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: Mon 15th March 2010, 9:28pm

[John Limey]

Has anyone thought of doing a complete import of Wikipedia's content to another Wiki site and starting with a clean batch of editors?

If the content on Wikipedia is good enough to justify forking to another site, then what's the problem? Either Wikipedia produces good content in which case it is a success and the dysfunction of the community is just a pointless sidenote or Wikipedia doesn't produce good content in which case there's no point in starting with bad content and new editors - they'd be better off just writing from scratch. The theory that Wikipedia has good content but bad editors is entirely incoherent.

[anthony]

Has anyone thought of doing a complete import of Wikipedia's content to another Wiki site and starting with a clean batch of editors?

If the content on Wikipedia is good enough to justify forking to another site, then what's the problem?

Exactly. To clean up a fork, you have to do almost as much work as just starting from scratch yourself.

Plus, as was discovered early on by Citizendium, the whole Wikipedia template system makes it incredibly hard to fork individual articles. You're really much better off starting from scratch. At the most you could use Wikipedia as a reference, to find other sources, but IMO even that isn't a great idea, because one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia articles is what's *not* there.

See also: How To Read Wikipedia

[A User]

You're really much better off starting from scratch. At the most you could use Wikipedia as a reference, to find other sources, but IMO even that isn't a great idea, because one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia articles is what's *not* there.

If you want to start from scratch, you need good editors. People who are loyal to the idea and commited. If there are barriers and no incentives for experts to join and contribute, they simply wont bother. That's what happened with Citizendium. They had the right idea but the way it was implemented and managed was flawed.