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Two Wikipedia Spinoffs In The News
from the more-reliable? dept
Wired has a roundup of two Wikipedia spinoffs that have been in the news recently. Both sites, Citizendium and Veropedia, were launched because their founders felt that Wikipedia had reliability problems that could only be addressed by an independent project. But their approaches are very different. Citizendium is what the open source software world would call a fork. They launched the site with some Wikipedia articles as the baseline, but they're not contributing their changes back to the Wikipedia project. That means that the two projects are diverging over time, and in a few years the content on the two sites will be quite different. It also means that there's going to be a lot of duplication of effort: the content in Citizendium and Wikipedia will largely be redundant. In contrast, Wikipedia is, in open source terms, "upstream" from Veropedia. Just as distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat take Linux code, improve it, and then package it for public consumption, making a profit in the process, so Veropedia is going to take a subset of Wikipedia, do some additional work to ensure it's reliable, and then publish it on an ad-supported site. Unlike Citizendium, Veropedia is planning to contribute its changes back to Wikipedia. Personally, I'm not convinced that there's a pressing need for either effort, and I'm particularly skeptical of Citizendium. I think Clay Shirky is right to question the underlying rationale for Citizendium, and while founder Larry Sanger has touted some modest successes over the last year, they're going to need some massive growth to catch up to Wikipedia.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
