It seems like you're putting the text out under CC-4.0-BY-SA [1] (Attribution, Share-Alike), which is great (the updated version of the same copyright for Wikipedia content). However, you're also collecting a TON of structured and relational data, which seems to be the value generated by your editor. Are you planning on keeping that locked up?
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.
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.
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 - jed@golden.com
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.
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. :)
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?
> 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?
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
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Jude from Golden here. TLDR answer on this important question and I’m interested in the community ideas on this problem set:
1. High visual transparency and open edit logs eg golden.com/wiki/Morphogenetic_Engineering/activity
2. Using real profiles so we can prevent bots / multi accounts etc.
3. Cross checking SPO/fact triples in the prose against our structured data to validate information.
4. Cross checking against multiple sources
5. Using high resolution citations where we actually highlight the claim (please test our highlighting of a claim and citation tool to see this in action).
6. Having source trust ranked citation URLs.
7. Opening up primary sources eg articles of incorporation as evidence for claims.
8. Having a strong audit log of where information comes from.
9. Using a github style ‘issues’ rather than wiki talk in order to discuss content issues.
10. Giving UI affordances to argue out points and give evidence to claims made in these arguments.
We are still working on this UI / AI and general community to really dig into this core challenge.
9. Github style issues feels much more modern, as a semi-regular wiki editor talk pages are one of my least favorite (and hardest to audit) parts of Wikipedia
Please reconsider the real names policy, it is perfectly appropriate to keep my legal name separate from what I write online, and I don't even live in a country where I can be arrested for my opinions.
I would much rather see a 'durable identity' process, whereby when someone sees my username as an author, they know it was authored by me. This goes beyond allowing or not allowing duplicate screennames (where you swap an I for l and impersonate a politician etc) -- consider authenticating edits and transactions with public key cryptography so I can assert my identity -- just not necessarily the one I can't change.
keybase.io is, of course, an innovator in this space and you should consider adopting their strategy for asserting identity online !
You can still make it a pain in the ass to create multiple accounts without asking for a government ID (which can be faked too, by the way!). ban multiple log-ins from single IP, have a phone number challenge, put a waiting period on the account, nothing is perfect but all of this is better than having to use my real name.
Thomas here, programmer at Golden. We don't have any specific plans to announce at the moment, but we've been thinking about how best to provide API access, including looking into GraphQL. Let me know if you have any specific needs or ideas! thomas@golden.com
I'm sure it's possible to make this an actual required element of the company, isn't it, rather than just the say so of someone who might'n't be at the company in the future?
Being able to provide a query engine that can combine general knowledge with trade secret / internal knowledge will be a huge step for chatbot engines or other document retrieval. Cool project.
> Golden’s mission is to collect, organize and express 10+ billion topics in an accessible way, presented in neutrally-written and comprehensive topic pages.
How do you plan to uphold the neutrally-written part? Wikipedia does not really do this; many editors try, but it is very difficult. This is especially true seeing as every one carries personal biases. How will you make sure opinions that do not agree with the majority of your users, editors, etc. are allowed?
I agree this is the most difficult problem for a global platform -- even Google Maps has to redraw the borders depending on whose asking. I would prefer a wiki where I can read different branches of the 'main' article. Instead of deleting paragraphs that don't agree with my sense of what's true, I can say 'please relegate this to a different branch' and let it be upvoted or downvoted or geo-fenced, but still have it available.
I do really appreciate their priority to keep open logs -- make sure editors and admins can be held accountable for making changes to the tone or frame of an article.
Do you think the paid features for enterprise use is enough to support a VC model? (How do you avoid this becoming Quora (which also had an enterprise proposed use case)?)
What was the decision process around taking this a VC route vs not?
Jude from Golden here. Yes, I believe we can have the top 50k companies of the world as paying clients and help power open knowledge for the world. We have paying customers today on that front.
The decision for VC includes the following reasons:
1. Making this happen at scale / quicker.
2. Having people like Marc from a16z, FF and Gigafund adding valuable insight in order to pull this off.
How will you handle people that want to add knowledge that isn't accurate such as flat-Earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc? Seems like only a matter of time until you're overrun with contentious and vocal minorities that have nothing better to do than undermine our species longterm survival.
