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December 5, 2005
Called Digital Universe, the project is the brainchild of, among others, USWeb founder Joe Firmage and Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's earliest creators.
By providing a service they're calling "the PBS of the Web," the Digital Universe team hopes to create a new era of free and open access to wide swaths of information on virtually any topic.
News.context
What's new:
Digital Universe, a new online repository of articles, will have two tiers: publicly written articles that are not certified by the experts as accurate, and those that are.
Bottom line:
The founders of Digital Universe say they're creating a unique online information resource that combines Web-based collaboration and scientific review. The challenge will be finding the money to back up an endless supply of no-cost and ad-free articles.
"The vision of the Digital Universe is to essentially provide an ad-free alternative to the likes of AOL and Yahoo on the Internet," said Firmage. "Instead of building it through Web robots, we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world."
Their idea is particularly timely given recent questions about Wikipedia's accuracy and credibility. A frequently raised criticism of the constantly growing repository of information has been that the millions of articles created by a worldwide community of contributors are not verified by experts.
Of course, that has always been Wikipedia's modus operandi--that its articles are written and vetted by its community, not by an elite corps of Ph.D.s. Yet there are some who feel that while the site has a satisfying populist appeal, and may be on par with the Encyclopedia Britannica when it comes to accuracy, it still suffers from a lack of true accountability.
By including articles that have been approved by experts, Digital Universe will have such reliability, its founders say.
The problem that Firmage and his colleagues are trying to solve is finding a financially viable way to back up an endless supply of no-cost and ad-free articles written by the general public with review and certification by subject-area experts.
There have been previous attempts at this. In fact, Sanger and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were behind the last major attempt, known as Nupedia. But that effort died when it failed to generate the kind of critical mass that Wikipedia has--more than 45,000 active users and nearly 900,000 articles in English alone--over the last couple of years.
Avoiding past pitfalls
But Firmage, Sanger and Digital Universe President Bernard Haisch think their project can avoid the pitfalls of its predecessors. They've created a system built around the idea of portals--one for each major subject area, such as climate change, energy, education, the solar system and so on. Each portal will contain many different kinds of resources.
"There will be a lot of resources of different kinds that are actually prepared by experts and the general public under the management of experts," Sanger explained. "So this would include an encyclopedia, but also public-domain books, participatory journalism, forums of various kinds and so forth."
While the Digital Universe will be free to anyone, it has a business model, Firmage said. The idea is that it will partner with nonprofit organizations including NASA, the American Museum of Natural History and U.C. Berkeley and sell Digital Universe-branded Internet service to their members. He said subscribers would pay no more than what they currently pay for Internet service, and would get the benefit of knowing that some of their fees are going to supporting the organizations, as well as the Digital Universe itself.
See more CNET content tagged:
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia, expert, information service, aim
hate America first programming and left wing ideologues. Why do
we need another one? It's ironic that Wiki is filled with inaccuracies
and left-slanted material. Just like P-BS.
The time has long passed for P-BS to fold and Wiki to be ignored.
Neither can be trusted.
with a large chunk of Americans, not to mention a usually
miniscule audience. Maybe the aspect of PBS these entrepreneurs
admire is its ability to suck up tax dollars.
(No, it isn't necessary to be a right-winger to think that PBS is
incredible, for the most part.)
The time has long passed for P-BS to fold and Wiki to be ignored.
Neither can be trusted.
--
that is really true ;-)
Do humanity a favor, educate yourself a bit before you make moronic statements. Jesus would then love you...
People who listen regularly to PBS are substantially better-informed on all such issues than the rednecks-at-heart who berate PBS. Even FOX News is starting to sound a little more honest lately, perhaps becoming disillusioned with the proven dishonesty of their former political heroes.
The reason the news often seems "left of center" is that newspeople (and Wikipedia contributors and academic people for that matter) are better-informed and less full of hogwash than rightwingers.
and imagined knowledge is going to inherently contain serious
pitfalls. Wikipedia failed in achieving key objectives because no
effective documentation control could be developed. In fact.
someone in charge had the dim bulb idea that Wikipedia would
be self controlling. For the most part, it probably is, but you
never know ant any given moment what parts are correct and
what parts aren't.
