Can Everipedia remake collaborative encyclopedias to be inclusive and enjoyable?

Does the site primarily seek to get it’s profits from advertising? What would that look like on the site? Banner ads? Videos? Is user data and usage trends being data mined?

Right now, ads are our main source of income. We are not mining user data. On the contrary, we may mine pages themselves in the future, as i stated above, we are marking them up with Schema.org as they are created. We could use that data to provide advertisers info about that page rather than them having to guess the content category by parsing the page text themselves.

We plan on offering a wiki-authoring and verification service in the near future for companies or individuals. We would still allow unfettered commenting on the pages and discussion about the veracity of links to try and blunt bias and promotionalism on behalf of the company or individual that paid for the service.

People/Businesses could still make pages for free, but they would have less control over them.

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Thanks for taking the time to reply :slight_smile:

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I wish you folks the best of luck. Crowd-sourced, Crowd-edited content needs multiple stewards to survive. I am a huge fan of the Wikimedia Foundation and their projects, including Wikipedia, however the more options that are out there, the greater the breadth of information available to everybody.

As long as your mission continues to be providing accurate, verifiable information, you have my support.

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If Wikipedia were to be the only option out there for the type of information/content they’re striving to encompass then it runs the risk of stagnating or stopping innovation. They have a long way to go to improve on what they’ve accomplished but i hope that with Everipedia and others being on the landscape everyone benefits. Competition is always a good thing.

I’m interested to see what kind of usage and content Everipedia will see the most of.

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Thank you!

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Yes. Very, very much so.

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Unlike in a printed encyclopedia, there is not really a competition for space. There can be thousands of pages devoted to SRIRACHA THE OFFICIAL HOT SAUCE OF HIPSTER BROGRAMMERS LOL and it will make no difference to people who are not deliberately seeking those pages out.

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Quora is … less than ideal:

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This is such an important point. To me the worst part of Wikipedia is how impenetrably difficult the talk pages are to understand, much less participate in. They are a usability disaster of epic proportions. That is absolutely crippling to any sense of citizen / community oversight.

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That is a technical problem to be solved by search. Would a siracha bros page on the internet prohibit you from googling a relevant result? Of course not. The web is the ultimate “online encyclopedia” in that sense, and unlike the web, an actual “all-inclusive” encyclopedia controls both search and hosting so they have much better control over removal of linkspam / unattributed content while also being able to promote well-researched, well-linked pages through search.

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Inclusive, yet has a logo that assumes everyone reads latin script.

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Hmm.

So basically…

  1. Scrape wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
  2. Copy content https://www.everipedia.com/Tsar_Bomba/
  3. Slather ads on it
  4. ???
  5. Profit!

Not to mention these copies get out of date…

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For that matter, those copies represent copyright violation on a massive scale, since Everipedia doesn’t seem to follow the “ShareAlike” part of the CC-BY-SA license. Instead stuff reads “© 2017 Everipedia Inc.”, so that’s copyfraud icing on top.

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I’m taking their “inclusivity” and “diversity” claims with a big heaping pile of salt.

What are they using to justify those claims of diversity? How do they know their community is diverse or not? Have they done surveys, scraped profiles, or what? Wikipedia’s gender gap is well known because Wikipedia itself did the surveys and made it known as part of the effort to improve on the issue.

For that matter, it’s really suspect that they claim to be “more inclusive” while using essentially the same inclusion model Wikipedia pioneered (inclusion justified by references). Does Everipedia have a public log of deletions somewhere so we can see outright what’s being removed and judge for ourselves?

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To me the problem with funding stuff by advertising is that the benefits are clear and immediate, whereas the harm is diffuse and works over the long term.

In the short term, you don’t have Wikipedia’s cash-flow worries, and you can be generous with staffing and not pinch pennies on the infrastructure. But eventually ad revenue plateaus – and occasionally dips – and sooner or later you will start giving in to little incremental changes. More and bigger ads; content policies that indirectly favor commercial products and muted political views; paid search rankings; purges of dead weight / minority-interest content; etc. You can’t start asking for money, because you’ve branded yourself as a “free” site. At some point, the moves to boost ad revenue and/or reduce costs will trigger a backlash, and then a death spiral as people move on to the next site. I haven’t even mentioned the idea that Everipedia might start (and thus, potentially, stop) paying editors.

That next site will probably have further promising improvements to the technical and social design, too. But its content will now have been through two migrations, with pages like “17th-century Welsh Poetry” accumulating bit rot and lost updates, even if all the sites involved make it easy to extract their content (which is a huge “if”).

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No body of knowledge can avoid bias when viewed from any possible perspective.

But fair dos to you if you’re working for informative clarity.

Maybe we need now a consumer assessment tool, that rates subject matter on accuracy and truth, so that the independent and clear viewpoint is thrust on wiki / everi / all the others too.

I’m not suggesting I do that. Well - not for free.

  1. appropriating the volunteer labor of others to generate profit is morally dubious at best.

  2. even if you don’t feel it now, advertisers create perverse incentives on both your content and on you, urging you to surveil your users for your sponsor’s benefit.

I’ll add that I personally find your aspiration to accumulate oligarchic power over the rest of us (“the next Zuck”) to be troubling, and certainly counter to the project of freely sharing human knowledge with the world.

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So like the internet, with all it’s wild potential for the growth of beautiful flora! Except tended and curated, like, like a garden. But privately owned, and controlled for quality! You, know, like a garden with walls…and it’s social!

Twikipediumblr?

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Yeah, that’s ok though, because in the same way adding pages to the 'net doesn’t affect existing ones (unless better!), as long as the Wikimedia Foundation remains funded and Wikipedia remains available, alternatives are perfectly fine (in fact, they are encouraged and necessary according to the foundation, because any one group in control of the encyclopedic content of Wikipedia (and the Wikimedia Commons) puts them at risk).

It’s the same reason Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, then went off and shepherded Wikia - which is for profit and runs ads. Wikia serves a different community (mostly fansites!) and doesn’t diminish Wikipedia at all.

If Wikipedia is currently going through a “Notability Crisis” (and it seems to be), then having somewhere for that content to live is welcome, IMHO.

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