Veropedia: Like Wikipedia, Except Totally Lame
Have you heard about Veropedia yet?
Veropedia is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia’s content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited, The result is a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information.
Just a few thoughts right off the top of my head:
- Can’t we tell for ourselves what articles are stable in Wikipedia….just by looking? Why do we need Veropedia editors to do this FOR us?
- In using Veropedia, we’d be trusting its (un-named) editors as expert enough to decide for themselves what should be done to properly “vet” an article and clean it up. This would be done without the transparenecy of Wikipedia.
- In what cycle will “stable,” uneditable articles be revisited for consideration of an edit/update? Time passes, things change. Saving articles as static “for all time” seems to defeat at least half the purpose of having an online, digital encyclopedia- and makes certain that the site will age poorly.
So Veropedia will lack a number of Wikipedia’s strengths, offer nothing we can’t already get from Wikipedia itself AND it’ll have advertisements?
Why on earth will people want to use it?
It seems to me that Scholarpedia and Citizendium are both better ideas that leverage many of Wikipedia’s strengths while overcoming some of its weaknesses.
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October 31st, 2007 at 3:56 pm
You can even buy Wikipedia on a CD-rom.
Pretty silly don’t you think?
http://www.wikipediaondvd.com/site.php
November 1st, 2007 at 4:06 pm
I really do, Dymphie.
November 7th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
I must say…while I think Citizendium is interesting (haven’t really looked at Scholarpedia), my reaction to Veropedia was pretty much the same as yours.
Still is, for that matter.