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?

I've found that you complain a lot. Just who are you? Why is your quest so meritorious? Are you some sort of scholar or something? What bugs you most about Wikipedia? Have you given Wikipedia Review a try? Jon Awbrey could probably explain why he likes its hybrid "protected and open" qualities.

Speaking of which, anyone seen the new Alice yet?

The alternative to Wikipedia is no Wikipedia. There is no void to fill.

Why have only one option for an online encyclopedia? I'd rather have a healthy competitor.

As far as Wikipedia Review, it's focused on advertising and promotion. Also, its owner operator has anti-social tendencies and lashes out at anyone who doesn't see things exactly his way. So it doesn't seems like a very good option.

I think it's too bad there isn't a place without the abusive bureaucracy of Wikipedia where collegial encyclopedia builders can work together. If BLP issues are a concern or there are other problems on Wikipedia then it can simply be modeled differently. That's why I started this thread: to discuss the models that exist and their strengths and weaknesses.

There are some interesting set-ups and structures for encyclopedia type Wiki communities, although I haven't found one yet that's viable. So I was interested in seeing if there were people interested in discussing and possibly building a more moral and collegial Wikipedia variant.

Such a discussion is very possible. Now, who are you, again? I'd rather not be wasting my time on this with a teenager or with someone who's just trying to stir up a drama fest.

Anti-social tendencies? How'd I get these 322 friends on Facebook?

It seems to me that Encyc functioned just fine in the last few days. We had a vandal show up, who seemed ok at first but then within a matter of hours became profane and abusive. One of our experienced administrators handled him right away.

I wonder why everyone but you seems anti-social?

Speaking from past experience by any chance?

God...just don't. I honestly felt like demanding my money back from Walt Disney Pictures afterwards. There were zero redeeming qualities to it.

I hear Wipipedia is very good. Lots of interesting people there.

I'm not discouraged by the responses here and I remain hopeful that a more healthy alternative to Wikipedia can and will be developed.

As far as existing alternatives I think they are interesting efforts with some approaches and innovations that are worth discussing, such as Wikinfo's use of "criticism of" alternative articles for every subject. I think forking that way can be useful in many cases where there is a need to alleviate the stress and tension of competing content interests. Giving appropriate balance and weight to negative assessments of a subject seems quite reasonable, although including such a link in every article seems a bit over the top. I think the way the criticism of articles were deleted across Wikipedia with the Chosen One's election was pretty ridiculous. Does anyone really think criticisms of Bush, Obama, Cheney, or other controversial figures isn't a notable subject all its own?

I also think that approaches to dealing with the BLP issues raised here are worth considering (one alternative would be to have an encyclopedia with no biographies of living people or only very notable people or only very public people or to segregate them in some way). But I think a template noting that biographical content is assumed to have been contributed in good faith and that errors are possible is enough when combined with a proactive approach to dealing with vandalism (such as having a community more focused on content contributors instead of just vandals and vandal fighters). I think starting a smaller and more limited community might be an effective approach. Or a system where anonymous edits and edits from noobs were reviewed. But of course that's a whole can of worms all it's own and not a huge concern of mine personally. Nasty things are said about people in the media and on the web all the time. Maybe an opt out clause would work?

Gregory, I'm not sure how to answer your question about who I am because I'm not sure what it is you're asking exactly. I'm well past my teens. And I'm not interested in drama. I do think an encyclopedia project can be built that lives up to the aspirations established on Wikipedia, but that haven't been lived up to there, such as respect for participants, maintaining a level playing field, and fair play. A place that actually embodied these ideals would be a big improvement.

Does thinking about an alternate Wiki make me Alice? Is Wikipedia Review a looking glass?

Why don't you take your personal and hidden agenda back to your very own revenge engine where it belongs, asshole.

Well, in fairness, you do cast rather a wide net.

Well, the first rule of it is I'm not supposed to talk about it.

You don't like smokey eyes? It's Tim Burton, so you have to expect that it's Alice in Wonderland But EveryBody Looks Like a 2-Day Corpse. Why people put up with this, I do not know. I'd rather see a good zombie flick, where they blast those characters with major weapons.

The alternative to Wikipedia is not one site but several. First you have the other non-profit competitors that compete in various niches:

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Supported by Stanford University and various foundations. Excellent articles written by experts on philosophical topics, but suffers from spotty coverage.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Supported by the University of Tennessee. Good coverage. Expert written, pitched at a slightly more accessible level than the SEP.
• Encyclopedia Virginia - Supported by the State of Virginia. Mostly historical articles which are of uniformly excellent quality and written by experts.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography - Published conventionally but available online through the support of the Australian Research Council. Professionally written and almost always superior to Wikipedia.
• Holocaust Encyclopedia - Expert written and available in many languages, though the articles are generally short. Funded by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Encyclopedia of Earth - Supported by a variety of nonprofits. Expert-written coverage of scientific topics, particularly those related to the environment
• Encyclopedia of Alabama - Funded by Auburn University and the State of Alabama. Expert written and excellent, basically like the Encyclopedia Virginia only for Alabama.
• Similar projects for Georgia and Oregon
• Encyclopedia of Ukraine - Supported by the Canadian Institute of Iranian Studies and private donations. Expert written.