By comparison, EB's errors are fixed, and usually identified, with
corrections in the next edition. Wikipedia just wanders around
truth, or a round what is currently proposed as truth.
We already have Wikipedia. It probably is adequate for casual
information finding, and perhaps as a starting point for serious
research. No matter what, of course, Wikipedia information
needs verification before using it. But another version of
Wikipedia seems like a major waste of time and effort. Let's stay
with what we have. We already know what you can, and cannot
do with it.
What benefits could "Digital Universe" take from linking to Wikipedia? Well, the presence of a wider range of articles, stubs etc on Wikipedia would be an obvious possibility - If DU doesn't have a reviewed article on a topic, possibly calling in the results of a google on Wikipedia for the serve terms AND tracking the frequency with which search terms are used, or WP pages come up during such searching would give a guide to the degree of public demand.
I watched Nupedia trying to take off, and I tried contributing myself, but the weight of the reviewing and copy-editing processes put off casual input. If I wanted to work hard at something like that, I'd also want to be getting paid for it. That's a circle that DU would have to square ; the Wikipedia solution ... is certainly not a circle, but I think it's got rather more sides, angles and loops than the normal definition of "square". (I contribute to Wikipedia too, and find it rather off-putting to have ignorant tubes come along and tell me that I know nothing about what has been my profession for 20 years.)
Or, I suppose you could just add that feature to Wikipedia (and have a view last certified version option for articles).
moment reference can be lucrative, and Encarta is the place to
make it happen. And Microsoft will add the credibility of "expert"
review. As the new Nature study suggests, no source is infallible,
but the oversight of specialists improves accuracy.
Have you been taping together Bill Gates' shredded email again?
The degree of Doctor of Philosophy is not awarded by governments. It is awarded by a body of people (usually with PhDs themselves, but not always) who are acknowledged by a high proportion of workers in a particular field to be very good or expert in that field, and that award is generally rubber-stamped by a university's governing body (again, not a government-controlled institution. At least, not in Europe and America.)
You get your PhD for doing competent original research in <whatever> field. Or occasionally for services to that field, typically teaching.
It is extremely difficult to get a PhD for incompetent research, undefended bluster, or sloppily-done work, because the majority of the people on the review panel would (a) spot the incompetence, (b) deflate the bluster or (c) have pointed out the problems in your research methods several years ago because they were in the people you asked for help when you started the project. The academic research community is a community just as much as the "Wikipedia community" is, and it has developed it's own mores over the 2 to 3 centuries that it has existed.
Governments very rarely try to interfere with this low level of academic life, because it simply doesn't matter to them. Also, academia has a tendency to get very prickly about interference from outside, which would make such interference unlikely to be successful, and potentially costly in terms of bad publicity.
<<Wikipedia may be biased here and there >> That's a bit of an understatement! The problem is that often Wikipedia is too accepting of vocal but just plain wrong claims, with inadequate fact checking. And people tend to accept description of incorrect, but strongly defended, positions in the mistaken belief that the sum of <probably correct> and <almost certainly very wrong> is likely to be closer to the truth than either position on its own. This may work in literary criticism, but it doesn't work in (to choose one of your examples) nuclear fusion. As a cartoon character (engineer) once said "We'd like to build our prototype in an uninhabited solar system, in case we have a learning experience."
<<you get strong balance troughout the article as to dissentions and dangers not found in Britannica.>> Given the question of the meaning of "balance" above, this is a fair point. Since most review articles in the likes of Britannica are written by people deeply involved in <whatever> field, then broad overview of a field, and it's relations to the rest of the world of knowledge can be hard to attain. I believe that this is what the "discussion" links on most Wikipedia pages are for.
<<Non-Profit is the future. You may think I am too liberal here but this is the way I see it now.>> Irrelevant. Possibly true, but irrelevant. Given the popularity of Wikipedia, it would be perfectly plausible for WP to morph into a for-profit advertising-funded site and continue on the same path as it is travelling now. It would take some good PR work, and a careful focus on maintaining public image, but it could be done. Witness Google. Equally, the Wikipedia concept could be applied in a commercial setting -we've considered it as a model for maintaining an "experience base" for some of our software products at work - and at $15k a license, we're not exactly doing that as a non-profit organisation.
