I am just wondering why insteed of criticizing Wikipedia on here and wasting human ressources we could not creat a true alternative? I am experienced with article editing and have many idea's on how to improve the concept of a free encyclopedia. An alternative would be great. I've read about citizendium and I think the concept is flawed, I've took a look at Fred Bauder project, the concept is also flawed, NPOV is the way to go. Many here are critical and have for sure good idea's and know what is wrong with Wikipedia, why not producing a better product? I'm serious and I know it'll take a huge server and it is expensive, but isen't there a way to collect money or something?

We should canalise all this energy and make something really constructive, I am not saying that we should stop criticising Wikipedia, but that we could build what we've hopped Wikipedia to be. Higher standard on everything, like minimal conditions before requesting adminship, better editorial policies. A better mediation process etc.

A better, more credible product will be what would destroy Wikipedia. If we could not improve it, we have to replace it with an overal better product.

That is exactly the kind of thing I tried creating (and I called it "The Fair Community Encyclopedia"), but downloading the image dump would've been a huge expense so I had to scrap the idea entirely.

I'd definately be willing to pitch in some funds for any ideas that come along, I've always had an idea for some sort of broadcast or podcast of weekly wiki events with a recap of major developments. I think it would be great if Wikipedia Review could branch into other mediums to get the message out there to as many people as possible.

Here's the problem. If you're trying to produce a great encyclopedia, then you shouldn't be comparing your project to Wikipedia (which is a community-edited forum, not an encyclopedia), you should be looking at World Book, Encyclopedia Brittanica, and Encarta. Those are encyclopedias.

Furthermore, what exactly is "flawed" about Citizendium, in terms of trying to build an encyclopedia that has named, credentialed authors? I think Citizendium could really work, in the encyclopedia department.

What problem I think the next great project to compile information in a wiki form needs to solve is the puzzle of "motivation". What's the motivation of a contributor to "jump ship" from Wikipedia and spend time on another, smaller, not-Top-10 site? At Centiare.com, we hope that it's the fact that contributors keep all of their own ad and sales revenues on the pages they create. The "drawback", though, is that community editing is limited to entities that do not have standing in a court of law. So, Centiare is essentially going to get built out at the rate of about one or two articles per editor, for the rest of time. For example, if your name is Fred Johnson and you run a business World Investment Kingdom, Inc., you'd be welcome to create a Centiare Directory page about Fred Johnson and about World Investment Kingdom, Inc. If you wanted to create a page about Jimbo Wales, you certainly would be welcome to; but the day Jimbo Wales registers on Centiare, he gets to take control of "his" Directory article. Both Fred and Jimbo, however, are welcome to create, edit, and modify the pages about "rain", "Venus", and "fractions" -- since they aren't legal entities -- but they can't put advertising on those pages. (We are prepared to allow community-space ads, though, if our community gets large enough and we could implement a reputation system.)

Xidaf, I guess what I'm saying is, if you think Centiare could be a platform, be my guest to use it to "destroy Wikipedia". I just don't see what you're getting at that would make some alternative site "better" than Wikipedia?

Greg

Wouldn't actually running a site like that use far more bandwidth than just downloading the image dump?

The first thing that needs to be done is to decide whether or not it is theoretically possible to do it. Many people say that it isn't. Citizendium is probably the best way to go about it, yet right now Citizendium looks to be a lost cause.

I mean, if you had Wikipedia, but without the secret admin structure, required everyone to log in in order to edit, got rid of "Check User" and instead had all admins being able to see all IPs all the time, and then did such things as encouraging actual experts in their fields, rather than banning them just because they are biased, and so forth, then it might be better. I mean there's a list of things that should be changed.

But this gets me to another thing.

Look at Encyclopaedia Dramatica for a moment. Okay, its not trying to replace Wikipedia (obviously), but look at their rules. Their rules are very much an improvement over Wikipedia.

1. All admins have CheckUser automatically - no sock puppets (or precious few, and they know who you are), and no fake sock puppet allegations.
2. They require all users to create an account - far less vandalism.
3. They have removed the option to "watch" pages, and you can't simply click to see someone's contributions - far less wikistalking, or actual stalking for that matter.
4. They don't have an "Article for Deletion" process. Instead, some admin puts a tag on a page to say that they want to delete it, you get x amount of time to try to convince them its worth keeping, or else they delete it. Simple. None of this stupid fighting and arguing over it. An admin decides, and you get a chance to fight your case with the admin.
5. People can't change the rules to suit themselves. Admins can contribute to it, but they don't just let anyone off the street change the rules and then subsequently do something against the rules, but now its not against the rules.

