16 ms·

Golden: Mapping human knowledge

397 points by yarapavan 8y ago

JamesClear99 8y ago
Signup page - https://golden.com/signup https://golden.com/signup AI suggestions - https://golden.com/suggestions https://golden.com/suggestions
qnsi 8y ago
[deleted]
- judegomila 8y ago
  The content is on CC4.0 and not going to be paywalled.
  - riordan 8y ago
    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? [1]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
    - coldacid 8y ago
      My hope is that all the content, not just prose, will be CC licensed. Jude, will it be so?
judegomila 8y ago
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.
- zinssmeister 8y ago
  this is a great idea. First URL I faved in the past 12 months. Good luck Jude!
- TheLegace 8y ago
  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.
  - jedc 8y ago
    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
    - hk__2 8y ago
      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.
- kreetx 8y ago
  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. :) Good luck!
bovermyer 8y ago
I like the concept. I'd like to know how they plan on addressing auditability of content - where it comes from, how it changes over time, etc.
- judegomila 8y ago
  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.
  - SethTro 8y ago
    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
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    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.
pmuk 8y ago
How many topics do you cover now?
herogreen 8y ago
I hope it will not be registration walled like Quora but more open like stackexchange websites or hn. I refuse to participate to registration-ponzi-scheme. What will the content licence be ?
- judegomila 8y ago
  Jude from Golden here. We won't do the reg wall - hold me to it :>. We want the information to be open and EASY to access, thus no reg screen. CC4.0
  - sgrove 8y ago
    How about API access and textual dumps for the other kinds of analysis?
    - ztratar 8y ago
      If they offer API access I think it's fair to charge for it. At least for a certain scale. Hard to offer something for free if the server costs & maintainence are non-trivial.
    - baddox 8y ago
      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
      - j-zhang 8y ago
        Hey Thomas, love what you are building.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >We won't do the reg wall - hold me to it :>. 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?
imafish 8y ago
Is it Wikipedia - but with a modern editor?
- teddyh 8y ago
  And a “Real Names” policy.
- lkj 8y ago
  And "AI". And all about blockchain and VC.
- dredds 8y ago
  And "socialized" like Github with followers & favs, but without the forks or personalized pages.
saadalem 8y ago
What will be the monetisation ?
- ztratar 8y ago
  So far looks like tools for companies & pro research, like their query builder. Will be interesting to see if it scales up...
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    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.
    - hk__2 8y ago
      You can already do that with Wikidata. Edit: and before that, with Freebase (which was later merged in Wikidata).
mises 8y ago
> 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?
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  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.
aznpwnzor 8y ago
Love the modern take and long tail focus! 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?
- judegomila 8y ago
  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. 3. Derisking the mission with $$$
evo_9 8y ago
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.
- judegomila 8y ago
  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.
  - Viliam1234 8y ago
    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.
  - adamsea 8y ago
    Who gets to decide who is a scientist and who is not a scientist? Scientists?
- all2 8y ago
  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?
  - evo_9 8y ago
naringas 8y ago
why not join efforts with wikipedia? or at least borrow heavily from?
Cynddl 8y ago
> 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.
- Bjartr 8y ago
  > 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.
- Cynddl 8y ago
  More interesting questions: 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?
- jcrben 8y ago
  Wikipedia notability is actually quite strict. Relatively few businesses have significant coverage by multiple independent reliable sources, for example.
- judegomila 8y ago
  Jude from Golden here. Unfortunately, there are many more topics other than US companies being removed eg right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_Popinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_Popinski is up for removal. This notability issue spans almost all entity types. Additionally, many topics just simply don't make it onto there soon enough https://golden.com/wiki/Morphogenetic_Engineering https://golden.com/wiki/Morphogenetic_Engineering Another example, Lisk was removed https://golden.com/wiki/Lisk https://golden.com/wiki/Lisk SV Angel https://golden.com/wiki/SV_Angel https://golden.com/wiki/SV_Angel
msla 8y ago
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?
teddyh 8y ago
> Today, we have a great opportunity to use new technologies to solve the problems: […] real identity […] > 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_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
- ztratar 8y ago
  I'd like to see a breakdown of the benefits next to the costs. As it stands, the article you link here is a judgement seeking non-anecdotal data.
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    What are the benefits of a real name policy? 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...
  - hk__2 8y ago
    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. https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-name-field/ https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-na...
- billmalarky 8y ago
  "Really terrible" is a bit harsh imo but your comment is very insightful. Perhaps there is a middle ground? Some kind of novel solution that accounts for data coming from "real names" vs pseudonym differently?
troymc 8y ago
