http://www.citizendia.org Thoughts on the idea of bringing knowledge for the masses Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:53:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well, for the the most popular articles, especially for politics-related article, the answer is "no, it's not". Not even for administrators. It's not a wikicracy, it's a trollocracy. When an admin tries to edit the article on Sarah Palin, one gets this warning: Administrators Attention! Do not edit this page without consensus on the ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/is-wikipedia-still-a-wiki/ Some people hailed the new Google Knol as an alternative for Wikipedia, but it's not just for Wikipedia: it's written chaotically by random people: both people holding PhDs and people who don't know much about the subject. Knol appears to be more like the Web itself, but completely under the ... http://www.citizendia.org/uncategorized/google-knol-and-wikipedia/ The Citizendium has not yet a license, but there are debates on which they should choose. The two main points are whether it would allow commercial redistribution and whether it would be compatible with Wikipedia's GFDL. The main argument for a non-commercial license is that more academics would allow their content ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/citizendium-compatibility-with-wikipedia-license-and-a-non-commercial-license/ It seems that a major difference between Wikipedia and the new Citizendium is that Citizendium will perform censorship of certain materials deemed inappropriate (not "family friendly"). As such, they won't cover some topics related to sexuality nor they'll have "many" articles on porn stars and they certainly won't include photos ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/citizendium-the-prudish-encyclopedia/ Is sourcing an important thing for an encyclopedia? In the beginning, in order to get a head start, Wikipedia ignored sources, allowing articles to be unsourced and as such, few had any real references. Nowadays, there is a large number of people on Wikipedia who think that sourcing is not ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/sourcing/ Apart from the three "official policies" (Neutral Point of View, Verifiability and No Original Research), which are valid throughout Wikipedia, each language Wikipedia is free to choose their own policies and administration. Whereas most Wikipedias simply translate the policies from the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia had some original policies, ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/german-solutions/ Larry Sanger initated recently a debate on whether it would be better to start Citizendium from scratch instead of forking Wikipedia. Arguments have been brought forward, for both variants: Wikipedia has many good articles, but also a lot of mediocre or poor quality and his idea is that the poor ... http://www.citizendia.org/larry-sanger/clean-slate-for-citizendium/ A difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium is the real-name policy: Wikipedia allows people to use pseudonyms, while Citizendium requires people to use their real names and even write a short bio of themselves. One of the reasons for the usage of real names is less vandalism. Under ideal circumstances, it would ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/real-name-policy/ Wikipedia was said to be an utopia and that it shouldn't have worked. The early critics said that it would succumb in vandalism, but they were wrong. The major issues with the quality of Wikipedia have little to do with vandalism. In fact, with the new "approval" method of anonymous ... http://www.citizendia.org/wikipedia/the-flaws-of-wikipedia/ Digital Universe is supposed to be an encyclopedia project started by the dot-com entrepreneur Joe Firmage with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. The wikipedia article on it says that: On the basis of interviews given by the founders, the Digital Universe concept appears to be undergoing rapid evolution, so ... http://www.citizendia.org/digital-universe/whats-wrong-with-digital-universe/