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by SethFinkelstein
6541 days ago
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Regarding "23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia" - I investigated this myself a while back. A viable BUSINESS is much, much harder than it looks. To begin with, note Jimmy Wales's separate commercial company "Wikia" is already in that field, and both Wikia and Wikipedia people assist in moving some content from the noncommercial Wikipedia to the commercial Wikia. Let me be clear, I don't say what they do is illegal (even if does raise eyebrows sometimes). But it's a fact that there's already a very strong established competitor, one with a huge amount of insider access that another start-up would not have. Moreover, while it's obvious Wikipedia has a huge amount of Google-juice, few people realize how difficult that is, and how many other sites have floundered in the bottom of the search results. So what's likely to happen is the start-up ends up with a website full of junk, or even worse, gets penalized by Google for having content that's too similar to Wikipedia and/or Wikia sites. |
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