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." Okay, so CC-BY-SA-4.0... similar to Wikipedia.
- judegomila 8y ago
  CC-BY-SA-4.0 correct, we are correcting the blog post.
bluejay2387 8y ago
The cynic in me sees an attempt to crowd source a knowledge base for a IMDB style business model...
- rambojazz 8y ago
  What is IMDB business model?
  - bluejay2387 8y ago
    Sorry, meant CDDB (now Gracenote). So many acronyms.
mduncs 8y ago
"Knowledge is Golden" -- Cute name.
alexcabrera 8y ago
So... a wiki?
tonak_li 8y ago
It is similar to ideaflow but a lot better :) https://www.ideaflow.io/ https://www.ideaflow.io/
pradn 8y ago
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.
- judegomila 8y ago
  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.
  - pradn 8y ago
    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.
    - judegomila 8y ago
      Thanks, glad you like it.
  - 8y ago
pcmaffey 8y ago
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.
Invictus0 8y ago
Hi Jude. 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 https://golden.com/wiki/Beyond_Meat [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Meat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4sterbroplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4sterbroplan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Day
camdenlock 8y ago
To the creators of Golden: how do you view Golden in comparison to Everipedia?
- pazimzadeh 8y ago
  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.
rememberlenny 8y ago
Only slightly related. I just went through the founder's website and they are a very fascinating person: www.judegomila.com
lkj 8y ago
So for one of your "showcase" pages, the "Golden AI" plagiarized Wikipedia content and now you are in violation of the CC BY clause Wikipedia uses: https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt/activity/user/golden-ai https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt/activity/user/golden-ai How could that happen? What will happen now? How will you prevent such copyright violations in the future?
- judegomila 8y ago
  Jude from Golden here. We attribute to wikipedia in general which is inline with their TOS. Did we miss a place? We say when needed "Text adapted from the Wikipedia page "Product Hunt": https://en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt" https://en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produc... FYI as well the copyright doesn't apply to the actual fact only the text and we give attribution as per their TOS in those cases.
  - lkj 8y ago
    I do not see attribution on https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt The vast majority of the text on that page is a verbatim copy from Wikipedia. You have to provide appropriate attribution.
lucb1e 8y ago
This is my idea, happy to see someone had the same one and decided to implement it! There are two major things I run into: figuring out the minimum knowledge needed to understand a certain thing, and deciding what to work on to further our knowledge and help everyone. - My knowledge is quite specialized (I didn't have broad foundations), so sometimes it's hard to get into something. I know that I'm missing knowledge, but it takes forever to try and get from "I know how if statements and databases work" to making sense of a symbolic formula that might depend on set theory. If something could tell me "read these two pages and you've bridged the gap" (because the paper is about topic X and I already know topics Y and Z, so I only need those two to bridge my gap), that would be so much faster than googling "what's that sideways chandelier" and figuring out that it's set theory that I'm missing. There could even be circular branches between topics: someone who knows set theory can use that to understand databases more quickly than someone who does not, and vice versa. Posts explaining set theory for database users and vice versa could exist. But that's a lot of manual work to create each possible explanation, not sure that's viable, even if it has to be done only once. - Related to the previous point, bridging knowledge gaps is currently done by asking questions. If you can ask another human a question, they can give an answer that perfectly fits your knowledge gap. That way of learning is much more efficient (for the student) than trying to give a workshop on the topic for a group of people. If we can do it as described in the previous point, we can free up a lot of resources that are now spent on having people tell the same things in slightly different form over and over again. Things need to be taught only once. - When hiring, how can you tell if someone has the right knowledge for the job? Even a full day of testing can't tell you whether someone really understands all aspects of software engineering that are relevant for your organisation. If you can tick boxes on all the topics you understand, job matching might become much easier. Employers can request people with certain knowledge, and job seekers might get the jobs most in reach, e.g. "if you learn about these two topics, you are fit for this job" (on a technical level, at least). You'll still have to test that someone actually understands a topic (or have some trusted testing third party), but verifying a claim by asking randomly about a few topics is much easier than asking about everything. - Our society demands ever more educated people. If you didn't have a lot of schooling, it can be hard to know what you are missing that companies are looking for. A message like "learn these three things and unlock this profession" might help a lot of people. (In the optimistic case, that is. It'll also cause people to reject candidates that are otherwise great because they're missing a topic. But at the start of a project like this, I'm just exploring the potential, not thinking about all the ways it could fail.) - You can find who has certain knowledge within (or outside) your organisation to help with a project. - At the leaves of the tree, you can find a topic to work on next, to further our understanding of the world. People can ask for certain issues to be solved or results to be confirmed and pay people to do that. Right now, our knowledge as a species is quite scattered and often hard to find. I'm excited to see an attempt at starting that knowledge tree and am very curious to see which of the above points can really be done with it!