Jude from Golden here. Great question. We are actively monitoring all the changes right now, building up the community with a scientific/industrial focused seed and building out UI and AI to track the flat earth type changes that might come up in future. I think if we can get transparency on their best arguments/evidence and see the best counters it is going to become clear that the earth is round in that example. Let us get overun with people that want the best known information on the topics.
This approach may work with natural sciences, but what about political topics? People who spent most time studying an ideology X, are in some sense the best available experts (they remember thousands of details), but are far from impartial. And of course, ideologies may try to call themselves "science", making it seem like people who disagree are simply uneducated.
There's a pile of bias in this question, but it such an important question that needs to be answered.
Nazi policies were the defacto "science" for a decade-and-a-half. @Jude, how ill you prevent similar dogmas from taking hold? Especially if they are the popular dogmas?
> The arbitrary threshold of what is notable and what is not doesn't cut it in the Knowledge Age. There are currently 5.8 million English language articles in Wikipedia, and Google had 1 billion objects (200x Wikipedia's size) in its Knowledge Graph when it launched in 2015. We estimate internally that there are 1000x the entities to cover than what Wikipedia has today. It’s an exciting challenge!
This is a very weird comparison. Why not helping Wikipedia and contributing to this huge open knowledge base? The rules set by the WP community for acceptability clearly do not imply that “actual technologies, projects, products, theoretical electrical components and academic ideas” might be removed if written there, as the author suggests.
That articles, or even drafts, for specific American VC-funded projects did not reach WP's acceptability threshold does not mean that there is something fundamentally wrong in Wikimedia's approach. I'd love to see a better comparison.
> That articles, or even drafts, for specific American VC-funded projects did not reach WP's acceptability threshold does not mean that there is something fundamentally wrong in Wikimedia's approach.
Unless your goals include preserving knowledge that is outside of WP's guidelines. WP drew the line for what is worth preserving in one place, there is room enough in the world for a service that draws the line somewhere else.
Wikipedia notability is actually quite strict. Relatively few businesses have significant coverage by multiple independent reliable sources, for example.
As far as I see for issue like the morphogenetic engineering page you linked, the notability issue is to prevent people from gaming SEO or making their personal company/theory/whatever from being listed. Which is to say, maybe it's not a good idea for anybody to be able to list their business, thesis, or book (for commercial or discovery purposes) alongside actually notable topics. It seems ripe for marketing or other gaming.
>Why not helping Wikipedia and contributing to this huge open knowledge base? The rules set by the WP community for acceptability clearly do not imply that “actual technologies, projects, products, theoretical electrical components and academic ideas” might be removed if written there, as the author suggests.
There are rules as they are written, and there are rules as they are actually enforced. Wikipedia has long had a great divide here, especially thanks to rules-lawyering deletionists and political cliques amongst editors.
> Why not helping Wikipedia and contributing to this huge open knowledge base?
Wikipedia is incredibly selective about what they allow to have its own page. They simply aren't interested in being a huge open universal knowledge base - it's aggressively curated in an awful way that isn't immediately obvious. I've seen notable/important/interesting people be removed simply because they didn't meet some arbitrary level of notability, even if they had high impact in their respective communities. That kind of selective enforcement and control of information is what we should be fighting against, not encouraging.
Will you have an API, or will the information only be available through the heavy Web interface?
How will you handle inherently contentious topics, like vaccine safety, the existence of Morgellons as a disease distinct from delusional parasitosis, and the existence and current territorial extent of Israel and Palestine?
It's easy to create bot accounts that have believable names, and a whatever vetting process put in place may just be a false sense of security that you're interacting with who they say they are.
It certainly doesn't make anyone less of an jerk. Plenty of racists sexists etc on facebook arguing with everyone else in the world.
How does is prevent impersonating someone not on the platform? Twitter is notoriously bad at this... you can just call yourself whatever you want as long as your target isn't a user of the platform and takes notice...
Additionally, splitting in "first" and "last" name is a terrible idea for a service that aims to be international. Not all names can be split as "first" and "last". Some people have two "last" names. Some languages (e.g. Hungarian) put the family name before the given name.
If the problem is one of credibility, maybe some manual process that verifies the user is part of some prominent organization i.e. a professor in a given field or something could work. Give the user "flair" (similar to how reddit does it for r/askscience). They keep their pseudonymous username, but they're also recognized as an important figure.
> If the problem is one of credibility, maybe some manual process that verifies the user is part of some prominent organization i.e. a professor in a given field or something could work.