And then of course Citizendium has a few good ones too:

6. They don't index talk pages, or user pages, or user talk pages.
7. Anything accidentally bad and they delete it
8. Anything deliberately bad and you're banned. If in doubt, you're banned.

And they don't have a stupid Request for Comment, Request for Mediation and Request for Arbitration, all of which just create stupid arguments that ultimately end up as smear campaigns.

There is debate about whether or not you should be forced to use your real name. Citizendium does it, and it sounds nice, except that the problem then is that if they do something false, suddenly its got your name attached to it. And when I used it, they did something false. The thing is that over the internet, people are going to do that, anonymous or not, but it becomes more important then.

The question then is this - can an open source project create a real encyclopaedia over the internet? I have no doubt at all that a company, such as New World Encyclopaedia, CAN do it, because they are all capable of writing their own encyclopaedia. But can individuals do it? I don't think that they can.

What's it mean, "They don't index talk pages, or user pages, or user talk pages." ??

Talking to the person, Request for Comment, Request for Mediation and Request for Arbitration having to be done in that order are only good among editors. When there's admins abusing an editor, the editor can't do anything.

Using your real name will get you real life harassment. That's what I've found.

Wikipedia has something nothing else of its style does: Name recognition.

No. The best it can produce is a vast heap of random, poorly written, transient information - crudely bolted together like some Frankenstein creature - which is damaging to the education of our children


And that name is becoming mud.

This question was asked soon after we started, and we decided after much discussion to not directly be involved in creating an alternative, but rather to analyse any alternatives. Right now, I think we could say that there are 3 major alternatives going around:

1) Wikinfo - like Wikipedia but with SPOV
2) Citizendium - like Wikipedia but with real names and hard to login
3) New World Encyclopedia wiki - A real encyclopedia making an online wiki version

We can say that Wikinfo has a major problem in that it then has shit articles created by any old idiot (see Grace Note's recent debacle as an example), and furthermore it still wipes stuff. It has been an abject failure, and only seems to still exist as something of a hobby.

Citizendium as we have discovered has the problem of encouraging real life harassment by using real life names, and still has many of the fundamental problems that Wikipedia has.

New World Encyclopedia wiki might work, and is our new best hope, but it hasn't opened yet.

Also I note that BBC created some version of a wiki encyclopedia, which seemed to work fairly well.

That'd be H2G2.

If I told you the motto of H2G2 was "Don't Panic", you'd probably figure out where the name came from.

The main difference is that at least some articles can only be edited by H2G2 staff. There is an attached conversation page where you can suggest changes... which doesn't always work well. There was an article that I suggested changes on in late 2005. They were just merged into the article in May 2007.

Well H2G2 seems to be relatively successful. It isn't trying to be an all-encompassing encyclopaedia, but for what it is trying to do it seems to be working. Come to think of it, WR hasn't done a full study on H2G2. Perhaps they should.

Citizendium is pushing to the other extrem, it won't survive and would lead to other excesses. Most of the stuff I contributed to were outside of my ''credentials'', I'm not a historian. Second, the subjects I was contributing to were too delicate, particularly the Armenian Genocide so I don't want my identity being revealed. Also Citizendium could suffer of elitist biases, I know it seem strange, but those working in the field are those who are prone to biases in the particular subject. Take a historian of the Turkish republic who has all the credentials and to write the Armenian Genocide article. There are several other concerns with Citizendium, but I will leave them down.

The idea of an encyclopedia which permit identity being kept secret is fine but with various modifications. Like you have to be logged to access talkpages. That visitors who are not logged can view the talkpage is a huge problem and attract bad faithed editors. You have to be logged to edit everything. You have to justify before editing the main everything you edit in the main, in the talkpage, and this before you edit the main. You have to prepare your justification and edit, and post them in an interval of 10 minutes, if you don't post the justification before, the edit of the main is blocked. No 3RR, reducing this to 1RR(more than that, the editor who would be reverting it is not editing in good faith) and this not on the editor but the version itself. This will kill meatpuppeting right away.