llamataboot 8y ago
Cynical self: They raised a $5mil round just to re-do wikipedia with more self-referential VC pats on the back. Intrigued self: If there is anything worth raising money for, it is building out a collective knowledge base for all of humanity. Angry self: Wikipedia is quite literally one of the most amazing things that the internet and millions of strangers have ever produced together, and lives as a vital proof of concept of a collaborative process on a scale not seen before. If you are interested in making wikipedia more useful with more linking on in-depth knowledge, more multimedia, and a richer UI for editing, why not build something that builds on wikipedia instead of building something entirely new? Academic self: You are throwing out ideas like "cover all topics that exist" and "neutral objectivity" as if entire fields of human inquiry don't exist into what those things even mean. You seem to dislike the current editorial standards of wikipedia, but I'm not at all clear where Golden will draw its lines or how? Also, what are your thoughts on the morality of essentially crowdsourcing all the input that you will feed to your query engines and profit off people using? Aren't you essentially making your contributors all unpaid workers? If you are serious about building out a for-profit version of wikipedia, why not figure out ways to distribute micropayments based on how useful others find the information someone took the time to contribute (as an example)
- VectorLock 8y ago
  It seems like Wikipedia might have some inherent incompatibilities with what they're trying to do, such as its editorial rules and its definition of notability, which can't easily be "fixed" by whatever definition of fixing they need. I appreciate a more inclusive view of notability that lets you take it all in and surface whats relevant more selectively although that is open for insane amounts of debate around it as we've seen on Wikipedia.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    Wikipedia is a great resource, but it's also one of those success stories that owes as much to the incompetence of its competitors as it does to its own merit. I've often thought it would be interesting to create a "Wrapipedia" of sorts, basically a copy of the Wiki codebase that could be used to circumvent Wikipedia's often-nonsensical notability and deletion rules. Basically, instead of going to wikipedia.org to look up something, you'd go to wrapipedia.org, which would issue the query on your behalf and supply its own page if the Wikipedia lookup fails. Wikipedia pages that were created by users but subsequently deleted by editors would essentially be treated as pure virtual functions to be implemented by wrapper classes. As with Wikipedia itself, users could create new entries and edit existing ones. That way the original Wikipedia project could remain true to its charter without leaving its users frustrated or unsatisfied. Its editors would also appreciate an alternative to being insulted and browbeaten by annoyed users, I'm sure.
pazimzadeh 8y ago
It looks good from a visual and usability standpoint. But it's kind of odd how there's already a cluster of articles on synthetic biology, but nothing written about Escherichia coli. If the idea is to catch up and eventually overtake Wikipedia in content, that seems extremely ambitious. Luckily the name Golden is pretty generic so maybe they plan to pivot towards whichever industries adopt it more?
flexx 8y ago
My 2c on design, while scrolling article, sidebar is highlighting current paragraph and that jumping is very annoying in current color, it should be much lighter..
- judegomila 8y ago
  JG here. Will look into this.
gibsonf1 8y ago
Why not actually work on capturing knowledge in a machine-readable and usable way?
incompatible 8y ago
"navigating the cacophony of formats, designs, sources and standards is challenging. Google, Wikipedia, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Quora, StackExchange, Github, etc" Makes me think of standards, all we need is one universal one. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- stebann 8y ago
  Thought the same! Haha
maxdamantus 8y ago
From quickly skimming through this post, it seems like it's basically just a Wikipedia that supports people posting their products as advertisements. If something is not notable, you're just going to end up with those with vested interests deciding what content goes up. I suspect this is the main reason for Wikipedia's requirement of notability.
Liron 8y ago
This is a great example of a product that has 10 little reasons why it's better than pre-existing alternatives, but seems to lack 1 killer reason why it's better. I don't think it would have passed my personal sanity check for startup ideas [1]. I predict that the team will eventually discover one or more niches where they can leverage their platform to build a differentiated value prop specific to those niches. For example, the niche of "investor databases" with the differentiated value prop of "letting entrepreneurs filter down the list of all investors to find the top 100 best ones that they specifically should try to pitch". Each time a specific niche and value prop is identified, it will motivate building cool new functionality into the platform. The platform can evolve as a union of these niche-motivated features. I suspect that a lot of the features that exist in today's horizontal-minded v1 won't be needed because they were conceived of without reference to any specific differentiated value prop. [1] https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-startup-idea-dbb3ad4c9888 https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-st...
cryptokernel 8y ago
This is such wow! Just leaving this here, earn crypto by doing tasks https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3 https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3
pcj-github 8y ago
Sorry, but I see nothing compelling here. If at this point your "customer stories" section includes quote from a VC, you don't have a real product. Good luck, but I'm afraid you are going to have a hard time finding real paying customers. And attracting actual human editors? Numerous people on this thread are already offended by your proposal. Next.
