On Jan 25, 2008 9:47 AM, bharat shetty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > However, > it turns out that Wikipedia has some wrong information at places, he > also said. That led me to googling and I came upon this > http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page - which promises to be a better > Wikipedia, by offering reliable content that can be trusted upon.
I suppose there are currently three approaches to this. One is the traditional "the expert is right" Brittanica approach that we have been familiar with for so many years. The second is the "The crowd is the expert" paradigm of Wikipedia where everybody has edit authority and the "truth" is a rather dynamically changing equilibrium (articles in wikipedia keep changing and there is a lot of discussion around knowledge) rather than just expert decree. In fact, in a lot of cases, the discussion page provides more insight than the article page. The third is the "knol" approach (Google - see screenshot here<http://www.google.com/help/knol_screenshot.html>) that seeks to strike a balance between the top down nature of Brittanica and the chaotic bottom-up nature of Wikipedia. In fact, the concept is pretty interesting. Experts can author pages on their topics and invite a group of peers to collaborate. So this part is close to the Brittanica approach. But the twist here is that there can be several "knols" on a particular topic and the crowd determines, through votes, rating and hits, which "knol" is the best for a given subject. -- Krish Ashok Blog: krishashok.wordpress.com GTalk: krishashok www.stage.fm/krishashok
