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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 rais

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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    There is/was the Deletionpedia: http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      True, but that sounds more reactionary and less constructive than what I had in mind. I'd envision it more as an alternative access URL for Wikipedia, one that acts as a supplementary source when necessary but otherwise is indistinguishable from using wikipedia.org directly.
- dzamo_norton 7y ago
  Should we be thinking of Wikipedia alone, or Wikipedia plus all of the fan and other wikis that have sprung up around it? When you consider the collection of all of them there isn't much of a notability restriction and cardinality takes a jump forward too. Of course the collection of them doesn't get you an ontology carefully elaborated by a single mastermind, you just get whatever emerges from this decentralised web.
  - dzamo_norton 7y ago
    And perhaps it's ontologies like these that you get if you do go with emergence https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/27/rare-and-strange-icd-10-codes/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/27/rare-and-strange-i...
msla 7y ago
> 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? My mind went in a different direction, although your point is very valuable and the question needs to be asked. My concern is this: Wikipedia editors work hard to maintain a level of quality high enough that the kooks and cranks and racists of the world feel like Wikipedia is biased against them. Well, guess what: It is. Wikipedia gives no platform to people who think vaccines cause autism. NPOV is biased towards the scientific consensus. So, will Golden even attempt that level of quality? Will it keep the constant tide of insanity out or will it be inundated by the loudest few who believe the craziest shit? Crowdsourcing is dangerous when some people are endlessly motivated to game the system, and I don't just mean making Moot win Man Of The Year competitions.
- judegomila 7y ago
  Jude from Golden here. Yes we will work very hard to keep to scientific consensus and reach that level of quality or higher. Please bear in mind this is not only crowdsourcing but there is automation in the collection of the information, that too will have its fair share of issues as well no doubt :> There is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area. Feel free to shoot over ideas as well if you have further thoughts.
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    "there is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area." Ask facebook and twitter how easy automated content moderation is...
    - judegomila 7y ago
      True, very hard problem. But combinatorial opinion free form comments phase space >> than phase space of canonical knowledge thus number of patterns of things that can go wrong for them much larger. Still keeping our shields up and not discounting this issue.
judegomila 7y ago
Jude from Golden here. Agreed that WP is one of the most amazing things ever built and interesting to see your various lenses on our mission. To the cynical self: see dropbox launch on HN back in the day. PS I’m no way claiming we are dropbox :> To the angry self: There are various constraints that we want to release ourselves from in working on this problem by starting fresh. We believe the constraint space is too high to not build something new here. There are things that can be reused to build on what has been done already (linking out to WP, WP linking back to us when appropriate, the name space being similar/forked, various policies being built on/forked or rewritten, lessons learnt, content summarization with AI, fact cross checking etc). To the academic self: we want to cover 10bn+ topics, google knowledge graph is around 3bn+ entities. We are not attempting to map all lamp posts in san francisco which would make a useful data set for a self driving car company but we do want to map all businesses, concepts, science topics, people of interest, species, products, services, etc etc. Instead of notability, we are aiming more at a validation model ie ‘does this entity exist’. There is also a difference between ‘article’ of WP and ‘entity’ of Golden for our model. So I believe there is space for positive coexistence between Golden and WP. We will still want discussion around the validation and ‘what next after 10bn entities are done’ debate. In terms of the morality part, we wish to be at a more open standard than WP. The trade being for the common user: we open up all the pages on CC-4.0-BY-SA, go hopefully 1000x more entity cardinality, open source useful queries in exchange for less work per topic than alternatives (due to the leverage of the automation on alternatives). So I think we are on strong moral ground here, otherwise I would not work on it. We also have paid helpers as well to fill in gaps on our side to increase content and using part of our revenue to increase content at an ever faster speed. We reviewed the micropayments model and we don’t think it will work (see lunyr failure and others on that front).
- llamataboot 7y ago
  Thanks for replying! I agree micropayments are incredibly difficult to make work, as is evidenced by the race to the bottom advertising model that seems to be everywhere all-the-time. I hear from you that you want to essentially cover 10 billion topics, and essentially validate that they exist, but that says nothing about validating the content of what someone is saying about it, nor organizing it, etc. I hear lots of AI buzzwords, but essentially I don't see any staff that would leverage all the thinking humanity has done on organizing, validating, and cataloging information. Where are the information scientists? The librarians? The archivists? The journalists? The philosophers? Etc etc etc. Essentially you are talking about a profoundly /human/ endeavor that requires input (IMHO) from many corners of human knowledge to do in any way that begins to approach wikipedia (or even an encyclopedia, much less a library) in terms of quality and scale. I hear buzzwords, and see an alarming lack of acknowledgement of how difficult these questions are (or even that they exist). However, you have the $$ and the people, and I'm just here hiding behind a keyboard criticizing. Clearly you've convinced more people of your ideas than I have of mine, and by all means it's a noble goal, so I wish you the best of luck and will be interesting to see what you are and what Golden looks like in a decade or so!
asdffdsa 7y ago
To angry self: I dont entirely trust Wikipedia to give an objective/apolitical view of things all the time: there've been times where articles have been noticably influenced by a defacto, anachronistic political (progressive) position. I wouldnt mind having a redundant source of information where the possibility exists of current politics corrupting its articles' integrity
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  > articles have been noticably influenced by a defacto, anachronistic political (progressive) position I hate it when the right pretends that everyone is biasing everything in terms of a progressive agenda, when that's just not the case, even in Wikipedia's case. There was the case of Cross doing absolutely right-wing, biased, pro right-wing Israeli governments entries and edits and being protected by Wikipedia editors to do so. I think what's often gets conflated is that munch of Western society and organizations are socially progressive, sure, but they're very much economically right-leaning, something that rarely gets acknowledged and which makes it difficult for me to have a honest conversation with the other side. I'd also note that Wikipedia's founder is very much right-leaning, regularly attacking the likes of Corbyn and certainly not holding progressive economics dear.
  - asdffdsa 7y ago
    Ok, my point still stands then; it's good to have multiple sources of information
    - AsyncAwait 7y ago
      Sure, I agree with that.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Examples?
- Retra 7y ago
  Many people have tried this, and they invariably end up creating propaganda cesspools like conservapedia. Progressivism fundamentally values objectivity, so I don't think you can easily exclude the former without also losing the later.
voltagex_ 7y ago
As well, think of the kind of impact 5mil would have on archive.org.
ace_of_spades 7y ago
Thank you for the comment! I think it sums up some important critical questions very nicely. While I am happy to see talented people working on important topics like this, I am really sad to see that this seems to be a for profit effort. If you have the right team and vision it should be easy enough to get five million from public funders like the NSF without the leash of having to maximize profits (likely) at the expense of being able to maximize the overall benefit for society. For things that can go wrong just have a look at the dumpster fire aka fb. Although I do believe that companies like Golden start out with the best of intentions, experience shows that the reality of financial expectations will likely win out in the end (e.g., Google, FB, Twitter). So, why not go with an institutional structure that doesn’t have as many strings attached? INAL but maybe something like a public benefit corp [1]? 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation