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
Small UI complaint: I can't quickly open lots of links that are near each other due to the little popups.
Numberwang 8y ago
I really like the design of the site. Congratulations on avoiding many of the popular trends such as massive whitespaces and making everything low contrast grey.
cjbprime 8y ago
On reading this announcement, I can't help but think of Quora, and what an unmitigated disaster it is, as well as a cautionary tale of what happens when you accept VC funding for a human knowledge project. It's a few small steps from "well, we'll have to start making money" to "let's block the Internet Archive completely and hoard the world's knowledge for our own gain". But worse than just being a cautionary tale, I guess I'm unhappy to see this announcement because Quora could seriously have been what we got instead of Wikipedia, you know? Who wins in a platform race seems like a function of factors like first mover advantage and luck, rather than any dispassionate analysis of what would be better for the world. So I wouldn't have the guts to start a project like this with VC funding. You have to model the probability that you'll be pushed out and replaced with someone who doesn't share your ideals and is tasked with finding a path to profit. How could anyone have the stomach to create a potential Wikipedia replacement with that kind of liability attached?
Cheryl_Sanders 8y ago
Hopefully if there's ever a global fallout we'll have the entirety of human knowledge store deep in the ground for future generations lol. This project is amazing though.
trpc 8y ago
so this is a for profit company that intends to use free labor contributions to exploit search engine SEO rankings and subsequently attract useless millions of daily visits and then you exit it for hundreds of millions a few years from now. It worked before, why wouldn't it work now? there are always enough dumb people who will help you make a fortune for free if you understand tech capitalism and manage to fool them; good luck anyway.
sixdimensional 8y ago
Peter Drucker once predicted that the knowledge economy and knowledge workers would be the next big evolution [1]. Are we there yet? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landmarks_of_Tomorrow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landmarks_of_Tomorrow
emmanueloga_ 8y ago
For a tool that has the high goal of "mapping human knowledge" and use A.I., I'm just not very impressed by the lack of APIs and no mention of a data model. I feel that to map human knowledge and make it accessible and understandable for machines, the data model should be put front and center. For me that means a knowledge graph (preferably with SPARQL/OWL capabilities). Were's the metadata? The wiki pages don't even have schema.org data! I'd be more interesting if golden provided UI improvements over the querying and presentation of data from Wikidata and/or DBPedia, or if golden's editor would make it easier to annotate the content of the wiki pages with RDF data.
fjfaase 8y ago
Is there anything of traceability in Golden? In the past years, I have been documenting the works, exhibitions, and documents about a Dutch artists. While doing this, I have often come across conflicting information. I have discovered that what I actually need is a reasoning system about statements and have a mechanism for traceability with respect to every fact represented.
- teddyh 8y ago
  You seem to want classic style AI in the style of Cyc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
  - fjfaase 8y ago
    No, not something as rigid as Cyc, but more a system where you can trace the truth of a certain fact. Wikipedia requires you to reference sources. But that is just one layer. Some forms of knowledge are based on multiple layers of references. Making a statement based on a source, always involves some form of interpretation. It would be nice to know who made the statement (and who are supporting the interpretation). Of course, wikipedia keeps the full history of an article, and you could go back through all the revisions and see who edited what, but in requires a lot of work. It would be nice if Golden would at least acknowledge that traceability is an issue has some support for it.
antpls 8y ago
In my opinion, you should include "POWERFUL QUERY TOOL" into the community edition, and then sell the ability to have private spaces including support in the priced plan. Right now, it doesn't seem very fair or legit given the headline "The intelligent, open knowledge base". If the raw data is accessible but the tool to query it is not accessible to most web users, it doesn't make it "open".
holografix 8y ago
So Wikipedia with better UI and a sprinkle of AI "magic"?
navaru 8y ago
I don't get it, in what scenario would someone pay $99 per user per month? Could someone please give an example where this makes sense?
amitport 8y ago
Freebase is back! (until google buys them again) just kidding (I hope), good luck!
gcb0 8y ago
a press release of a Wikipedia for profit, with no information. just flag it.
mjgeddes 8y ago
Yup, wikipedia already maps all human knowledge. In fact , you don't need to map everything, just central concepts in every field. I think there's a law of diminishing returns - summaries of knowledge are extremely useful, but as you add more and more detail , there's less and less benefit. I created 'Wikipedia-Prime', a series of 27 wiki-books mapping all central concepts in all fields of human knowledge. Approx. 16 700 articles was enough to capture all the central concepts used by experts in all fields. Wikipedia-Prime Index: http://www.zarzuelazen.com/CoreKnowledgeDomains2.html http://www.zarzuelazen.com/CoreKnowledgeDomains2.html
narendranag 8y ago
This is very disturbing — the idea of all human knowledge being a for-profit venture owned by a founder and his investors is wrong.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> neutrally-written I'd like to see opinionated stuff too. In fact lack of what can be labelled as opinionated, non-credible and non-significant is what I dislike of Wikipedia. I acknowledge value of neutral and credible information but I believe too much of what still can be useful food for thought gets discarded with the rest.

