point out the racist stuff yourself, where's the fun in that? Obscure, cryptic, and allegorical are better than overt, blatant, and obvious, any day of the week!

Mind you, this is just in theory, of course. It would be better if people weren't racists at all, but nobody's perfect. Especially on the interwebs...

Posted by: JohnA

Erm the original did mention plausible alternative. Let me know when you've reached plausible first.