BTW, given your claims to be rather liberal, you might want to check out "common ownership" company structures. Definitely for-profit, but equally definitely not an illiberal corporate structure. Actually, going CO would be a credible model for WP to go for-profit. Hmmm, that would stir up a fine hornet's nest if you said it in the right circles.
made scholarship obsolete? That's a sad thought. More likely,
the public schools have made the respect for knowledge "old
hat." What, pray tell, has having PhD got to do with NASA? A
doctorate is disreputable because the government hires people
who have them? It also hires people who know how to drive cars,
so I guess the car is out, and people who eat at restaurants, and
those who read books, so away with those. Yes, let's chuck the
entire human race because NASA relies on human employees.
No reference is perfect. But one that relies on a anonymous
donors who may have no outstanding knowledge about the
topics on which they post is, by definition, less dependable than
one that features the content of topical specialists who, GASP!,
may even have PhDs.
Which makes better sense: eating at a restaurant where your
food is prepared by a group of strangers who are not employees
of the restaurant and whose cooking ability is unknown (much
less their names), or eating at one whose kitchen staff is
directed by a cook/chef with proven ability?
It looks like Americans are ready to proudly elevate ignorance to
a high art. Given that we have the lowest student test scores in
the developed world, I guess we have to lay claim to some areas
of expertise. Why not stupidity?
I had a forum argument about St. Paul the Apostle ended by being told I was totally wrong, witness the Wikipedia!!! It did no good to point out that the Wikipedia entry on Paul was written in 1899 by a Protestant minister.
The Wiki is worthless, for the simple reason that this service will remedy. It publishes opinions abd fantasy as fact, regardless of the source. Expertise is not a dirty word when you need brain surgery....
Wiki is no better than the advice given a demented friend of mine after she told one of her illiterate friends she had been diagnosed with emphysema. "That's just a fancy doctor word for lung cancer!"
So she called me hysterical, to say good-bye. Good-bye, Wiki. Your friends deserve you.
M
- Wikipedia matched (not "almost matched") Encyclopedia Britannica, that great source of articles, written by experts, for accuracy, at least in scientific matters. Where opinions and interpretations are involved, factual checking is not always possible.
But here's a fact. Credentials (the only test for "brain power") don't guarantee accuracy. And here's an opinion: a piece on St. Paul isn't necessarily disqualified because it was written by a protestant minister or because it dates back before the 1900s.
Aside from college Sophomores trashing the Wiki with digital grafitti that other people can correct or append their own opinions to, I've seen no problem with the Wikipedia to disqualify it as a research tool. One would be a pretty sloppy researcher to depend on any single source for all one's information, after all. Wikipedia is just another input, but in my experience it's a damned good one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_of_Tarsus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_of_Tarsus
If we're going to let someone else do the work for us, what will ultimately win out will be a collective process (like Wikipedia) with editors (like About.com) and a technological backend that's smart enough to give more weight to one thing over another, but on a constantly shifting basis measured both by the popularity/frequency of consultation and the relevance of current events (like Google).
And as long as government or academia are directly involved, there will always be people who distrust it, always be people who perceive a real or imagined slant.
And as long as we're talking about communications, it goes back to what we learned on day 1 of COMA123 my freshman year... 1+1=3. What I said, what you think I said and what we together take away as shared communication from the process.
As long as we allow someone else to do our thinking for us, it will always be a flawed process.
"Intelligent Design" supporters are using -
"hey, it's all relative - all points of view are valid"
See the current print issue of Harper's for a story on this. The
flaws of this should be obvious.
You write:
"And as long as government or academia are directly involved,
there will always be people who distrust it, always be people
who perceive a real or imagined slant."
And there will always be people who think the earth is flat. Who
cares?
"PBS of the Web", because pbs.org _is_ the PBS of the web.
Also,I'm not sure it would be as popular, because everyone and anyone can submit info to Wikipedia, while a service which makes it a point to be like"Pbs" is already asking to fail.When I go to Pbs, its for British Comedy, and Dr Who, shows that entertain me. I don't go there for most opera and programs which I think will bore me because the people that host them seem asinine.