397 points by yarapavan 8y ago

Signup page - https://golden.com/signup https://golden.com/signup AI suggestions - https://golden.com/suggestions https://golden.com/suggestions

qnsi 8y ago

[deleted]

judegomila 8y ago
The content is on CC4.0 and not going to be paywalled.
- riordan 8y ago
  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? [1]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
  - coldacid 8y ago
    My hope is that all the content, not just prose, will be CC licensed. Jude, will it be so?

judegomila 8y ago

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.

zinssmeister 8y ago
this is a great idea. First URL I faved in the past 12 months. Good luck Jude!
TheLegace 8y ago
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.
- jedc 8y ago
  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
  - hk__2 8y ago
    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.
kreetx 8y ago
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. :) Good luck!

bovermyer 8y ago

I like the concept. I'd like to know how they plan on addressing auditability of content - where it comes from, how it changes over time, etc.

judegomila 8y ago
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.
- SethTro 8y ago
  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
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  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.

pmuk 8y ago

How many topics do you cover now?

herogreen 8y ago

I hope it will not be registration walled like Quora but more open like stackexchange websites or hn. I refuse to participate to registration-ponzi-scheme. What will the content licence be ?

judegomila 8y ago
Jude from Golden here. We won't do the reg wall - hold me to it :>. We want the information to be open and EASY to access, thus no reg screen. CC4.0
- sgrove 8y ago
  How about API access and textual dumps for the other kinds of analysis?
  - ztratar 8y ago
    If they offer API access I think it's fair to charge for it. At least for a certain scale. Hard to offer something for free if the server costs & maintainence are non-trivial.
  - baddox 8y ago
    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
    - j-zhang 8y ago
      Hey Thomas, love what you are building.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >We won't do the reg wall - hold me to it :>. 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?

imafish 8y ago

Is it Wikipedia - but with a modern editor?

teddyh 8y ago
And a “Real Names” policy.
lkj 8y ago
And "AI". And all about blockchain and VC.
dredds 8y ago
And "socialized" like Github with followers & favs, but without the forks or personalized pages.

saadalem 8y ago

What will be the monetisation ?

ztratar 8y ago
So far looks like tools for companies & pro research, like their query builder. Will be interesting to see if it scales up...
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  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.
  - hk__2 8y ago
    You can already do that with Wikidata. Edit: and before that, with Freebase (which was later merged in Wikidata).

mises 8y ago

> 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?

jazzyjackson 8y ago
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.

aznpwnzor 8y ago

Love the modern take and long tail focus! 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?

judegomila 8y ago
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. 3. Derisking the mission with $$$

evo_9 8y ago

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.

judegomila 8y ago
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.
- Viliam1234 8y ago
  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.
- adamsea 8y ago
  Who gets to decide who is a scientist and who is not a scientist? Scientists?
all2 8y ago
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?
- evo_9 8y ago

naringas 8y ago

why not join efforts with wikipedia? or at least borrow heavily from?

Cynddl 8y ago

> 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.

Bjartr 8y ago
> 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.
Cynddl 8y ago
More interesting questions: 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?
jcrben 8y ago
Wikipedia notability is actually quite strict. Relatively few businesses have significant coverage by multiple independent reliable sources, for example.
judegomila 8y ago
Jude from Golden here. Unfortunately, there are many more topics other than US companies being removed eg right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_Popinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_Popinski is up for removal. This notability issue spans almost all entity types. Additionally, many topics just simply don't make it onto there soon enough https://golden.com/wiki/Morphogenetic_Engineering https://golden.com/wiki/Morphogenetic_Engineering Another example, Lisk was removed https://golden.com/wiki/Lisk https://golden.com/wiki/Lisk SV Angel https://golden.com/wiki/SV_Angel https://golden.com/wiki/SV_Angel

msla 8y ago

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?

teddyh 8y ago

> Today, we have a great opportunity to use new technologies to solve the problems: […] real identity […] > 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_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...

ztratar 8y ago
I'd like to see a breakdown of the benefits next to the costs. As it stands, the article you link here is a judgement seeking non-anecdotal data.
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  What are the benefits of a real name policy? 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...
- hk__2 8y ago
  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. https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-name-field/ https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-na...
billmalarky 8y ago
"Really terrible" is a bit harsh imo but your comment is very insightful. Perhaps there is a middle ground? Some kind of novel solution that accounts for data coming from "real names" vs pseudonym differently?

troymc 8y ago

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." Okay, so CC-BY-SA-4.0... similar to Wikipedia.

judegomila 8y ago
CC-BY-SA-4.0 correct, we are correcting the blog post.

bluejay2387 8y ago

The cynic in me sees an attempt to crowd source a knowledge base for a IMDB style business model...

rambojazz 8y ago
What is IMDB business model?
- bluejay2387 8y ago
  Sorry, meant CDDB (now Gracenote). So many acronyms.

mduncs 8y ago

"Knowledge is Golden" -- Cute name.

alexcabrera 8y ago

So... a wiki?

tonak_li 8y ago

It is similar to ideaflow but a lot better :) https://www.ideaflow.io/ https://www.ideaflow.io/

pradn 8y ago

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.

judegomila 8y ago
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.
- pradn 8y ago
  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.
  - judegomila 8y ago
    Thanks, glad you like it.
- 8y ago

pcmaffey 8y ago

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.