The policies on content, such as neutrality, should be expended with clear exemples of what to do and not to do, for those who can't grasp it and those who grasp it but don't respect them regardless. With very harsh, very harsh restrictions if they are not respected.

Administrators mendate is of three months(which should be renewed), and those who want to become administrators should have prior contribution to articles including a FA.

No arbitration committee, the arbitration committe acts more on the person than condtribution and is a punishment system than anything else.

I have many other idea's, but I think you get the picture.

In my experience, the only places that allow anonymous contributors (as in, no screen names) are places that are over-run with trolling and idiots. You don't necessarily need to know everyone's real names (and over the internet it can be dangerous) but you do need to be able to separate them from anyone else. I mean even WR forces people to have one account each and to use a screen name.

Name recognition only goes so far on the internet. If someone creates a better application or service and it reaches a critical mass it'll simply supersede Wikipedia.

Look at search engines, for instance. Yahoo was absolutely dominant a few years ago but who uses it anymore as a search engine? Does anyone even remember Aliweb (the first "search engine").

Wikipedia hit its peak, credibility wise, about a year ago. Since then their reputation has declined due to the accumulated rot of the Seigenthaler controversy, the Essjay affair and other hoaxes, goofs or major errors that now hit the media on a semi-regular basis. More and more universities are advising students not to use Wikipedia as a source and the media is less willing to do so as well. Reporters may look at a wikipedia article to give them a quick bearing on an obscure individual or event but only a journalist who is looking for a way to end their career would take Wikipedia as a final, authoritative source or would risk taking a "fact" published in Wikipedia at face value without checking it independently.

If Citizendium, for instance, can expand its contributor base and its size it won't be long before the media starts quoting it and that will in turn result in more contributors and more attention.

Wikipedia will either have to end its anonymity policy (which, in turn, will make it more difficult for lobbyists and people with an obvious conflict of interest to subvert it) or it will become as relevant in tomorrow's world as Usenet is today.

Yes, eventually, but we were prepared to cross that bridge when we got there.

Nice thread Xidaf.

Why does everyone think that it's so expensive to start an online encyclopedia? Throwing up a wiki site costs hardly anything. Sure, expenses would spiral if it became successful, but you'd think at that stage it would be possible to figure something out. Have there ever been any online encyclopedias that were forced to fold because they couldn't meet expenses?

If a reformed encyclopedic project was launched it would need to address the same governance and social responsibility issues that bring criticism to WP. That would mean establishing an independent non-profit entity and a governing board would represent all significant stakeholders in the project. The Wiki-Crits of WR have earned a seat at this table but to be complete it would mean participation from the funding community, accountability/privacy advocates, academics, technology interests, business, civil and social agencies.

It would also take a credible degree of capacity in terms of administration and management, internal controls, technical abilities and financial resources.

I believe that this does not occur by redirecting our efforts away from criticism and toward the creation of a "constructive" project. it will occur, if at all, as we successfully criticize WP and draw resources, volunteers, "buzz" and support away from WP and toward the appropriate alternative.

H2G2 had some useful stuff but then stopped being useful as it takes forever to add anything useful to it and so it pretty much doesn't get updated.

The main good feature is that it lets everyone make their own article of advice instead of people fighting.

Is this the case - I hadn't heard anything, but I kind of lost interest when I got the impression the "Citizendium is censored to be family friendly" and "Conservapedia is censored to be family friendly" policies were about as similar as they look, although one enforced the biases of ignorant 40 year old white americans, and one enforced the bias of educated 40 year old white americans.

That said, I figured Citizendium had a lot of things right on fixing Wikipedia. No anonymous editing (just outing admins would be a diaster, outing everyone shouldn't be as bad), no tolerance for bullshit, versions needing to be "approved" before the hit public viewing all seem like the right approach. The "very difficult to sign up" thing is a bit of a handicap, but once (if) CItizendium gets going, I imagine it won't be so bad. Frankly, if they can steal a few more ex-Wikipedians, it should be alright - most of us can write a half-decent article on something from sources without much difficulty.

