Citizendium – A Peer-Reviewed Wikipedia

April 30, 2009 at 1:12 pm | In accessibility, faculty resources | Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , ,

What is Citizendium?

It is a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an open wiki project aimed at creating an enormous, free, and reliable encyclopedia.

The major difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium is one of responsibility of authorship.  “Anonymous” can write anything it wants to and upload it to Wikipedia; who knows who “anonymous” is or of its credentials?

The world needs a trustworthy free encyclopedia. We aim to create that by providing a responsibly governed global community where real-named contributors work under expert guidance and all are accountable.

“What is the point of the Citizendium,“ you might ask, “when Wikipedia is so huge and of reasonably good quality? Is there really a need for it?”

There is a better way for humanity to come together to make an encyclopedia.

To put it forcefully: there is a better way for humanity to come together to make an encyclopedia. So we make this appeal to you. If we can do better than Wikipedia—or more positively, if we can pioneer a truly effective way to gather knowledge—then shouldn’t we?

We can do better

We do not think that Wikipedia is  “good   enough.”  We think humanity can do better: Wikipedia is full of serious problems. Many of the articles are written amateurishly. Too often they are mere disconnected grab-bags of factoids, not made coherent by any sort of narrative. In some fields and some topics, there are groups who “squat” on articles and insist on making them reflect their own specific biases. There is no credible mechanism to approve versions of articles. Vandalism, once a minor annoyance, has become a major headache—made possible because the community allows anonymous contribution.

Library of Congress has a YouTube Channel

April 27, 2009 at 10:53 am | In accessibility, faculty resources | Leave a Comment
Tags: , , ,

From the Library of  Library of Congress Blog

“Light and liberty go together.” * 1 Item * Updated: Sun, Apr 26 2009 3:50 PM

YouTube, and Now We Do Too By Matt Raymond on youtube Well, this is a day that has been a long time in coming. The Library of Congress has been working for several months now so that we could “do YouTube right.” When you’re the stewards of the world’s largest collection of audiovisual materials (some 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings), nothing less would be expected of you, and our own YouTube channel has now gone public. We are starting with more than 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904 (I defy you to watch some of them without thinking of the Carl Stalling song “Powerhouse”), scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (curiously enough, a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott). But this is just the beginning. We have made a conscious decision that we’re not just going to upload a bunch of videos and then walk away. As with our popular Flickr pilot project, we intend to keep uploading additional content. We’re modifying some of our work-flows in modest ways to make our content more useful and delivered across platforms with built-in audiences of millions. Not so incidentally, all of the videos we post on YouTube will also be available at LOC.gov (and many, many more, of course) on American Memory, many of which are newly digitized in much higher resolution by the fine Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recorded Sound conservators in Culpeper, Va.

Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.