192 karma · joined November 22, 2014
The Knowledge Standards Foundation does. We're making an open network of all the encyclopedias (http://encyclosphere.org). Contact us: info@encyclosphere.org
Disclosure: I was co-founder of Wikipedia, once upon a time, and the KSF is my project.
Ouch.
Apple is happy to learn a lot about you. Hence the feds can learn a lot about you through them.
But most important to me is this wretched speech by Tim Cook: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/03/tim-cook-adl-keynote-sp...
What a censorious tool. Soured me on Apple for, probably, ever.
My support person was my 12-year-old son. ;-)
The reason Wikipedia articles are often biased is that people in authority in the community simply do not respect the neutrality policy. Even if most Wikipedians and most readers would prefer things to be more balanced, those in de facto control of an article determine the article's degree of bias. If the wording and order of facts is determined by open public vote, my hypothesis is that there will be more of a moderating effect.
The Infobitt model has an advantage over wikis that will enable a wisdom of crowds effect. People contribute and vote independently of each other, not by having to agree on a single version of the content. Yes, there can be comments, and that will have a biasing effect; but what people say in comments is obviously not as important as their votes, which they can exercise independently of each other and comments.
Also, since the pieces of content are short and fungible, they are therefore capable of being subject to contests. We can submit competing versions of facts, and the best can rise to the top.
Finally, every fact in Infobitt has to be sourced, and the fact is a summary of the source; and (soon) we'll be able to compete to write the best summary. So, to be sure, we'll have bad summaries occasionally, but generally I think we'll have good ones, once we've built the community up some more.
In other words, wiki forces users to collaborate on the same extended piece of content. This has all sorts of great effects, if enough people are participating. But it makes it harder to make short fungible pieces of content, rearrange them by vote, and do contests to discover the best version of each type.
In the long run our platform will make it possible for you to get the news ranked according to your preferences and interests, which will be made possible by the fact that we break the news into facts that people can rank differently. So your friends' (and compatriots') rankings can be up-weighted and what you're shown will be different.
I know this isn't what you see on the site yet...but in 2001 and 2002 you wouldn't see what you'd have liked on the front page of Wikipedia, either. :-)
Sorry, no API yet. We will have one; we're open content. We're not even hard-launched. We've built what you see on a shoestring...
If you don't pay people, you have to compensate them in other ways--especially in terms of community recognition and other evidence of the value of their work to the community/readership as a whole.
We've got quite a few very motivated writers who find writing bitts to be fun, and they know they're working on a site that will be open content (complete with API) and thus a potentially forkable public resource. We're considering doing a profit-sharing system, but I'm worried about the effect that will have on the community. We haven't even hard-launched (the content is still behind a login), we have had minimal publicity, and yet we've got enough regular participants to have a decent evening edition. Relying exclusively on paid writers will prove a drain on resources and might pose a significant roadblock to allowing the site to scale. It's a good thing we didn't do that with Wikipedia...
In the fullness of time, at scale, we'll have features permitting us to filter/weight the news presented to us according to our preferences. Breaking news into small pieces makes this possible.