Veropedia

Short description: Advertising-supported online encyclopedia

Veropedia

Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	English
Owner	Veropedia, Inc.
Created by	Wikipedia editors
Website	veropedia.org (defunct)
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Not required to read, required to contribute
Launched	October 2007
Current status	Inactive

Veropedia was a free, advertising-supported online encyclopedia launched in late October 2007. It was taken down in January 2009, pending creation of a new version.

Veropedia editors chose Wikipedia articles that met the site's reliability standards; information was then scraped, or chosen by an automatic process, and thereafter a stable version of the article was posted on Veropedia.

Any improvements required for articles to reach a standard suitable for Veropedia had to be done on Wikipedia itself. This model was intended to provide benefits to both projects: Wikipedia's open nature and large volume, and Veropedia's stability and perpetuity.

(As of October 2008) the site, still in beta, had checked and imported more than 5,800 articles from the English Wikipedia into its public database. Although Veropedia intended to eventually support itself completely through advertising, the project was mainly financed by those involved in the project, and was an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation until spring 2007. By November 2007, roughly 100 Wikipedia editors were involved in the project. The help of academics who had worked on Wikipedia was also being sought.

An explanatory page on the site stated that similar projects in languages other than English might be launched; it distinguished Veropedia from "expert-driven" wikis such as Citizendium.

In January 2009, the encyclopedia contents were removed and replaced with a message stating that "The original version of Veropedia has been taken down for now while we work on a new Veropedia. This new Veropedia will have a superior method of handling articles and introduces an improved interface."

Management and legal status

Veropedia was operated by Veropedia, Inc., a for-profit corporation registered in Florida, and founded by Wool, a former co-ordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia.

As required by its use of Wikipedia material, all Veropedia content was licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Contrast with Wikipedia

• Articles were uploaded when they met Veropedia's criteria. Articles were not edited once uploaded.
• Veropedia used only experienced article editors, and operated an automated system for uploading, which checked proposed articles for a wide range of issues, and refused to accept them if any were present.

Independent human expert review of articles was planned for the final version, but was not implemented. In Veropedia's own words: "Each article will be given to recognized academics and experts to review. These experts can either provide their stamp of approval or make suggestions as to how the article can be improved further. In that way, users will know that the article is reliable. Our material is written by Wikipedia contributors. The role of experts and academics will be to check it and, ideally, approve it. Their comments will be given back to our contributors to incorporate back into the articles to make them even better."

• While Wikipedia allows almost anyone to edit, contributing to Veropedia was by approval (following a request) or invitation only.
• Veropedia's content covered a smaller range than Wikipedia: at its height it had some 5800 articles vs. 3 million for Wikipedia. The focus was explicitly upon articles that are likely to be widely useful, and are improved to a high quality standard. (As of December 2007), Veropedia's growth rate was around 300 articles per month.
• Unlike the English Wikipedia, Veropedia had a number of tighter restrictions. For example, exclusion of fair use images and other content. The Veropedia FAQ stated: "We have decided to... go back to the core principles of the project by focusing on free content. Only by insisting on free content can we revert the current trend of extending copyright and encourage people to release their content to the public."
• While Wikipedia is funded by donations, Veropedia used paid advertising. Daniel Wool commented: "I was in charge of fundraising for Wikipedia, and I feel a lot more comfortable taking ads from Amazon than the donations of high school students."

Evaluation

Nicholas Carr, a critic of Web 2.0 in general and Wikipedia in particular, criticized Veropedia as trying to "scrape" the "cream" of Wikipedia. Carr has also stated that Veropedia had an unclear interface with clicks bouncing one back and forth between Wikipedia and Veropedia.

Tim Blackmore, an associate professor at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies of the University of Western Ontario, expressed scepticism toward the project, since there are already encyclopedias in existence where "content is checked and articles are reviewed". The main lure of the internet, according to him, is "free information" and Wikipedia has already emerged as a pioneer in open content information resources.

A different evaluation in The Australian said Veropedia "seems more likely to succeed" than Citizendium, another then-recently founded online encyclopedia, because "it is less directly competitive" with Wikipedia. The story opined that both Veropedia and Citizendium "should in theory help improve the fairness and accuracy of available online information about many contentious topics although the academic bent to each raises questions over what, exactly, they will construe as fair when it comes to coverage of corporations and their actions."

A story in Wired News discussed whether Veropedia (and Citizendium) could avoid some of the same problems that Wikipedia has supposedly encountered: "Though office politics and internecine bickering abound at the Wikimedia Foundation – one former insider described the atmosphere as "MySpace meets 'As the World Turns' for geeks" – both Wool and Sanger deny that internal squabbles were why they started their own encyclopedias. Whether their ventures fall prey to the same turf wars, bureaucratic quagmires and academic catfights as the site that spawned them remains to be seen."

In a review of various Wikipedia alternatives, TechNewsWorld argued that Veropedia's estimation of 5000 articles was not credible, as "many of these articles are small and insignificant almanac-type entries that serve mainly as filler". It thus argued that like Citizendium, Veropedia avoided "the tough challenge of handling controversial and time-sensitive subjects" that Wikipedia had taken on. The article also stated that most Veropedia articles were identical to their Wikipedia counterpart.

See also

• List of online encyclopedias

Further reading

• O'Leary, Mick (2008-02-20). "Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble". TechNewsWorld. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Would-Be-Wikipedia-Replacements-Stumble-61728.html.  (Sourced from the Wayback Machine).