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Jude from Golden here. Agreed that WP is one of the most amazing things ever built and interesting to see your various lenses on our mission. To the cynical self: see dropbox launch on HN back in the day. PS I’m no way claiming we are dropbox :> To the angry self: There are various constraints that we want to release ourselves from in working on this problem by starting fresh. We believe the constraint space is too high to not build something new here. There are things that can be reused to build on what has been done already (linking out to WP, WP linking back to us when appropriate, the name space being similar/forked, various policies being built on/forked or rewritten, lessons learnt, content summarization with AI, fact cross checking etc). To the academic self: we want to cover 10bn+ topics, google knowledge graph is around 3bn+ entities. We are not attempting to map all lamp posts in san francisco which would make a useful data set for a self driving car company but we do want to map all businesses, concepts, science topics, people of interest, species, products, services, etc etc. Instead of notability, we are aiming more at a validation model ie ‘does this entity exist’. There is also a difference between ‘article’ of WP and ‘entity’ of Golden for our model. So I believe there is space for positive coexistence between Golden and WP. We will still want discussion around the validation and ‘what next after 10bn entities are done’ debate. In terms of the morality part, we wish to be at a more open standard than WP. The trade being for the common user: we open up all the pages on CC-4.0-BY-SA, go hopefully 1000x more entity cardinality, open source useful queries in exchange for less work per topic than alternatives (due to the leverage of the automation on alternatives). So I think we are on strong moral ground here, otherwise I would not work on it. We also have paid helpers as well to fill in gaps on our side to increase content and using part of our revenue to increase content at an ever faster speed. We reviewed the micropayments model and we don’t think it will work (see lunyr failure and others on that front). |
I hear from you that you want to essentially cover 10 billion topics, and essentially validate that they exist, but that says nothing about validating the content of what someone is saying about it, nor organizing it, etc.
I hear lots of AI buzzwords, but essentially I don't see any staff that would leverage all the thinking humanity has done on organizing, validating, and cataloging information. Where are the information scientists? The librarians? The archivists? The journalists? The philosophers? Etc etc etc.
Essentially you are talking about a profoundly /human/ endeavor that requires input (IMHO) from many corners of human knowledge to do in any way that begins to approach wikipedia (or even an encyclopedia, much less a library) in terms of quality and scale.
I hear buzzwords, and see an alarming lack of acknowledgement of how difficult these questions are (or even that they exist).
However, you have the $$ and the people, and I'm just here hiding behind a keyboard criticizing. Clearly you've convinced more people of your ideas than I have of mine, and by all means it's a noble goal, so I wish you the best of luck and will be interesting to see what you are and what Golden looks like in a decade or so!