These are just a sampling of the non-profit offerings. What they all share is that they are freely accessible and written by experts. All of them are also primarily supported by organizations and individuals with expertise in the specific area of focus. They are all excellent, but limited to small subject areas.

Commercially, there are also several competitors to Wikipedia. Most obviously, Answers.com, which draws together hundreds of commercial encyclopedias and lets you search them all, as well as WIkipedia and dictionaries. I hate the way answers.com presents its content, but they probably have the largest database of commercial encyclopedia content on the web available for free, and much of it is excellent.

If anyone really wants to put together a Wikipedia killer, the way to do it is to do roughly what Answers.com does, only for the many non-profit encyclopedias, examples of which I presented above. All of these projects have excellent content and completely compatibly goals - making their content available to a wide audience, but they don't have much pull on Google. Someone with the right skills could probably find a way to pull them all together under some broad umbrella.

At the very least, it would be incredibly useful if someone created a portal that allowed you to search the universe of high-quality open-access encyclopedias all at once from a single page. If I had any idea how to do anything with websites, I'd make something like that myself.

Except answers.com won't kill wikipedia because the bulk of their search content relies on wikipedia articles, to exist.

What are more thing that don't need to exist? Alex.

That's an interesting list Limey, and I know that some of the conventional wisdom is that only sub-wikis can compete, but I'm not buying it. I think a broad Wiki start up that's built with a good community of good people will prosper. Who wants to put up with the bullshit on Wikipedia? Sure there will need to be things worked out, trials and error, but I think it's doable. All Wikipedia content is importable anyway, so it's not like it can't be duplicated if need be to fill in the gaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers

You could do so quick easily using the Open Source project called "Sphider", its is a php website spider and search engine.

It is pretty damned simple to set up. You could offer a simple single page search option and add sites as you find them. Stick a few adsense ads on it and it would pay for itself, no problem.

The Encyclopedia of the Earth has an impressive policy as far as contributors go:

http://www.eoearth.org/eoe/contribute

Something like this would go a long way to fix the Pee-dia ... and then they could use some of those multi-millions to pay for proper editorial staff.

The problem is that I've chosen not to share my valuable professional time and advice with people who approach me on the street with a dark hood over their head and one of those "60 Minutes"-style voice modulators to disguise their voice.

Same goes for anonymous new guys here on Wikipedia Review.

You very well may deserve my effort, but before you just rob me of it, don't you think introductions are in order, first? It's what human beings have been doing for at least 4,000 years.

A list of people who have made an edit in the last 30 days is not the same as a list of people who are happy with Wikipedia and it doesn't give any indication of the number of editors who would like to participate in an alternative. Obviously there are very big advantages right now to doing work there because of how well plugged in it is to search engines. But that doesn't mean a competitor can't be whipped into shape. Remember Atari? IBM computers? Zenith? The World Book encyclopedia? Someone stepped up and offered something better or adapted better to new technologies.

In terms of alternatives to WP, don't overlook Google Knol, which provides a substantially different architectural model for supporting articles of an encyclopedic nature.

Has anyone thought of doing a complete import of Wikipedia's content to another Wiki site and starting with a clean batch of editors? I heard that Citizendum thought about doing that, but they oped to create original articles instead.

Yes.

And it didn't work out?

I'd say "it didn't work out" is probably an understatement .

If you're serious about your interest in this topic send me a PM. I have my own experiences in trying to create a fork of Wikipedia (circa 2004), and am somewhat familiar with the experiences of a few others. But I have a feeling I'd be wasting my time going over them with you. If you think you can convince me otherwise, send me a PM, and maybe we can have an email conversation.

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.

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

That was the initial plan for Citizendium. Think about it. Try to imagine a group of reasonably adult editors looking at a Big Dump of stuff from Wikipedia. A few weeks of trying to stomach that was enough to send them running away screaming and deciding to start from scratch.


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

Right, anyone who is willing to do the task is exactly the wrong kind of person needed to do it right. People willing to spend countless amounts of time "building an encyclopedia" are in some sense aberrant and deformed.

I'm sure the people behind Britannica, World Book, and Encarta might disagree. Then again they got paid.

