Talk:Veropedia

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 3 November 2007. The result of the discussion was keep.
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Contents

[edit] Please

Please don't delete this; we can at least fix it up and give it its own article.   jj137 (Talk) 20:24, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

It's currently up for AfD, so you may wish to weigh in there. If it's deleted, it's deleted. Those are the rules and the community gets to judge :) - Alison ❤ 20:57, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment: I suspect this one is a keeper. Thanks.Songgarden 03:30, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This belongs here, but it's terrible

Despite that this is a poor stub, the fact that so many other third-party journals, including Wired, have covered Veropedia gives the subject enough notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. I recommend that the article be condensed into one overview section, on account of the lack of content, and that we wait until the site gets beyond its beta incarnation before expanding its article. Thoughts? --Mayor Coffee Bean 17:39, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not affiliated with Wikimedia Foundation

It needs to be ensured that it's made clear that they're seperate, which it wasn't beforehand, otherwise it could be very misleading -Halo (talk) 05:16, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Available Languages

Is there a source for all the listed "available languages"? I think the implication is that the encyclopaedia is available in each of those languages, but I can't see any sign that that's true (or verifiable). 80.65.247.216 (talk) 01:21, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ethos

I've tidied up the lede a bit but for now I've left in promotional content elsewhere like "The Veropedia editorial community ... is highly geared to quality article writing, seeing involvement in Veropedia as a means to return to the roots of knowledge building by focussing upon articles rather than editorial difficulties." Every company in the world has a committed work force highly geared to quality; well, it does if we're going to copy its own promotional material as factual encyclopaedia content. If people feel we need to have a description of Veropedia's self-image and objectives then it needs to be neutrally included in a section devoted to that purpose (e.g. a section on the company's ethos), not included elsewhere as statements of fact. 87.254.79.38 (talk) 10:50, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

This is somehow related to the above, but the concern I have with the intro is that it may not be quite intelligible to those who don't know Wikipedia, in particular its model. Veropedia basically mirrors content in Wikipedia and I don't think intro does a good job of explaining this in an uncomplicated way. I think the older version was simpler and more readable. Having said this, I do think the article can benefit from detaining the model of Veropedia. While we don't want promotional stuff, the article needs to give a clear and detailed account of Veropedia's goal and how it works. I am writing this here instead of editing the article because I actually don't know much. -- Taku (talk) 11:17, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
I tend to agree, I don't really edit much myself though and wanted to fix what I thought were bigger problems first. When you say you "don't know much" about this subject, I think all the sources are online and none of them are lengthy so if you have time to read them and few preconceptions about Veropedia then you're probably in a great position to edit the article :) 87.254.79.38 (talk) 13:01, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Hopefully these are now fixed. Can you recheck? FT2 (Talk | email) 15:37, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Licensing

At the moment the article says "As required by its use of Wikipedia material, all Veropedia content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.", which it cites to the Veropedia home page. The home page, however, says "Content within Yedda Widgets are available under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commerical Share-Alike 2.5 license." Now, I've no idea what a "Yedda Widget" is but that seems to contradict our article text. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.254.79.38 (talk) 11:57, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Intro

I've reverted one sentence as follows back to the original:

As modified - Vero's business model is "to mirror stable versions of English Wikipedia articles which the site deems to meet its reliability criteria"
As reverted back - Vero's business model "involves collaboration within the English Wikipedia community to scrape a database of stable, quality controlled articles that are freely available"

Rationale:

  1. Vero's business model is a lot more than just "mirroring" articles "deemed to meet criteria". it actively edits them, peer reviews them, collaborates strongly with the Wikipedia community and so on. "Mirroring" is misdescriptive. It only "mirrors" after a lot of other collaborative editorial work and quality control work has been undertaken, as a final step.
  2. Vero's model is correctly (as best I can tell) described as "(web) scraping". Not only this is the word used (see cite), but it's apparently the correct term for the activity; the drawing of content from one site for use on another, possibly in a different format or the like. I'm not an expert but it sounds like a valid word, and it's the one used by them as well.
  3. Reverted version made clear the resulting articles are freely available (as opposed to needing registration, paid access, etc).

FT2 (Talk | email) 14:35, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

  • I disagree that "collaboration" is the right word, since it implies that people from Wikipedia are intentionally collaborating and that there's some sort of official association between the two. There's no real active collaboration - if Veropedia wished to mirror an article which I've contributed to, that wouldn't be through any "collaboration" with them from my point of view. Mirroring on the other hand means they are duplicating Wikipedia content, which is true as per their model, and is also the term Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Vwxyz#veropedia.com Wikipedia itself uses - plus the term "stable versions" is itself used in the FAQ. The term "web scraping" is specific, refers to technical details and doesn't seem to be cited if that's how it indeed works - using an automated http scraper bot to copy content from Wikipedia. IMO "free" and "advertising-supported" in the first sentence implies gratis (and libre too). -Halo (talk) 15:37, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
    • I've tried to rephrase the paragraph to tidy it up. Tell me if you have any reservations -Halo (talk) 15:59, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Questions:

  1. Given Veropedia is a beta project, is it giving a misleading impression to state "significantly less popular than both Wikipedia and Citizendium"? I'd be inclined to give its Alexa ranking and leave the reader to draw their own conclusions. Or at worst, a "(for comparison, the Alexa rating for Citizendium, which also launched in 2007, is X)".
  2. I tend to think of collaboration as "working co-operatively/deliberately working together". if veropedia wished to use your or my article, an experienced Wikipedia editor - not necesarily you or I - would have to review it, check for errors and style issues, check for dead links and flaws, omitted or unbalanced or unsupported content, other problems, improve it, then submit it for automated checking, and finally transfer it via an automated process. That's the sense in which it is collaborative and not just mirroring.
  3. The version you're veering towards omits the entire core process of that. The process you're describing is "Editor looks for suitable articles meeting Veropedia standards, and scrapes them. If they need some editing it's done on Wikipedia." Thats not at all a good characterization of it. Articles that are not up to standard are chosen at will too - any article, of any standard. They are worked on until a suitable standard is reached, on Wikipedia, in the usual way. Finally, they are computer-checked, and then scraped or copied. Thats a very different process to the one implied.