Only accepting users from prominent organization would compromise the goal of having 1000x more content than Wikipedia (see the failure of Nupedia).
The blog post says, "Public topic pages will be free to access and the text available on CC 4.0."
What does "CC 4.0" mean? There are many version 4 Creative Commons licenses. I looked at an actual Golden article and the bottom of the page says, "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0; additional terms apply. By using this site, you agree to our Terms & Conditions."
One reason why I like contributing to Wikipedia is because it feels like I'm contributing to the knowledge-base for all of humanity. Why should I spend my time working on a VC-funded version instead of at a non-profit? VC companies go bust all the time. I would have little share in the governance. Plus, it seems like you all are using public labor for private profit.
That all said, more knowledge is better than less. Good work on creating this.
Jude from Golden here. This knowledge base is for all of humanity as well. I think the important part here is that we are putting out the content on CC-BY-SA-4.0.
There is also risk factor to a donations model for WP and to not having enough revenue to invest in the tools needed to go 1000x on the topics + other features that are important to build. If it means anything, I worked on my last co (Heyzap) for 9 years and its still running today. I can see the worry but there are many options on creating backups and dumps to the text, so we are agreement that more knowledge is better and thanks for the support.
Thank you for your response. I'm greatly encouraged that the license is CC-BY-SA. That's definitely in the public good.
I do believe there is space for non-Wikipedia knowledge repositories. Look at Wikia, for example. People do want to store all their fandom knowledge somewhere. It's just that Wikipedia might not be the place for it.
I also agree that the underinvestment in tools can limit contributions. Wikipedia's new visual editor is the biggest step they've taken in making editing easily accessible. They also have new translation and analysis tools. Not to mention all the specialized wikis under the umbrella - Wiktionary, Wikidata, etc. I do wonder if it's enough though.
Thanks for your work. I hope you can find a balanced business model.
Between the politics (both internal and external) around Wikipedia, I gave up as an editor years ago. To me it sounds like Golden actually wants to be a repository of all information, rather than a byzantine bureaucracy that pretends to play encyclopedia.
> To me it sounds like Golden actually wants to be a repository of all information
And based on what information did you draw that conclusion? A well-articulated self-description from a VC-funded startup? Or does it mean some competitor failed in some way automatically makes it favorable and trustworthy?
Jude from Golden here. I'd love to get your feedback on the editor and fix any bugs you come across / comparisons of previous experiences and why you gave up. You can email me at jude [at] golden [dot] com or post it here...
Same here. Why should I contribute to Golden for free, where people have to pay to make queries, when I can do the same with Wikidata, which is queryable by anyone?
Jude from Golden here. Good question. We are opening up useful queries over time for users eg https://golden.com/y-combinator-w19-companies/ Future paid/business tools will include using our AI assisted editor for private companies, private storage of their knowledge so we can continue to open up more queries to the public. Our north star is to get to a more open knowledge base than what is currently available. Also here are all the cryptocurrency projects that have whitepapers https://golden.com/cryptocurrency-whitepapers/
Given than Wikidata is published under a CC 0 licence there’s nothing preventing Golden from using it as a knowledge source. Unless Golden provides a better editor experience I see no reason for anyone to contribute to Golden rather than Wikidata.
Just FYI, most of the content on Wikipedia is actually dual licensed under CC-BY-SA and GFDL. Both licenses are copyleft licenses; CC0 is more permissive.
While noble in appearance (that's what you're going for with the Golden name?), I'm skeptical of a VC-backed company going after Wikipedia, which is, IMO one of the treasures of the internet.
Without a VERY transparent and provable business model, I would never support this, as it seems like exactly the wrong direction to take "the internet". Especially since from the CEO's language, it seems to be competing directly with Wikipedia, rather than trying to work with them.
1) What makes Golden so different than Wikipedia that we should stop using Wikipedia and use Golden instead?
2) I randomly clicked into the Beyond Meat page on Golden [0] and I am comparing it to Wikipedia's page for the same company [1]. I can see you personally made 10 contributions to the article, more than anyone else. Why do you think I should read Golden's article instead of Wikipedia's article?
3) You want to stop deletion of data. When is content not worth keeping? For example, would you want an article written about every street in the world? How would you write an article on Golden for this [2]? My first click on Random Article on Wikipedia returned this [3]: how would you write the article for H. Day on Golden?
