Alternatives to Wikipedia, Competitors to the beast Options Rating

[DawnofMan]

I've been wandering the internet wasteland in search of alternatives to Wikipedia. Here's what I've found so far:

Brittanica: follows the traditional model of an encyclopedia written by experts, although it does allow some input allowed from readers. Seems to be failing slowly and falling behind more open models.

[Encyc]: is a tiny effort that is even more dysfunctional and anti-social than Wikipedia.

Neturalpedia: a start-up narrowly focused focused on criticisms of mainstream climate coverage including Wikipedia's cabal driven effort.

Wikinfo: a more open community allowing original research, attribution, articles critical of subjects, and creative writing and research. The most successful alternative I've come across so far although most of its content seems to consist of copies of Wikipedia articles. I don't really understand how that part of its content is useful. Created and governed in large part by Fred Bauder who is an admin in good standing on Wikipedia? More information on this forking of the Wikipedia effort and its founder would be interesting.

Encyclopedia Dramatica, a sarcasm and humor site.

Uncyclopedia, an "unencyclopedia" site that provides an opposite day type alternate universe to Wikipedia where deleted articles, irrelevancies, and the inappropriate are the focus.

Wikademia: a Wikiversity alternative? Not really an encyclopedia.

What have others found?

This post has been edited by DawnofMan:

[lilburne]

I dug out an old CD copy of Britannica (1999) the other day. Interesting that it installed on a win7 machine, it had previously barfed on XP.

Surprisingly refreshing and got to the essence of the information I was looking up without the incoherent blather.

[Emperor]

I dug out an old CD copy of Britannica (1999) the other day. Interesting that it installed on a win7 machine, it had previously barfed on XP.

Surprisingly refreshing and got to the essence of the information I was looking up without the incoherent blather.

If you actually have a professionally-written book or CD sitting on the shelf within arms reach, it's almost always faster and easier than dealing with Web 2.0.

It's sad for the kids who don't learn how to use both anymore.