VectorLock 7y 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 7y 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.
- teddyh 7y ago
  There is/was the Deletionpedia: http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    True, but that sounds more reactionary and less constructive than what I had in mind. I'd envision it more as an alternative access URL for Wikipedia, one that acts as a supplementary source when necessary but otherwise is indistinguishable from using wikipedia.org directly.
dzamo_norton 7y ago
Should we be thinking of Wikipedia alone, or Wikipedia plus all of the fan and other wikis that have sprung up around it? When you consider the collection of all of them there isn't much of a notability restriction and cardinality takes a jump forward too. Of course the collection of them doesn't get you an ontology carefully elaborated by a single mastermind, you just get whatever emerges from this decentralised web.
- dzamo_norton 7y ago
  And perhaps it's ontologies like these that you get if you do go with emergence https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/27/rare-and-strange-icd-10-codes/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/27/rare-and-strange-i...

msla 7y ago

> 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? My mind went in a different direction, although your point is very valuable and the question needs to be asked. My concern is this: Wikipedia editors work hard to maintain a level of quality high enough that the kooks and cranks and racists of the world feel like Wikipedia is biased against them. Well, guess what: It is. Wikipedia gives no platform to people who think vaccines cause autism. NPOV is biased towards the scientific consensus. So, will Golden even attempt that level of quality? Will it keep the constant tide of insanity out or will it be inundated by the loudest few who believe the craziest shit? Crowdsourcing is dangerous when some people are endlessly motivated to game the system, and I don't just mean making Moot win Man Of The Year competitions.

judegomila 7y ago
Jude from Golden here. Yes we will work very hard to keep to scientific consensus and reach that level of quality or higher. Please bear in mind this is not only crowdsourcing but there is automation in the collection of the information, that too will have its fair share of issues as well no doubt :> There is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area. Feel free to shoot over ideas as well if you have further thoughts.
- llamataboot 7y ago
  "there is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area." Ask facebook and twitter how easy automated content moderation is...
  - judegomila 7y ago
    True, very hard problem. But combinatorial opinion free form comments phase space >> than phase space of canonical knowledge thus number of patterns of things that can go wrong for them much larger. Still keeping our shields up and not discounting this issue.

