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]

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.

What you say here represents the single biggest misconception about the nature of knowledge that the popular imagination has ever misconceived. Generations of educators and researchers have gone to bat trying to combat it. That naturally guarantees it a place of honor in the cornerstone of Wikipediot Fundamentalism, but I'm a little surprised to see otherwise educated people toeing its misbegotten line.

Jon Awbrey

What exactly is the misconception?