Invictus0 8y ago

Hi Jude. 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 https://golden.com/wiki/Beyond_Meat [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Meat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4sterbroplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4sterbroplan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Day

camdenlock 8y ago

To the creators of Golden: how do you view Golden in comparison to Everipedia?

pazimzadeh 8y ago
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.

rememberlenny 8y ago

Only slightly related. I just went through the founder's website and they are a very fascinating person: www.judegomila.com

lkj 8y ago

So for one of your "showcase" pages, the "Golden AI" plagiarized Wikipedia content and now you are in violation of the CC BY clause Wikipedia uses: https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt/activity/user/golden-ai https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt/activity/user/golden-ai How could that happen? What will happen now? How will you prevent such copyright violations in the future?

judegomila 8y ago
Jude from Golden here. We attribute to wikipedia in general which is inline with their TOS. Did we miss a place? We say when needed "Text adapted from the Wikipedia page "Product Hunt": https://en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt" https://en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produc... FYI as well the copyright doesn't apply to the actual fact only the text and we give attribution as per their TOS in those cases.
- lkj 8y ago
  I do not see attribution on https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt https://golden.com/wiki/Product_Hunt The vast majority of the text on that page is a verbatim copy from Wikipedia. You have to provide appropriate attribution.

lucb1e 8y ago

This is my idea, happy to see someone had the same one and decided to implement it! There are two major things I run into: figuring out the minimum knowledge needed to understand a certain thing, and deciding what to work on to further our knowledge and help everyone. - My knowledge is quite specialized (I didn't have broad foundations), so sometimes it's hard to get into something. I know that I'm missing knowledge, but it takes forever to try and get from "I know how if statements and databases work" to making sense of a symbolic formula that might depend on set theory. If something could tell me "read these two pages and you've bridged the gap" (because the paper is about topic X and I already know topics Y and Z, so I only need those two to bridge my gap), that would be so much faster than googling "what's that sideways chandelier" and figuring out that it's set theory that I'm missing. There could even be circular branches between topics: someone who knows set theory can use that to understand databases more quickly than someone who does not, and vice versa. Posts explaining set theory for database users and vice versa could exist. But that's a lot of manual work to create each possible explanation, not sure that's viable, even if it has to be done only once. - Related to the previous point, bridging knowledge gaps is currently done by asking questions. If you can ask another human a question, they can give an answer that perfectly fits your knowledge gap. That way of learning is much more efficient (for the student) than trying to give a workshop on the topic for a group of people. If we can do it as described in the previous point, we can free up a lot of resources that are now spent on having people tell the same things in slightly different form over and over again. Things need to be taught only once. - When hiring, how can you tell if someone has the right knowledge for the job? Even a full day of testing can't tell you whether someone really understands all aspects of software engineering that are relevant for your organisation. If you can tick boxes on all the topics you understand, job matching might become much easier. Employers can request people with certain knowledge, and job seekers might get the jobs most in reach, e.g. "if you learn about these two topics, you are fit for this job" (on a technical level, at least). You'll still have to test that someone actually understands a topic (or have some trusted testing third party), but verifying a claim by asking randomly about a few topics is much easier than asking about everything. - Our society demands ever more educated people. If you didn't have a lot of schooling, it can be hard to know what you are missing that companies are looking for. A message like "learn these three things and unlock this profession" might help a lot of people. (In the optimistic case, that is. It'll also cause people to reject candidates that are otherwise great because they're missing a topic. But at the start of a project like this, I'm just exploring the potential, not thinking about all the ways it could fail.) - You can find who has certain knowledge within (or outside) your organisation to help with a project. - At the leaves of the tree, you can find a topic to work on next, to further our understanding of the world. People can ask for certain issues to be solved or results to be confirmed and pay people to do that. Right now, our knowledge as a species is quite scattered and often hard to find. I'm excited to see an attempt at starting that knowledge tree and am very curious to see which of the above points can really be done with it!