4) How will you implement fact validation?
5) > 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.
As a long time Wikipedia user, I can tell you I have never wanted any of those features, maybe with the exception of the auto-updating tables pending more information about what that actually means. How do you know that people want these features?
I just took a look at Everipedia, and it looks like they are just cloning content from Wikipedia. At least that's what it seems like based on the article on E. coli.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadAI suggestions - https://golden.com/suggestions
[1]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
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.
Good luck!
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?
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?
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)?
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.
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.
Are you going to collect user data and track them?
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.
If you start reading from the introduction, you won't know that Heyzap is a mobile advertising company.
[0] https://golden.com/wiki/DNA_sequencing#Companies
I'd like to know how they plan on addressing auditability of content - where it comes from, how it changes over time, etc.
1. High visual transparency and open edit logs eg golden.com/wiki/Morphogenetic_Engineering/activity
2. Using real profiles so we can prevent bots / multi accounts etc.
3. Cross checking SPO/fact triples in the prose against our structured data to validate information.
4. Cross checking against multiple sources
5. Using high resolution citations where we actually highlight the claim (please test our highlighting of a claim and citation tool to see this in action).
6. Having source trust ranked citation URLs.
7. Opening up primary sources eg articles of incorporation as evidence for claims.
8. Having a strong audit log of where information comes from.
9. Using a github style ‘issues’ rather than wiki talk in order to discuss content issues.
10. Giving UI affordances to argue out points and give evidence to claims made in these arguments.
We are still working on this UI / AI and general community to really dig into this core challenge.
I would much rather see a 'durable identity' process, whereby when someone sees my username as an author, they know it was authored by me. This goes beyond allowing or not allowing duplicate screennames (where you swap an I for l and impersonate a politician etc) -- consider authenticating edits and transactions with public key cryptography so I can assert my identity -- just not necessarily the one I can't change.
keybase.io is, of course, an innovator in this space and you should consider adopting their strategy for asserting identity online !
You can still make it a pain in the ass to create multiple accounts without asking for a government ID (which can be faked too, by the way!). ban multiple log-ins from single IP, have a phone number challenge, put a waiting period on the account, nothing is perfect but all of this is better than having to use my real name.
I refuse to participate to registration-ponzi-scheme.
What will the content licence be ?
Hard to offer something for free if the server costs & maintainence are non-trivial.
I'm sure it's possible to make this an actual required element of the company, isn't it, rather than just the say so of someone who might'n't be at the company in the future?
Will be interesting to see if it scales up...
Edit: and before that, with Freebase (which was later merged in Wikidata).
How do you plan to uphold the neutrally-written part? Wikipedia does not really do this; many editors try, but it is very difficult. This is especially true seeing as every one carries personal biases. How will you make sure opinions that do not agree with the majority of your users, editors, etc. are allowed?
I do really appreciate their priority to keep open logs -- make sure editors and admins can be held accountable for making changes to the tone or frame of an article.
Do you think the paid features for enterprise use is enough to support a VC model? (How do you avoid this becoming Quora (which also had an enterprise proposed use case)?)
What was the decision process around taking this a VC route vs not?
The decision for VC includes the following reasons:
1. Making this happen at scale / quicker.
2. Having people like Marc from a16z, FF and Gigafund adding valuable insight in order to pull this off.
3. Derisking the mission with $$$
Nazi policies were the defacto "science" for a decade-and-a-half. @Jude, how ill you prevent similar dogmas from taking hold? Especially if they are the popular dogmas?
or at least borrow heavily from?
This is a very weird comparison. Why not helping Wikipedia and contributing to this huge open knowledge base? The rules set by the WP community for acceptability clearly do not imply that “actual technologies, projects, products, theoretical electrical components and academic ideas” might be removed if written there, as the author suggests.
That articles, or even drafts, for specific American VC-funded projects did not reach WP's acceptability threshold does not mean that there is something fundamentally wrong in Wikimedia's approach. I'd love to see a better comparison.
Unless your goals include preserving knowledge that is outside of WP's guidelines. WP drew the line for what is worth preserving in one place, there is room enough in the world for a service that draws the line somewhere else.
1. What does not work in WP's model that you will address? Moderation? Transparency? Funding?
2. How do you plan to have 1000x the number of articles on WP? How do you plan to moderate and follow the accuracy of these 6,000,000,000 articles?
