Social:Justapedia
Logo of Justapedia Encyclopedia | |
Screenshot | |
Type of site | Online encyclopedia |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Headquarters | United States |
Created by | Betty Wills |
Website | https://justapedia.org/ |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Yes (Required to edit pages, via request of account) |
Launched | Aug.10, 2023 |
Current status | Active |
Content license | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Justapedia is an open and freely accessible online encyclopedia that is being developed and maintained by volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system; editors are referred to as Justapedians. Justapedia is the registered trademark of the Justapedia Foundation (JPF), a tax deductible section 501(c)(3) charitable organization for educational purposes. The JPF was officially registered on October 5, 2022, and was founded by Betty Wills, a longtime editor of Wikipedia.[1] Justapedia attributes Wikipedia and its many volunteer editors, some of whom are also Justapedia's volunteers, for the freely licensed content under CC-BY-SA, where most of Justapedia's content originated. The same free licenses also apply to Justapedia's revisions and new articles as noted in the page footer.
Origins
Justapedia was born of founder Betty Wills' desire to restore the spirit of neutrality and objectivity that Wikipedia had long since lost, a spirit that initially attracted her to become a Wikipedia volunteer in 2011.[2] A retired television producer and magazine publisher, Wills had a void to fill, and enjoyed sharing, editing, and helping others on Wikipedia as a tutor for new page patrol, the first line of defense in protecting Wikipedia from inadvertently publishing undesirable content. Wills considered her volunteer work to be a "project of love", which she stated in an interview with the NPR station WGBH (FM)–Boston[3] during the 2019 WikiConference North America, hosted by MIT.[4] Wills has also expressed her views about politics with a polite measure of humor as evidenced in her measured responses when she was interviewed by Slate[5] and Fast Company.[6]
About
The Justapedia Foundation (JPF) is a Sect 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization dedicated to providing and operating an open source, neutral and objective encyclopedia that will remain free to the world in perpetuity. Foundation headquarters at the time of origin are located in north Texas. Betty Wills as founder, CEO/president, Christian Gribneau as CTO/vice president, Ryan Stiles as secretary/treasurer, and Laraine Abbey-Katzev as Member at Large, comprise the Board of Directors and subsequent Executive Committee that manages the Foundation and its programs, which at the time of its inception includes the English Justapedia.
The Foundation is dedicated to maintaining a friendly and welcoming community for its volunteers, and is looking forward to hosting fun educational activities, spirited debates and various sponsorships and endowments with the help of tax deductible donations. The Foundation envisions Justapedia continuing its mission to maintain and protect the spirit of objectivity and neutrality in its encyclopedic content as volunteers continue to add to the building blocks of true knowledge in perpetuity.
Foundation's mission and goals
The Justapedia Foundation's mission is to host and operate Justapedia, a free and open-source encyclopedia, by providing the platform and tools to enable volunteers to easily edit, create and share their knowledge while maintaining compliance with Justapedia's five fundamental principals, and its policies and guidelines. Criticism is a useful tool for necessitating improvements, and Wikipedia has received more than its share of criticism relative to lacking objectivity, being used as a weapon, and for having a left–far left bias that is unacceptable for a neutral encyclopedia. Mainstream media's criticism ranges from politics to social and medical sciences, including a wide range of topics such as global warming, COVID-19, government and more.[7] Wikipedia's failure to maintain objectivity and neutrality in contentious topic areas are no secret as evidenced by Wikipedia's own articles, including gender bias,[8] systemic bias,[9][10] political bias,[11][12] and science. The Washington Post published the following criticism: "Groups that are underrepresented in academia tend to be missing at an even higher rate on Wikipedia. And there is growing evidence that Wikipedia articles have tangible effects, including the power to influence the contents of scientific papers. Wikipedia does not just passively reflect biases. It amplifies and reinforces them."[13][14]
Mission statement
Justapedia's mission is to develop and maintain articles that:
- are created and edited by editors with a good command of the English language;
- comply with Justapedia’s Manual of style, and are compliant with Justapedia's Policies and guidelines, particularly its core content policies concerning Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research and Verifiability;
- are fact-based, verifiable, corroborated and properly cited to reliable sources that are objectively chosen in an effort to include all significant views;
- contain minimal opinions, corroborated statements of fact, but when opinion is included, it will be with properly cited sources using in-text attribution,
- do not include breaking news as there will be a 7-day moratorium before any breaking news can be included.
Licensing
Justapedia is a work in progress that began in October 2022 with content originating from Wikipedia, all properly attributed in compliance with their free CC-BY-SA license. The same free license also applies to revisions and new articles authored by Justapedia volunteers as noted in their page footer.