llamataboot 8y ago

Cynical self: They raised a $5mil round just to re-do wikipedia with more self-referential VC pats on the back. Intrigued self: If there is anything worth raising money for, it is building out a collective knowledge base for all of humanity. Angry self: Wikipedia is quite literally one of the most amazing things that the internet and millions of strangers have ever produced together, and lives as a vital proof of concept of a collaborative process on a scale not seen before. If you are interested in making wikipedia more useful with more linking on in-depth knowledge, more multimedia, and a richer UI for editing, why not build something that builds on wikipedia instead of building something entirely new? Academic self: You are throwing out ideas like "cover all topics that exist" and "neutral objectivity" as if entire fields of human inquiry don't exist into what those things even mean. You seem to dislike the current editorial standards of wikipedia, but I'm not at all clear where Golden will draw its lines or how? Also, what are your thoughts on the morality of essentially crowdsourcing all the input that you will feed to your query engines and profit off people using? Aren't you essentially making your contributors all unpaid workers? If you are serious about building out a for-profit version of wikipedia, why not figure out ways to distribute micropayments based on how useful others find the information someone took the time to contribute (as an example)

VectorLock 8y ago
It seems like Wikipedia might have some inherent incompatibilities with what they're trying to do, such as its editorial rules and its definition of notability, which can't easily be "fixed" by whatever definition of fixing they need. I appreciate a more inclusive view of notability that lets you take it all in and surface whats relevant more selectively although that is open for insane amounts of debate around it as we've seen on Wikipedia.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  Wikipedia is a great resource, but it's also one of those success stories that owes as much to the incompetence of its competitors as it does to its own merit. I've often thought it would be interesting to create a "Wrapipedia" of sorts, basically a copy of the Wiki codebase that could be used to circumvent Wikipedia's often-nonsensical notability and deletion rules. Basically, instead of going to wikipedia.org to look up something, you'd go to wrapipedia.org, which would issue the query on your behalf and supply its own page if the Wikipedia lookup fails. Wikipedia pages that were created by users but subsequently deleted by editors would essentially be treated as pure virtual functions to be implemented by wrapper classes. As with Wikipedia itself, users could create new entries and edit existing ones. That way the original Wikipedia project could remain true to its charter without leaving its users frustrated or unsatisfied. Its editors would also appreciate an alternative to being insulted and browbeaten by annoyed users, I'm sure.

pazimzadeh 8y ago

It looks good from a visual and usability standpoint. But it's kind of odd how there's already a cluster of articles on synthetic biology, but nothing written about Escherichia coli. If the idea is to catch up and eventually overtake Wikipedia in content, that seems extremely ambitious. Luckily the name Golden is pretty generic so maybe they plan to pivot towards whichever industries adopt it more?

flexx 8y ago

My 2c on design, while scrolling article, sidebar is highlighting current paragraph and that jumping is very annoying in current color, it should be much lighter..

judegomila 8y ago
JG here. Will look into this.

gibsonf1 8y ago

Why not actually work on capturing knowledge in a machine-readable and usable way?

incompatible 8y ago

"navigating the cacophony of formats, designs, sources and standards is challenging. Google, Wikipedia, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Quora, StackExchange, Github, etc" Makes me think of standards, all we need is one universal one. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

stebann 8y ago
Thought the same! Haha

maxdamantus 8y ago

From quickly skimming through this post, it seems like it's basically just a Wikipedia that supports people posting their products as advertisements. If something is not notable, you're just going to end up with those with vested interests deciding what content goes up. I suspect this is the main reason for Wikipedia's requirement of notability.

Liron 8y ago

This is a great example of a product that has 10 little reasons why it's better than pre-existing alternatives, but seems to lack 1 killer reason why it's better. I don't think it would have passed my personal sanity check for startup ideas [1]. I predict that the team will eventually discover one or more niches where they can leverage their platform to build a differentiated value prop specific to those niches. For example, the niche of "investor databases" with the differentiated value prop of "letting entrepreneurs filter down the list of all investors to find the top 100 best ones that they specifically should try to pitch". Each time a specific niche and value prop is identified, it will motivate building cool new functionality into the platform. The platform can evolve as a union of these niche-motivated features. I suspect that a lot of the features that exist in today's horizontal-minded v1 won't be needed because they were conceived of without reference to any specific differentiated value prop. [1] https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-startup-idea-dbb3ad4c9888 https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-st...

cryptokernel 8y ago

This is such wow! Just leaving this here, earn crypto by doing tasks https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3 https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3

pcj-github 8y ago

Sorry, but I see nothing compelling here. If at this point your "customer stories" section includes quote from a VC, you don't have a real product. Good luck, but I'm afraid you are going to have a hard time finding real paying customers. And attracting actual human editors? Numerous people on this thread are already offended by your proposal. Next.

X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago

Small UI complaint: I can't quickly open lots of links that are near each other due to the little popups.