FT2 (Talk | email) 18:34, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm content with issue 1 being resolved as it is, the 2nd I strongly disagree with - since Wikipedia isn't working with Veropedia; it's completely passive to Wikipedia, they aren't "deliberately" co-operating any more than their license forces to them - it's just ordinary people editing Wikipedia. Third, how is the process I've described wrong? I don't understand the difference, and Veropedia doesn't explain it either. What I'm stating comes directly from the previous version and the FAQ. Any chance of enlightening me further? -Halo (talk) 19:00, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
Daniel Wool runs Veropedia. He doesnt grab articles off WP, nor does he have his "own team" of editors. He collaborates with Wikipedia's community. All, or almost all editors on Veropedia without exception are actually editors in the Wikipedia community. It's therefore a collaboration with the Wikipedia community - not Wikipedia itself, but with its community - yes.
Second question, the process is wrong by omission and over simplification. It's like describing Microsoft's software creations process by saying "people come to work and write code which is then sold". Thats not a description of Microsoft's product creation system, it misses out the core of it -- consultation, design, quality, and many back-and-forth flows as the work is done. It's not even a good description of "what Microsoft does". Or if it is a description, it's so simplistic as to be misleading. That's effectively what's wrong here.
Hope that clarifies? FT2 (Talk | email) 22:15, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
Again, I don't really understand what I've put is inaccurate or untrue particularly considering it is a lead section, especially when you compare it to Microsoft as a simplification, when the lead section of the Microsoft article says "It develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices", which is what you basically said (and in my view is a perfectly accurate of Microsoft's activities), and I'm trying to write the equivalent explanation on how Veropedia essentially works. Whatsmore, I don't really understand what in the process I've actually missed out or inaccurately represented - from what I can tell, I understand the process perfectly and concisely as possible. And Veropedia do have their own team of editors - those "experienced Wikipedia editors" who choose which articles to upload to Veropedia, who happen to be a subset of Wikipedians. Please edit until you feel it's misleading, and then I'll chop it about again if I deem it incorrect.
I strongly disagree with your views on "the community", when it's actually an extremely small subset of Wikipedia contributors who also contribute to Veropedia and it's not a Wikimedia or sister project. It's far from "the community" as a whole, and I think it implies a stronger connection than there actually is -Halo (talk) 00:08, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Veropedia interwiki link

The Veropedia interwiki link is now working. For example, [[Veropedia:Second Seminole War]] creates Veropedia:Second Seminole War, which links to the Veropedia copy of Second Seminole War. -- Ned Scott 05:48, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Why would Wikipedia want to link to Veropedia? Is it safe to assume it'd solely be useful for non-article space? I think real links are much more useful in the context of this article. -Halo (talk) 08:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
I can imagine both, but suspect it will be mostly used on talk pages, etc. -- Ned Scott 07:14, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Template

It would be useful to have a template for talk pages similar to {{onlinesource}}:

This article has been included on Veropedia:
Veropedia:Second Seminole War

If this looks useful, we can work this up pretty quickly. Another possibility is to make this a general template to link to any of the wikis in Category:Websites which use Wikipedia. --— Gadget850 (Ed) talk - 14:52, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Why would we want this? I'm against spamming Veropedia, a commercial site, on Wikipedia -Halo (talk) 16:09, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
Telling people that another version of the article exists doesn't seem to be spamming it anymore than having links in an "External links" section. Remember, any improvements Veropedia makes can be folded back into our own copy, so making people aware of what their copy looks like can be a good reason for that alone. -- Ned Scott 06:55, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Upon reflection, it would probably be better to use a link on the article page using a format similar to the sister wiki links. --— Gadget850 (Ed) talk - 08:25, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
If someone added thousands of "relevant" links to another encyclopedia, I think it'd be regarded as spam. I don't see how Veropedia will be much different, especially as Veropedia merely forks Wikipedia content. I'm strongly against littering Wikipedia with these sorts of commercial links. -Halo (talk) 08:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
All that matters if is it passes WP:EL. It makes no difference it they are a non-profit organization or a for-profit one. -- Ned Scott 05:31, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
Okay then, Veropedia doesn't meet WP:EL criteria since Veropedia contains nothing that can't be in Wikipedia. Whatsmore, it could be argued that Veropedia is not a reliable source. -Halo (talk) 09:41, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
Why do you think external links have to be? See Links to be considered no. 4. скоморохъ 00:22, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
But you haven't addressed the crux of my point which is that it miserably fails "Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article" and "Sites that contain neutral and accurate material that cannot be integrated into the Wikipedia article due to copyright issues, amount of detail (such as professional athlete statistics, movie or television credits, interview transcripts, or online textbooks) or other reasons." -Halo (talk) 00:35, 11 February 2008 (UTC)