Frankly, people who think Wikipedia's on the way down are deluding themselves - replacing it with a better product is the only way it'll ever fail. I think there is potential - Sanger's come the closest I've seen - but the truth is, Wikipedia isn't popular because it has a good article on the United States, or biology, or semiconductors. It's popular because it covers things traditional encyclopedias don't - porn stars, inherently funny words, opera singers, the definite article, all your base and so on. Any attempt to build a "serious, dignified topics only" won't be able to steal enough of Wikipedia's market share to put a dent into it .

I dunno - as a current Wikipedian, I would like to see *everyone* disclose their real identities, have far less tolerance of bullshit and have the website display only "somehow approved" versions of articles. I think these would fix most of what's wrong with Wikipedia right now. All that would be left is that it takes up valuable time I should spend working on my thesis.

Don't tell us — tell them —

Speakin' o' wikipissin' into the wind ...

Jonny

I think Citizendium had a good idea, use experts to resolve edit wars and make editors use their real names, but then they threw a bunch of bad ideas into the mix. And then Sanger did something completely unacceptable to me, which is that he refused to promise that the content on the site will be released under a free content license and he left the decision of the license up in the air for months upon months. I just checked back with them now after having last looked about a month ago, and now the bottom says that "All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined." I'm still not comfortable with that "yet to be determined" part, given Sanger's lack of knowledge of copyright law which he revealed during my interactions with him.

I do think the idea that there is a single neutral point of view is false. I haven't followed WikInfo that much but the idea that multiple points of view can all be administrated by the same admins doesn't seem very realistic. To that extent I'd be interested in seeing a revival of gnupedia, where there is no central control at all.

I really never believed in Wikipedia as an encyclopedia in itself. During the early days I thought it would become a good rough draft of an encyclopedia. I guess to some extent it has done that, for those parts which haven't been extensively edit warred over or otherwise censored. One thing I didn't think enough about in the early days were the problems of libel and other dangerous information being spread. I guess part of this could be solved by simply turning on robots.txt. But maybe it's just an impossible dream. I haven't completely given up on it yet.

I think a lot could be done simply by replacing some of the administration. If Jimbo could somehow be kicked off the board it'd do a lot of good. I actually thought he might be resigning from the board soon when he gave up his position as chair. But now that's looking like a pipe dream.

Well, I have serious doubts about the culture being able to accept the first, I consider the second really the area I want to work on, and encourage others to improve in, and I hear from my highly reliable source (the rumour mill) that the third one is already in the pipes.

The second is probably the one I think is most important. The tolerance of abusive behaviour on Wikipedia is very destructive. To be frank, I don't think I have the influence to make any realistic progress on ending pseudoanonymity - I'd rather work on things I can improve than struggle helplessly on those I can't. I almost did leave Wikipedia for Citizendium, though - and I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to lure a lot of good Wikipedians away if you could offer a viable alternative. Citizendium is close, and if it succeeds much, it may lure away Wikipedians in droves - most of us honestly like writing articles (because we're nerds) and don't like drama and bullshit. A chance to do good, nerdish works in peace would be tempting.

The most abusive Wikipediots are already in positions of the greatest power.

Ergo, there will be no change but a downward spiral into the muck.

Jonny

There's a lot of good brain storming going on here. This way of seing Wikipedia as an experiment for a better product to come is interesting. And after reading the policies at citizendium, I see it in a better light. Wikipedia act as a big heavy institution which moves very slowly and with no improvement. Take the arbitration which takes individual decisions without in mind the whole project. Disruptions come and go, and it only worsten or remain stable with time which is a clear indication that there is no improvement. I don't believe a democratic system could change anything, what could change is a restricted numbers of editors experimented enough and will learn from the observations of the project as a whole and continuislly patch the problems so that the same mistakes don't happen again. The current Wikipedia is everything but that. It establishment seem to not want to change anything which leaves me to believe that their main interest is not to have a credible encyclopedia.

Has anyone made any research on the revenue fall if quality would mean less users involved. Does the administration have any monetary interest in allowing more users vs quality?

FWIW, this is the Wikipedia model. Policies that were developed for dozens or hundreds of users (and worked well then) are now straining to accomodate 10s or 100s or thousands (depends on how you count).

The real question left for Wikipedia is whether it can change to meet these new challenges - most of you seem convinced it cannot, I am unconvinced either way. The real number of abusive admins is not that high, and their influence decreases with every promotion. This might be enough, it might not. But if a better alternative could be developed in the meantime ....