Numberwang 8y ago

I really like the design of the site. Congratulations on avoiding many of the popular trends such as massive whitespaces and making everything low contrast grey.

cjbprime 8y ago

On reading this announcement, I can't help but think of Quora, and what an unmitigated disaster it is, as well as a cautionary tale of what happens when you accept VC funding for a human knowledge project. It's a few small steps from "well, we'll have to start making money" to "let's block the Internet Archive completely and hoard the world's knowledge for our own gain". But worse than just being a cautionary tale, I guess I'm unhappy to see this announcement because Quora could seriously have been what we got instead of Wikipedia, you know? Who wins in a platform race seems like a function of factors like first mover advantage and luck, rather than any dispassionate analysis of what would be better for the world. So I wouldn't have the guts to start a project like this with VC funding. You have to model the probability that you'll be pushed out and replaced with someone who doesn't share your ideals and is tasked with finding a path to profit. How could anyone have the stomach to create a potential Wikipedia replacement with that kind of liability attached?

Cheryl_Sanders 8y ago

Hopefully if there's ever a global fallout we'll have the entirety of human knowledge store deep in the ground for future generations lol. This project is amazing though.

trpc 8y ago

so this is a for profit company that intends to use free labor contributions to exploit search engine SEO rankings and subsequently attract useless millions of daily visits and then you exit it for hundreds of millions a few years from now. It worked before, why wouldn't it work now? there are always enough dumb people who will help you make a fortune for free if you understand tech capitalism and manage to fool them; good luck anyway.

sixdimensional 8y ago

Peter Drucker once predicted that the knowledge economy and knowledge workers would be the next big evolution [1]. Are we there yet? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landmarks_of_Tomorrow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landmarks_of_Tomorrow

emmanueloga_ 8y ago

For a tool that has the high goal of "mapping human knowledge" and use A.I., I'm just not very impressed by the lack of APIs and no mention of a data model. I feel that to map human knowledge and make it accessible and understandable for machines, the data model should be put front and center. For me that means a knowledge graph (preferably with SPARQL/OWL capabilities). Were's the metadata? The wiki pages don't even have schema.org data! I'd be more interesting if golden provided UI improvements over the querying and presentation of data from Wikidata and/or DBPedia, or if golden's editor would make it easier to annotate the content of the wiki pages with RDF data.

fjfaase 8y ago

Is there anything of traceability in Golden? In the past years, I have been documenting the works, exhibitions, and documents about a Dutch artists. While doing this, I have often come across conflicting information. I have discovered that what I actually need is a reasoning system about statements and have a mechanism for traceability with respect to every fact represented.

teddyh 8y ago
You seem to want classic style AI in the style of Cyc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
- fjfaase 8y ago
  No, not something as rigid as Cyc, but more a system where you can trace the truth of a certain fact. Wikipedia requires you to reference sources. But that is just one layer. Some forms of knowledge are based on multiple layers of references. Making a statement based on a source, always involves some form of interpretation. It would be nice to know who made the statement (and who are supporting the interpretation). Of course, wikipedia keeps the full history of an article, and you could go back through all the revisions and see who edited what, but in requires a lot of work. It would be nice if Golden would at least acknowledge that traceability is an issue has some support for it.

antpls 8y ago

In my opinion, you should include "POWERFUL QUERY TOOL" into the community edition, and then sell the ability to have private spaces including support in the priced plan. Right now, it doesn't seem very fair or legit given the headline "The intelligent, open knowledge base". If the raw data is accessible but the tool to query it is not accessible to most web users, it doesn't make it "open".

holografix 8y ago

So Wikipedia with better UI and a sprinkle of AI "magic"?

navaru 8y ago

I don't get it, in what scenario would someone pay $99 per user per month? Could someone please give an example where this makes sense?

amitport 8y ago

Freebase is back! (until google buys them again) just kidding (I hope), good luck!

gcb0 8y ago

a press release of a Wikipedia for profit, with no information. just flag it.

mjgeddes 8y ago

Yup, wikipedia already maps all human knowledge. In fact , you don't need to map everything, just central concepts in every field. I think there's a law of diminishing returns - summaries of knowledge are extremely useful, but as you add more and more detail , there's less and less benefit. I created 'Wikipedia-Prime', a series of 27 wiki-books mapping all central concepts in all fields of human knowledge. Approx. 16 700 articles was enough to capture all the central concepts used by experts in all fields. Wikipedia-Prime Index: http://www.zarzuelazen.com/CoreKnowledgeDomains2.html http://www.zarzuelazen.com/CoreKnowledgeDomains2.html

narendranag 8y ago

This is very disturbing — the idea of all human knowledge being a for-profit venture owned by a founder and his investors is wrong.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> neutrally-written I'd like to see opinionated stuff too. In fact lack of what can be labelled as opinionated, non-credible and non-significant is what I dislike of Wikipedia. I acknowledge value of neutral and credible information but I believe too much of what still can be useful food for thought gets discarded with the rest.