Community
The Justapedia Foundation firmly believes in maintaining a collegial environment for our volunteers as indicated in Terms of Use and JPF Code of Conduct. Hindsight has made the Foundation's leadership, which consists of longterm experienced Wikipedia editors, more appreciative of old-fashioned good manners, and how best to handle disruption resulting from incivility. Hindsight has played a key role in many of the decisions that determined the policies and guidelines for Justapedia. For example, under Justapedia's zero tolerance policy, administrators will simply not allow blatantly disruptive behaviors such as gaming, POV railroading, POV creep, to name a few. For content issues, Justapedia's Editorial Review Board will help in eliminating the "hegemony of the asshole consensus", a phrase coined by Bryce Peake, a media and communications professor at UMBC.[15]
Justapedia differs from Wikipedia, beginning with the elimination of "thought police" and noticeboards that encourage draconian measures imposed by small groups of influencers who patrol them. Justapedia's position is to promote free thought by eliminating the "weaponry" that forces free thinkers to conform, which frequently includes groveling and agreeing to change one's approach by accepting the majority's ideology and admitting wrongdoing they never committed. The latter has only served to generate biased articles and eliminate neutrality and objectivity, while creating hard feelings, embarrassment, humiliation, and unnecessary obstacles. Justapedia administrators will not settle content disputes, or be involved in article deletions which is now within the purview of the ERB and trained NPP reviewers working New Page Patrol. Editors can easily avoid enforcement by simply being polite and respectful of other users. Content disputes that cannot be resolved on the article Talk Page, or by an uninvolved third party, may request a review by the Editorial Review Board, or BoT.
Editing
Justapedia is committed to providing a collegial environment where registered users can feel part of our growing community, and feel inspired to help build the encyclopedia by creating new articles, improving existing ones, and getting involved in different projects. Users are required to register, but may edit anonymously using a pseudonym. There will be no drive-by IP editing. Users are responsible for their own actions, comments, and all of their edits. JPF does not endorse any opinions, or make any representations or guarantees as to the reliability or factual accuracy of user generated content; JPF provides access only.
In Focus project
In Focus is a Justapedia project that includes gathering and listing freely licensed articles originally imported from Wikipedia that need to be fixed or entirely made over because they either lack objectivity and neutrality, or fail to comply with Justapedia's core content policies. Such articles are considered a top priority, and will also be the source for articles used in competitive Fixathons, which will be a judged event offering prizes and rewards for outstanding work.
References
- ↑ "User:Atsme". 2015-02-06. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Atsme.
- ↑ "User:Atsme". 2015-02-06. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Atsme#The_first_few_years.
- ↑ Leeson, Sarah (2020-01-10). "Wikipedia’s Volunteer Army". https://www.wgbh.org/news/science-and-technology/2020/01/10/wikipedias-volunteer-army.
- ↑ "2019/Main Page". 2021-08-18. https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2019/Main_Page.
- ↑ Mak, Aaron (2019-05-28). "Inside the Brutal, Petty War Over Donald Trump’s Wikipedia Page". https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/donald-trump-wikipedia-page.html.
- ↑ Pasternack, Alex (2020-03-07). "How Wikipedia’s volunteers became the web’s best weapon against misinformation". https://www.fastcompany.com/90471667/how-wikipedia-volunteers-became-the-webs-best-weapon-against-misinformation.
- ↑ Main, Nikki (2022-12-08). "Wikipedia Founder Indirectly Tells Elon Musk the Site 'Is Not for Sale'". https://news.yahoo.com/wikipedia-founder-indirectly-tells-elon-173500007.html.
- ↑ "Gender bias on Wikipedia". 2014-04-30. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia.
- ↑ "Wikipedia". 2001-11-06. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_and_systemic_bias.
- ↑ "Wikipedia:Systemic bias". 2017-09-20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias.
- ↑ Thompson, Alex; Meyer, Theodoric (2020-12-03). "Wikipedia page for Biden’s new Covid czar scrubbed of politically damaging material". https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/03/wikipedia-page-bidens-new-covid-czar-scrubbed-442735.
- ↑ "Inside Wikipedia's leftist bias: socialism pages whitewashed, communist atrocities buried". 2021-02-18. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/wikipedia-bias-socialism-pages-whitewashed.
- ↑ Baltz, Samuel (2021-02-24). "Analysis - Wikipedia’s political science coverage is biased. I tried to fix it.". https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/24/wikipedias-political-science-coverage-is-biased-i-tried-fix-it/.
- ↑ "Is Wikipedia Biased?". 2022-08-16. https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased.
- ↑ Fernandez, Robert (2019-06-02). "The Limits of Volunteerism and the Gatekeepers of Team Encarta". Wikipedia @ 20. https://wikipedia20.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/k3lmooje/release/12. Retrieved 2022-11-24.