A post from the dissertation blog. Figured it’d have some general interest value.

From the folks who brought you Wikipedia, we now have the Veropedia project. Veropedia takes the best articles from Wikipedia, sends them through the scholarly and writerly gauntlet, and comes out the other end with (if all goes well) high-quality articles. Now that this project is up and running, Wikipedia has been recast as the Article-Generating Machine, and Veropedia as the new Source of Really Credible Knowledge.

This two-pronged approach is welcome. One of my main arguments against those who’d called for a vetting process built into Wikipedia is that it would’ve ground the project to a halt. Wikipedia has generated eight million articles in over 250 languages in only six years because of its open interface and the sheer power of numbers within its nonexpert community. Too many editors too early in the process would’ve killed the motivation to compose freely—a Murrayesque claim—and driven the crowds away.

Because it’s a separate project on its own site, Veropedia fills the need for scholarly credibility while still allowing Wikipedia to continue as a successful model of quickly generated, intricately networked “working knowledge.”

As of today, Veropedia has put together 3700 articles. It’ll be interesting to see how these two sites evolve as complementary projects.