I'm not "working on a decentralized encyclopedia." I am working on tools and standards to network together all the encyclopedias in the world. See encyclosphere.org.
It's not meant to win over an average Joe. It's meant to maybe win over the sort of people who read my blog--technical or semi-technical, intelligent in any case, capable of thinking outside the box...
I'm not, really. Before they moved to the crowd (I refused to follow them there), I used to be an Office expert. I knew the software inside and out. I still use Word 2007. But no, I never did install Office 365 (I see my mistake now!).
Ever since I heard of this site, I've thought that (annotating the web, or parts of the web) is a great idea for a website, and they're executing it pretty well. It's not what we're doing, but it's still cool and my guess is they'll keep growing.
In the wonderful event that Infobitt becomes a superior product and accordingly gains market share to the detriment of news sources, then we will of course know where our bread is buttered. Infobitt will suck without good sources; so probably we'll end up paying our sources ourselves.
It's certainly something we can consider now that we've soft-launched. We've thought about it in the past, and now I guess it is a good idea to consider it again!
Battling organized partisanship is a problem for down the road. My hope is that, by the time we deal with that, we'll have the funding and the personnel to code up a system that enables us to test out some technical solutions to this problem. There are lots of ideas...
The fact that bitt and fact order, as well as which fact is displayed to the reader, is (or will soon be) subject to vote will provide a moderating influence, I hope.
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.
I actually agree. This is one area in which Wikipedia shines. But when it comes to breaking news, or tracking the actual order of events as they were reported, not so much.
As I have said several times before, Wikipedia doesn't follow Surowiecki's rules for "wisdom of crowds" effects.
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.
The Knowledge Standards Foundation does. We're making an open network of all the encyclopedias (http://encyclosphere.org). Contact us: [email protected]
Disclosure: I was co-founder of Wikipedia, once upon a time, and the KSF is my project.