And that better alternaitve could be Citizendium. If they get their act together - remember, that's still a very young project. And I think it's a mistake to evalutate it as a finished project. Now, I'd say the same of Wikipedia - when you look at it as a work in progress, it looks much better than it does as a finished project. That people treat it as a finished project ... well, there isn't a cluestick in the universe big enough to deal with that.

The problem with Wikipedia is not only abusive admins, admin abuse was not the main thing which sabotaged my wikiexperience. The MAIN problem with Wikipedia is POV pushing which affects accuracy. We can clean by kicking abusive admins out this will still remain. Lobbying groups, agencies, governments spend considerable amount of money to make their positions heard, it is naive to think that Wikipedia one of the most popular site on the web will not be tried. It is so obvious that we can say it is massivally done on Wikipedia. This is what ruinated my Wikiexperience, bad faith editors who contribute for the sole purpouses of POV pushing. The current situation of Wikipedia makes it very difficult if not impossible to fix the problem.

This is why I said democratically taken decision are not good, because if a significant part of the contributors are such bad faithed editors, they will oppose with bogus reasons any improvement which would restrict them to POV push. It takes good faithed restrictive number of editors to observe and patch the system.

The abusive admins are able to have their way because the rest of the admins let them.

Because the way you get adminship is by either agreeing with the abusive admins or never taking a stand for or against anything. And the way you lose adminship is by challenging the actions of abusive admins.

Indeed, I agree this is a huge problem, and one that should be addressable. It's certainly one of the reasons we Wikipedia admins hate democracy and free speech - and generally believe the second you hear anyone whining about either, you should apply a banhammer. Because they're almost certainly a POV-warrior, in the lingo. That said, get your admin bit and you'll see that protecting good editors and chasing off bad editors is harder than it looks. I try, but I'm not very good at it yet.

It reminds me of one of Zola's book Le Germinal. In that work the poor population was exploited by the bourgeoisie, at one point one of the workers won a lot of money, while at first he was criticising very harshly the bourgeoisie, the first thing he thought of doing is exploiting others.

Administrators and simple editors are two different categories of editors, the common editor reports administrator abuses but would wish to become an admin too and once he become one he'll support the other admins against the simple editors.

The only way is to higher the standards, that those who will have the powers are fit to have that much responsability and show obvious evidence of individual and independent thinking without major influence and this before allowing them to be administrators.

Wikipedia 3RR policy is a paradise for POV pushers. Will you tell me that someone who reverts 3 times a day and get away with it is not POV pushing? But for a reason which defy logic it still is there. In fact, this policy is completly flawed, because not only 3RR is a policy exageratly assuming good faith, but it is a restriction placed on members and not a restriction on a number of times it is reverted to a version no matter who does it as it should obviously be. Because the current policy will inevitably bring the creation of socks and meatpuppeting. But just try proposition such a logical change to the policy and see if you have any chances for it to pass.

Yes, because a lot of admins are doing the opposite.

The wiki model has incredible flaws and cannot be used to make a reliable encyclopedia project unless there is significant editorial oversight.

However, the wiki model does have many incredibly useful features and functions.

One possible way to compete with Wikipedia would be to create a network of cooperative wikis, each focusing on a topical area with a clearly delineated point-of-view. Naturally, there would be some degree of overlap, but interwiki and an improved search model would actually make this overlap a Good Thing.

What you would have in such a scenario would be a large number of smaller wikis, which would likely prove easier to police, and the abandonment of such bullshit doctrine as the "neutral point of view", which is impossible to achieve in a wiki environment. You'd have wikis divided by topic, which would eliminate the problem of "cruft".

I don't know what it would take or cost to bring forth something like this. MediaWiki, as it stands, would be unsuitable for such a project, as it is designed near-solely for the benefit of Wikimedia projects. (This doesn't mean, however, that it cannot be modified, but the best solution may prove to be a closed-source engine developed from scratch.) Interwiki search has been implemented to a degree by Wikia, but it sucks balls, and makes it harder to get to a given page on a given wiki; an entirely new engine would have to be written. In addition, if any wiki wants to achieve serious credibility, they would do well to abandon the monobook skin, which is too closely linked to Wikipedia, and adapt one of their own.