The articles in traditional encyclopedias are written by specialists in their respective fields. The job of the editors is to find those specialists and then ensure that all the articles achieve a standard level of quality.

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.

What exactly is the misconception?

Emphasis added above

There you go.

Then again, many projects have not paid their contributors. None of the contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a resource of unsurpassed quality, were paid. Generally speaking, contributors to various specialized Encyclopedia of X variants are not paid either. They are experts who work as part of the general enterprise of academia or to spread knowledge or to advance their careers.

WP:COI!

They do not make tens of thousands of edits, nor play MMORPG games. Nor are they participating in a mere simulation of an encyclopedia. They write concise articles on a limited number of topics without undue interference, and reasonable editorial support. Whatever credit there is to had is achieved under their real names, using real credentials and not crowd shared. Even there writing an encyclopedia article is not going to generate much in the way academic creditability.

You are completely clueless of just how wack Wikipedians are and attempt to normalize their weirdness. This simple and basic fact (their weirdness) becomes a growing burden in interacting with Wikipedians, on there site and here as well. Be good and I'll assign you some extra homework.

In a real business or organization, some people become stale and are moved around to freshen them up; some people go bad and are fired. That can't, in the first place, and doesn't, in the second, really happen on the Pee-dia.

So the idea of a clean start of admins, and the exclusion of many classes of editor, is attractive ... but what would attract the right kind of material to produce a good Encyclopedia?

Like the man says, only money invested in qualifications.

As Churchill would have said, "It has been said that Wikipedia is the worst form of free encyclopedias created by unpaid volunteers except all the others that have been tried."

I was interested to see that Reuters.com had adopted the Mediawiki software for their journalist's handbook.

Right because it has damaged editors and flawed content. This is because aspects inherent in the software (anonymity, atomized content, endless levels of topic focus, repetitive tasks carefully recorded and counted, automatic attribution of edits to accounts) plays to the pathology of those attracted to wikis. It creates a self destructive dynamic both for the editors and the content.

I think that's fairly true. Wikipedia's content is bad because it combines (generally) bad editors with an (always) bad structure. The occasional gems on Wikipedia are the result of more qualified people who do show up from time to time and somehow manage to dodge the bad structure.

It is interesting to compare the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and its predecessor the Dictionary of National Biography, with Wikipedia. In both of them the articles on recently deceased people were frequently written by their relatives or friends. Even if not, there are often references to unpublished information obtained from relatives. This would of course not be allowed on Wikipedia under WP:NPOV, WP:RS and WP:V. I have heard the author of an article on ODNB, a professional historian, criticise the article on DNB that he replaced (written by a friend of the subject) as "a complete white-wash".

I recently wrote to the ODNB pointing out differences between one of their articles and what was said in obituaries. They have referred it to the article author. I have no way of knowing what "the truth" is in this case or if it even exists, but the ODNB is not infallible.

While I have no doubt that the great majority of articles on the ODNB are of high standard, it is at least possible that in a few cases WP will be better.

If by better you mean they include drive by vandalism, baseless statements concerning the person's sexuality, images including genitalia "for comparison" and a detailed listing of any reference on Family Guy, The Simpsons and Futurmara I susppose.

Wikipedia alternatives? There's always encyc.org.

RFLMAO!

Thanks! We're getting there.

Come off it! I'm not an idiot and I'm well aware of the problems there are on WP and how even a good article can be damaged by vandals or silly editors. However, nor am I of the mindset that everything on WP is bad, even the good bits, and that anything else must be better. There are plenty of good biographies on WP, with no baseless statements concerning the person's sexuality, genitalia or Family Guy. Further, although ODNB is undoubtedly an excellent source it is far from perfect, especially for recently deceased people where often the article displays a distinct POV. Failure to recognise these points makes it difficult to criticise WP when it is bad, which is certainly fairly often.

Also, WP has plenty of articles on people who are notable and interesting yet have no ODNB articles. Conversely, I am surprised how many people have ODNB articles but no WP ones. Not that I'd say that on WP or people will just shout {{sofixit}}. The old DNB was even worse; it didn't even have an article on Stan Laurel. The ODNB plugged a lot of the more obvious holes. It also added articles on many women. Some would say that's because the DNB editors were male chauvinists who overlooked these women; others would suggest the ODNB is bending over backwards to be politically correct and have as many women as possible. My belief is that both these statements are true.





Surely if you are going to try to criticize Wikipedia you have to use these terms. They're pretty fundamental to the way the place works or at least is supposed to work. I should have added WP:COI of course.

Straightforward, hear hear!

Now, could you please guide us on whether this person is a vandal or a silly editor?

Or, are you of the opinion that he wasn't "damaging" the article?