3. Is it an English-only project or do you value international contributions?
There are rules as they are written, and there are rules as they are actually enforced. Wikipedia has long had a great divide here, especially thanks to rules-lawyering deletionists and political cliques amongst editors.
Wikipedia is incredibly selective about what they allow to have its own page. They simply aren't interested in being a huge open universal knowledge base - it's aggressively curated in an awful way that isn't immediately obvious. I've seen notable/important/interesting people be removed simply because they didn't meet some arbitrary level of notability, even if they had high impact in their respective communities. That kind of selective enforcement and control of information is what we should be fighting against, not encouraging.
How will you handle inherently contentious topics, like vaccine safety, the existence of Morgellons as a disease distinct from delusional parasitosis, and the existence and current territorial extent of Israel and Palestine?
> Join Golden
> First Name Last Name
Yeah, no. A “real names” policy is a really terrible idea, for reasons outlined here:
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
As it stands, the article you link here is a judgement seeking non-anecdotal data.
It's easy to create bot accounts that have believable names, and a whatever vetting process put in place may just be a false sense of security that you're interacting with who they say they are.
It certainly doesn't make anyone less of an jerk. Plenty of racists sexists etc on facebook arguing with everyone else in the world.
How does is prevent impersonating someone not on the platform? Twitter is notoriously bad at this... you can just call yourself whatever you want as long as your target isn't a user of the platform and takes notice...
https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-na...
Perhaps there is a middle ground? Some kind of novel solution that accounts for data coming from "real names" vs pseudonym differently?
Only accepting users from prominent organization would compromise the goal of having 1000x more content than Wikipedia (see the failure of Nupedia).
A real names policy also means it'll have essentially no Japanese content. Online psudonyms, or anonymous editing are the norm in Japan.
> in some countries, such as Japan, online pseudonyms are the norm in all circumstances
What does "CC 4.0" mean? There are many version 4 Creative Commons licenses. I looked at an actual Golden article and the bottom of the page says, "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0; additional terms apply. By using this site, you agree to our Terms & Conditions."
Okay, so CC-BY-SA-4.0... similar to Wikipedia.
That all said, more knowledge is better than less. Good work on creating this.
There is also risk factor to a donations model for WP and to not having enough revenue to invest in the tools needed to go 1000x on the topics + other features that are important to build. If it means anything, I worked on my last co (Heyzap) for 9 years and its still running today. I can see the worry but there are many options on creating backups and dumps to the text, so we are agreement that more knowledge is better and thanks for the support.
I do believe there is space for non-Wikipedia knowledge repositories. Look at Wikia, for example. People do want to store all their fandom knowledge somewhere. It's just that Wikipedia might not be the place for it.
I also agree that the underinvestment in tools can limit contributions. Wikipedia's new visual editor is the biggest step they've taken in making editing easily accessible. They also have new translation and analysis tools. Not to mention all the specialized wikis under the umbrella - Wiktionary, Wikidata, etc. I do wonder if it's enough though.
Thanks for your work. I hope you can find a balanced business model.
And based on what information did you draw that conclusion? A well-articulated self-description from a VC-funded startup? Or does it mean some competitor failed in some way automatically makes it favorable and trustworthy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_person/Wikida...
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access#Basic_imp...
Without a VERY transparent and provable business model, I would never support this, as it seems like exactly the wrong direction to take "the internet". Especially since from the CEO's language, it seems to be competing directly with Wikipedia, rather than trying to work with them.
1) What makes Golden so different than Wikipedia that we should stop using Wikipedia and use Golden instead?
2) I randomly clicked into the Beyond Meat page on Golden [0] and I am comparing it to Wikipedia's page for the same company [1]. I can see you personally made 10 contributions to the article, more than anyone else. Why do you think I should read Golden's article instead of Wikipedia's article?
3) You want to stop deletion of data. When is content not worth keeping? For example, would you want an article written about every street in the world? How would you write an article on Golden for this [2]? My first click on Random Article on Wikipedia returned this [3]: how would you write the article for H. Day on Golden?
4) How will you implement fact validation?
5) > 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.
As a long time Wikipedia user, I can tell you I have never wanted any of those features, maybe with the exception of the auto-updating tables pending more information about what that actually means. How do you know that people want these features?
[0] https://golden.com/wiki/Beyond_Meat
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Meat
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4sterbroplan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Day