judegomila 7y ago

Jude from Golden here. Agreed that WP is one of the most amazing things ever built and interesting to see your various lenses on our mission. To the cynical self: see dropbox launch on HN back in the day. PS I’m no way claiming we are dropbox :> To the angry self: There are various constraints that we want to release ourselves from in working on this problem by starting fresh. We believe the constraint space is too high to not build something new here. There are things that can be reused to build on what has been done already (linking out to WP, WP linking back to us when appropriate, the name space being similar/forked, various policies being built on/forked or rewritten, lessons learnt, content summarization with AI, fact cross checking etc). To the academic self: we want to cover 10bn+ topics, google knowledge graph is around 3bn+ entities. We are not attempting to map all lamp posts in san francisco which would make a useful data set for a self driving car company but we do want to map all businesses, concepts, science topics, people of interest, species, products, services, etc etc. Instead of notability, we are aiming more at a validation model ie ‘does this entity exist’. There is also a difference between ‘article’ of WP and ‘entity’ of Golden for our model. So I believe there is space for positive coexistence between Golden and WP. We will still want discussion around the validation and ‘what next after 10bn entities are done’ debate. In terms of the morality part, we wish to be at a more open standard than WP. The trade being for the common user: we open up all the pages on CC-4.0-BY-SA, go hopefully 1000x more entity cardinality, open source useful queries in exchange for less work per topic than alternatives (due to the leverage of the automation on alternatives). So I think we are on strong moral ground here, otherwise I would not work on it. We also have paid helpers as well to fill in gaps on our side to increase content and using part of our revenue to increase content at an ever faster speed. We reviewed the micropayments model and we don’t think it will work (see lunyr failure and others on that front).

llamataboot 7y ago
Thanks for replying! I agree micropayments are incredibly difficult to make work, as is evidenced by the race to the bottom advertising model that seems to be everywhere all-the-time. I hear from you that you want to essentially cover 10 billion topics, and essentially validate that they exist, but that says nothing about validating the content of what someone is saying about it, nor organizing it, etc. I hear lots of AI buzzwords, but essentially I don't see any staff that would leverage all the thinking humanity has done on organizing, validating, and cataloging information. Where are the information scientists? The librarians? The archivists? The journalists? The philosophers? Etc etc etc. Essentially you are talking about a profoundly /human/ endeavor that requires input (IMHO) from many corners of human knowledge to do in any way that begins to approach wikipedia (or even an encyclopedia, much less a library) in terms of quality and scale. I hear buzzwords, and see an alarming lack of acknowledgement of how difficult these questions are (or even that they exist). However, you have the $$ and the people, and I'm just here hiding behind a keyboard criticizing. Clearly you've convinced more people of your ideas than I have of mine, and by all means it's a noble goal, so I wish you the best of luck and will be interesting to see what you are and what Golden looks like in a decade or so!

asdffdsa 7y ago

To angry self: I dont entirely trust Wikipedia to give an objective/apolitical view of things all the time: there've been times where articles have been noticably influenced by a defacto, anachronistic political (progressive) position. I wouldnt mind having a redundant source of information where the possibility exists of current politics corrupting its articles' integrity

AsyncAwait 7y ago
> articles have been noticably influenced by a defacto, anachronistic political (progressive) position I hate it when the right pretends that everyone is biasing everything in terms of a progressive agenda, when that's just not the case, even in Wikipedia's case. There was the case of Cross doing absolutely right-wing, biased, pro right-wing Israeli governments entries and edits and being protected by Wikipedia editors to do so. I think what's often gets conflated is that munch of Western society and organizations are socially progressive, sure, but they're very much economically right-leaning, something that rarely gets acknowledged and which makes it difficult for me to have a honest conversation with the other side. I'd also note that Wikipedia's founder is very much right-leaning, regularly attacking the likes of Corbyn and certainly not holding progressive economics dear.
- asdffdsa 7y ago
  Ok, my point still stands then; it's good to have multiple sources of information
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Sure, I agree with that.
Angostura 7y ago
Examples?
Retra 7y ago
Many people have tried this, and they invariably end up creating propaganda cesspools like conservapedia. Progressivism fundamentally values objectivity, so I don't think you can easily exclude the former without also losing the later.

voltagex_ 7y ago

As well, think of the kind of impact 5mil would have on archive.org.

ace_of_spades 7y ago

Thank you for the comment! I think it sums up some important critical questions very nicely. While I am happy to see talented people working on important topics like this, I am really sad to see that this seems to be a for profit effort. If you have the right team and vision it should be easy enough to get five million from public funders like the NSF without the leash of having to maximize profits (likely) at the expense of being able to maximize the overall benefit for society. For things that can go wrong just have a look at the dumpster fire aka fb. Although I do believe that companies like Golden start out with the best of intentions, experience shows that the reality of financial expectations will likely win out in the end (e.g., Google, FB, Twitter). So, why not go with an institutional structure that doesn’t have as many strings attached? INAL but maybe something like a public benefit corp [1]? 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation