[judegomila]

Jude CEO and Founder of Golden here. Super excited to take this live. We are out to build the next place for canonical knowledge on the Internet. It has been a long-term mission for me to open up the knowledge coverage of billions of niche topics, companies, technologies and new concepts. Our aim is to cover in excess of 10bn topics in high detail over time. Although we all love Wikipedia, there have been various issues in the last 18 years, from constant deletion of data (product hunt was almost removed a few months back) to fact validation and automation of processes/work and UI/ease of user. We also believe there are many more features that users want, like a knowledge feed, keyboard commands, AI assisted feedback on editor contributions and tables that can automatically update.

We have set out to:

1. Cover all topics that exist over time rather than just notable topics.

2. Go into greater depth around a topic, from its timeline to videos and other useful resources surrounding the topic (eg learning videos, further reading, blog posts, Q&A, podcasts etc).

3. Support a larger population of people trying to learn about topics.

4. Make knowledge more accessible, richer and fun to read about.

5. Allow you to track topics of interest and be updated when new information is available on the subject.

6. Save time making the knowledge in the first place by using design, UI and AI to aid construction of the information. Especially by automating repetitive tasks and bring smart editor features.

Initially we have kicked off with various areas from cell and plant based meat to synthetic biology to cryptocurrency consensus mechanisms to artificial intelligence, microbiome, stem cell technology and startup topics. We expect these areas to increase in scope over time covering space, medical food, clean technology, robotics and many more exciting fields.

We are still early on our journey to delivering our vision and very much looking forward to product feedback and help with building up the content. Our team is hard at work making the product easier to use, we are up for taking every flow to its simplest form and removing every bug. If there is a feature you have been dying for on Wikipedia but could not get it, please also let us know. We look forward to seeing you in our community and covering topics especially under represented elsewhere.

[mrdoops]

How to you intend to account for merit and credibility across data sources?

The way I see it we've scaled our communication of information far beyond are ability to scale our assessment of credibility and merit of said information. This problem of merit is where I see the big gap in our tools. Are you planning on doing some kind of credibility assessments per-user based on content written/consumed?

Golden's feature-set is similar in many ways to app's I've prototyped towards this problem; I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

[cocochanel]

The missing pages you speak of are mostly VC/company names, and you just gloss over useful knowledge as "others." As I look into DNA sequencing[0] for example, there is little information while the bulk of it seems to be about companies. Care to explain if this is the direction Golden is taking?

[0] https://golden.com/wiki/DNA_sequencing#Companies

[storkk]

Hi. I see that you're using some of my photos that are licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike license, but I cannot find where you have attributed me as the author. Could you elucidate how to, in general, go from the title picture of an article to find out the license information?

[all2]

How will you be handling "soft" topics like history?

What about the handling/records of/provenance of artifacts?

Who is the arbiter of Truth? Will this wind up like Snopes or Wikipedia with an entrenched viewpoint that is dogma and defended at all costs? How will you avoid this?

Will alternative views/paths of inquiry be considered seriously? For example; vaccination efficacy research? I understand this is a hot-button issue, but that's exactly why I picked it. How you handle it will be a litmus test of how other issues will be handled.

How will you avoid the apathy and dogmatic approaches of many scientific journals?

What about scientific verification (or lack-there-of)?

[camdenlock]

Sad to see the most important set of questions in this thread not only go unanswered, but downvoted too.

[msla]

Speaking as someone who asked a similar question: I doubt they're going to answer this, because it would tip their hand, and no possible answer would benefit this little publicity junket/advertorial PR dump.

If they say they're going to moderate the site such that vaccines don't cause autism, in their view, that's taking the "party line dogma all alternative views are crushed by moderator fiat" approach, as per the comment you're replying to.

If they say it's going to be a free-for-all, they're implicitly saying that, unless they get a team of users onboard to stamp out nonsense quickly, their site is going to be Yahoo Answers with more Ajax, and a clearinghouse for "Big Pharma Chemtrails Cause Morgellons Vaccines To Sterilize White Babies" type nonsense, because the extremists always seem to have time to spread their idiocy into any unmoderated or lightly-moderated forum.

However, the questions still have value, if only because the answers resonate in their nonexistence.

[kreetx]

You say that you'll be doing more media and learning oriented content than Wikipedia: how are you planning to support this - given how many contributors Wikipedia has? (And if you don't mind then maybe you could go deeper into how would you compare to Wikipedia. :)

Good luck!

[judegomila]

Jude from Golden. Beyond the blog post in terms of more learning content - video and extensive further reading links can help in this area but at the core much deeper pages eg https://golden.com/wiki/Cryobacterium vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryobacterium

In terms of numbers of contributors we believe Golden is at the stage where 1 hour editing on Golden produces more content/data than alternatives and the friction to edit is much lower. Are you looking for more depth on comparisons beyond the blog post?

[hk__2]

> In terms of numbers of contributors we believe Golden is at the stage where 1 hour editing on Golden produces more content/data than alternatives and the friction to edit is much lower.

In my experience as a Wikipedia editor, 80% of the time I spend writing an article is searching for (good) sources; 10% is editing friction like looking for the right infobox or the right model for what I want (although that time is reduced by experience); 10% is actually writing the article. Wikipedia’s contributing documentation discoverability is quite bad.

Your “high resolution” citations is a really great idea I wish WP would had. Does it support having multiple citations for the same part of the content? Overlaping parts?

[nileshtrivedi]

If the goal is to build a learning plan, I find LearnAwesome's approach far simpler & better: No UGC except collecting links to existing resources on the Web, a simple markdown file and connections to other topics for discovery: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome

[nabla9]

How you earn money?

Are you going to collect user data and track them?

[TheLegace]

Just reading the article I am extremely interested in the Advanced Query search. Bravo on allowing the user to decide how they search(unlike some products). It's something I have been waiting for years. What I would like to see next is the ability to mark items that should be excluded from the search. Usually when I am doing a long complicated and unpredictable search for information, I will go down rabbit holes and from my experience exclude all the information results that I know for sure I do not want. Unfortunately I have to keep track of the items mentally which limits the capacity of relevant info I can find.

[jedc]

Hi, Jed from Golden here. I'm obviously biased, but our query tool is really powerful. :) You can both include specific things in your search, but also exclude specific things. For example, show me companies that went through an accelerator, is in FinTech, but not based in the US or UK. Happy to talk through specific use cases - feel free to reach out directly - [e-mail]

[hk__2]

The real limit is the quality of the data. Wikidata’s (free) query tool is quite powerful but if the knowledge subject you’re interested in is poorly defined the query engine can’t help.

[wslh]

How your vision is different from Freebase and other ontology projects?

[threatofrain]

Is there a tension in designing a knowledge database for amateurs vs experts, and how do you mitigate or address it? Wikipedia has such a tension for a lot of topics.

[sytelus]

This is absolutely fantastic. I'd been distraught by Wikipedia policy of "notability" and deleting valuable articles that volunteers created by pouring several hours. I firmly believe that no knowledge, no human is small enough not to be "notable". I also like increased focus on tooling which Wikipedia has failed to deliver in all these years. I think Wikipedia was good start as trying to emulate encyclopedias of 18th century but in new age we need to move on to AI-first knowledge graph that can have billions of nodes where each node in the graph could be anything from some human to some object in my backyard to entire textbook.

There would obviously the question of how do you prevent misinformation and falsehood. If you want to scale to billions of nodes, moderators aren't going to cut it. One possibility is leveraging community and what I'd call chain of trust. For example, community can flag, upvote, downvote. This doesn't result in deletion but simply a signal to the reader about how trustworthy content this may be. The chain of trust mechanism can improve this further by inferring contributors that users have trusted previously. The StackOverflow like gamification for contributors can create wonders here. In addition, you can allowing users to create their social network so they can build their personal chain of trust. Another possibility is to put untrusted articles in draft domain and move them to main domain as trust level is increased. The key is to avoid deletion of content and retain it somehow so it can be improved and evolved.

Now the things I don't like about Golden:

When signing up, it forces bio to 140 chars. Why? Why not collect more knowledge about authors? Not artificially limiting information should be the point here, right?

I also find current interface very cluttered and unfriendly. After signup I was greeted with topic of blockchain and cell based meat occupying most of my screen real estate. I don't care about either and half-visible conversations under each topic does not help. How about asking me what I'm expert in? What are my interest? Add some algo magic to recommend topics for contribution?

I also don't like UX at all. For example, this is page on Bitcoin: https://golden.com/wiki/Bitcoin. The menu that suddenly breaks after quick intro hurts my eyes. The typography is straigning. The left menu just hard to grasp. On page for cluster, you get giant list of contributors on right which I care less. You can say whatever about Wikipedia but they got all these stuff right.

[zinssmeister]

this is a great idea. First URL I faved in the past 12 months. Good luck Jude!

[wodenokoto]

Looking at https://golden.com/wiki/Heyzap it seems like the summary has information that is not in the article.

If you start reading from the introduction, you won't know that Heyzap is a mobile advertising company.

[adamsea]

What about poetry, art, music, social movements, and, you know, culture?

[dayaz36]

This is so awesome!