Alternatives to Wikipedia
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Hi.
I'm looking for encyclopedias under a free license, and open to edit to the general public (may require registration) with a very board scope, like Wikipedia, or encompassing in its scope a wide area of hard science and the related engineering fields (for instance: electrical engineering, physics or mathematics).
In English, I know of
. In Spanish, there was the Enciclopedia Libre Universal (Universal Free Encyclopedia), but it is down currently.
What other projects like this exist?.
Regards.
What's wrong with Wikipedia? It's assets are released under free licenses.
Cheers.
Is there something wrong with Wikipedia?
its good to have alternatives to Wikipedia in-case Wikipedia did turn into a bad website but what is wrong with wikipedia?
If Wikipedia started having problems, the wiki could be mirrored somewhere else. This has happened with TV Tropes (forked to allthetropes.orain.org), though in that case TV Tropes started violating contributors' copyleft by changing its license to CC BY-NC-SA without their permission, which prevents the fork from copying over any changes made more recently than that. Given the massive number of contributors to Wikipedia, and the prevalence of Wikipedia, I don't think such a scheme would work there, though.
(Side note: if you have contributed substantially to TV Tropes before July 2012 and have not given them permission to distribute those contributions under CC BY-NC-SA, I'd highly recommend you complain about their unauthorized distribution of your work and demand that they fix the licensing or remove your contributions. Unauthorized copying is not unethical, but imposing restrictions on commercial usage is an injustice, and in this case some action can be taken against it.)
Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki, which is free software.
hi
its Free as in Freedom
wi you want Alternatives to Wikipedia??????????????
Several things are wrong with Wikipedia, but a much bigger and worser problem is that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF for short) is forgetting that it is an offspring of Wikipedia, not the other way, and that it's task (of the WMF) is to keep Wikipedia and some other projects running, not to be their government. They are getting used to use Wikipedia as their soapbox (a tool they can use to push their political agenda, which breaks neutrality). On the other hand, they never forget to ask for donations yearly with banners which get more misleading each year. People donate to them because they think that their donations are supporting Wikipedia, but only a tiny fraction is. The WMF has too much money, and the decision markers are rewarded excessively for working to put forward their unilateral ideas about Wikipedia governance (which they should leave in hands of the community that actually builds the encyclopedia). The people that build Wikipedia are us, the editors. Despite living off our work, the Wikimedia Foundation has several times acted against consensus of the Wikipedia editors.
I use Wikipedia, and I have contributed as a way to help the society progress but Wikipedia is very inefficient. An unavoidable part of contributing (unless you limit yourself to change punctuation and little more) is eventually (the likehood is mostly a function of the topic) having to argue with obstinate editors who revert one's work or other editor's work without a good reason. The central discussion venues and noticeboards are always full with discussions that have escalated from talk pages. In contrast, vandalism is an almost insignificant problem; it's easy to recognize, a lot of people already watch for it, and reverting it is almost always uncontroversial and harmless.
Neutrality (According to Wikipedia's understanding of neutrality) is an acceptable compromise, so that more people will contribute given the promise that no one's viewpoint will stand above that of others. It's not perfect, it's a pragmatic device. I'm not willing to put work into helping people understand informatics if I'm not allowed to also make them aware of the associated problems of proprietary software and centralization, and ask them to take action. I'm not willing to put effort into improving resources that will help people to program computers if I'm not allowed to educate them on why and how they should make the resulting work free software. In these areas, I don't contribute to Wikipedia; society doesn't needs neutrality here; a neutral resource promotes the indolence that has allowed proprietary software developers to succeed commercially abusing their users. I have contributed some technical information about informatics in this forum and in the Libre Game Wiki because it's not neutral, it raises awareness of the issue of user freedom.
To have a better idea of the problems with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, read critical journalism of Wikipedia (Wikipediocracy specializes in this, but they aren't the only source) or contribute substantially (not just changing punctuation or wording, but adding whole sections to articles and such) to Wikipedia for some months.
Wikipedia is inefficient, absolutely, but writing a libre encyclopedia in this way is a lot more effective than a more traditional way, regardless of how efficient it is or isn't. That's why Wikipedia has succeeded where other libre encyclopedias have failed.
In any case, if you want to try to take Wikipedia and improve it in the more traditional way, you're free to do so. Good luck!
Wikipedia has been moderately effective, I agree. I have contributed a tiny bit to make it better serve society and therefore also more effective.
I was asking for alternatives, not about how to start my own encyclopedia. I have never proposed building an encyclopedia by “traditional” means. If you're implying that any encyclopedia must be Wikipedia-like or traditional, then I disagree, but I won't engage into a discussion about that; that has never been my intention since I created this thread. Some fellow users asked about what is wrong with Wikipedia and that is why I wrote #7.
On 2015-03-14 12:25, name at domain wrote:
> Hi marioxcc,
> I fully understand your frustration that derives from rejected changes.
>
> However, there is a difficult - and I would even say: paradoxical -
> relation between freedom and knowledge. On the one hand, everybody
> should have access to and should be able to contribute to a base of
> knowledge. On the other hand, 'knowledge' is something that needs a
> kind of 'neutral validity'. In the early days of Wikipedia, there
> existed many articles full of half-truths and mistakes and, yes,
> biased information. Adding Wikimedia to Wikipedia was result of a
> process of quality management; Wikimedia naturally has to govern
> Wikipedia instead of the other way around - otherwise it wouldn't make
> sense. It may frustrate contributors every then and when - but its
> removal would transform many articles into useless political
> battlefields again.
>
> Wikimedia is a compromise between governing the output of Wikipedia,
> and sustaining democratic influence. Democracy is not always simple
> and straight-forward.
>
> Btw, open source works the same way: many people can contribute, but
> in the end it's the package maintainer who decides what to implement
> and what to reject. It requires responsibility. Dissatisfied
> contributors may found a fork - like you may from wikipedia, but it
> may be more fruitful to start a frank and qualified debate with other
> contributors and the maintainer.
Wikipedia is unrelated to Trisquel, I do not want these messages. Please
take this discussion to another forum. If its a search engine request,
please add it to the bug tracker from trisquel.info.
"If its a search engine request,
please add it to the bug tracker from trisquel.info."
i don’t know about everyone else but Wikipedia is included in both abrowser and icecat by default for me
On 2015-03-14 12:50, name at domain wrote:
> "If its a search engine request,
> please add it to the bug tracker from trisquel.info."
> i don’t know about everyone else but Wikipedia is included in both
> abrowser and icecat by default for me
Ok, you can use this addon: https://gna.org/projects/ad-free-libre/
Enciclopedia Libre Universal (Universal Free Encyclopedia) is up again. Does anyone knows of free as in freedom encyclopedias either universal or dedicated to a big part of knowledge (see my original message) in English, other than Wikipedia and Citizendium?.
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