I think an all "expert" Wikipedia would be the same way.
Especially in the areas I'd be most interested in"Video Games". Someone can call themself an expert, and talk about the mechanics of the game and pick the game to death...but to me, an expert is a person who has played a game, and "lives it" as if it was a way of life. I would rather read an entry from someone who says "The town of Yargos is located on the edge of the Paladial Mountains. There You will find Magiana, a valuable addition to your party." Than to read" The game system utilizes the ram compressor,and will store 30% more ram than it's predecessors"says Dr. Vergil Climmons of the Tras-Tech Institute (both just examples)I don't want to know the technology used most times, I just want the back story for the game;)
'public' entity. It's supposed to act like Open
Source where it is public and private but very
transparent and Interet friendly. PBS is more
communist and not really Non-Profit anyway.
Wikipedians -- for whom a PhD is as mysterious as a neutrino. A
person earns a PhD for years of specialized study. The recipient
does not ordinarily devote years to this pursuit so that a piece of
paper may be obtained. The piece of paper is evidence that the
person has, in the view of the academy, successfully completed
his study. It is not always the case that a person with a PhD is a
valuable source of information about her specialty, but she is
more likely to be so than someone who did not undertake the
study, and who is an expert only in his own estimation.
The battle is, as the Wikipedians rightly argue, a battle over the
democratization of knowledge. Unfortunately, they also argue
that one person's knowledge is no better than another person's.
The dumbing down of America is now an ideal rather than a
liability.
The Chinese students, hungry for real knowledge, will eat the
lunch of hapless and ignorant American students who don't want
to be bothered with facts. A tip of the hat to America's public
school teachers for convincing most people that impressions
and feelings are the basis for education.
Most of Wikipedia isn't science, it's half-assed fan drivel - so you
have to be a true believer, or have very low quality standards, to be
impressed.
But to each his own.
Most of Wikipedia isn't science, it's half-baked fan drivel - so you
have to be a true believer, or have very low quality standards, to be
impressed.
But to each his own.
than adding another level to it. That's a waste of effort. Let
Wikipedia be what it is and have an online encyclopedia with
articles by certified experts as a stand-alone creation. Why have
publicly-contributed articles vetted by experts when you could
have articles in their area of expertise written by the experts
themselves?
articles written by experts, the articles are still reviewed by other
experts. It is critical to have a "middle man" to do peer review.
1. So if a so-called expert doesn't agree with something does it make it wrong? Not even in science do all the experts agree on the details of much. And the more social/cultural topics that have been in the news even more so. Say there is something that is well known but the "experts" choose to deny it or pretend it isn't happening/happened. They can just veto the subject? We all know OJ did it, whether he was found guilty or not, for example. Censorship it sounds like.
2. How many experts? Can just one say an article is good, even if he/she is wrong?
3. The thing about community created things is they end up with everything in there. Stuff an expert may overlook or not think is important or not be what he/she wants to slant it to (his own agenda). And everyone has their pockets of info, no expert knows or thinks of everything.
It just smacks of something getting blown out of proportion in the news and someone else seeing an opportunity they want to take advantage of before people come to their senses.
Experts are not infallible. Experts have agendas. Experts keep secrets. No source is infallible. There should be several sources before you come to a decision about anything.
Just use a little common sense!
and
http://www.perverted-justice.com
and read the latest Wiki articles on [[Pedophilia]] , [[sexual abuse]] , [[child sexual abuse]] , [[child pornography]] and [[age of consent]].
Go see for yourselves!
Wiki is only as good as their last edit.
See Baou Inc., Greg Lloyd Smith,
Officewire, Kestrel trading
the modern universe trying to support a concept which is already
plagued by problems in credibility?????
You certainly have no fear!!!!!
- UFO entries in this encyclopedia?
- by vaxorcist December 20, 2005 10:05 AM PST
- we all might enjoy:
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (76 Comments)http://dmoz.org/Society/Paranormal/UFOs/People/Firmage,_Joe/
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http://www.geocities.com/saufor/otherpapers/joefirmage.html