
Golden: Mapping human knowledge - yarapavan
https://golden.com/blog/introducing-golden/
======
llamataboot
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)

~~~
judegomila
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
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!

~~~
judegomila
Thanks so much, in terms of the hard questions after todays madness of launch
comes down a little I'll tackle the hardest comments/questions here. In the
coming months we will do some technical blog posts to explain how we will
tackle the problem space. Many of the problems we have not figured out yet and
welcome the community to contact us with new ideas. I 100% agree some of the
problems are very hard. In terms of giving a glimpse into some problems we
have solved so far, please test out the AI assisted editor, the magic table
cells in the editor for auto filling tables, the citation tool by pasting a
academic paper in the citation UI, the event detection on the timeline UI and
the AI suggestions as well to get to some of the early results we have on
automating the problem. Topic prediction, taxonomic detection, claim
validation, structured data extraction, auto field detection/suggestions,
crosslinking, spelling/grammar checking, sentiment checking, event detection,
tense detection, quality on human edit feedbacks and ultimately prose writing
(see recent open AI auto writing research) [non exhaustive list] - some we
have solved and some not yet, but we will keep working on it. Generally
speaking, keen to work on something difficult for the next 10 years...

~~~
adamsea
Hi Jude,

On your page you said "If an extremely niche topic is valuable to just a
handful of people and positively contributes to society, it will have a home
on Golden."

Who will make that judgement call of what "contributes to society", and who
will be paying their salary?

You also said "We believe this advanced query tool is extremely useful for
investment funds, large consultancies and large companies, so please get in
touch if you want to experience one of the best query tools out there."

That sounds great but its a far cry from "human knowledge". There wasn't much
about advanced query tools for academics, nonprofits, activists, or government
employees.

Sorry to be so cynical but one can only hear so much of "making the world a
better place", to quote Silicon Valley.

------
judegomila
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.

~~~
kreetx
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!

~~~
judegomila
Jude from Golden. Beyond the blog post in terms of more learning content -
video and extensive further reading links can help in this area but at the
core much deeper pages eg
[https://golden.com/wiki/Cryobacterium](https://golden.com/wiki/Cryobacterium)
vs
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryobacterium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryobacterium)

In terms of numbers of contributors we believe Golden is at the stage where 1
hour editing on Golden produces more content/data than alternatives and the
friction to edit is much lower. Are you looking for more depth on comparisons
beyond the blog post?

~~~
hk__2
> In terms of numbers of contributors we believe Golden is at the stage where
> 1 hour editing on Golden produces more content/data than alternatives and
> the friction to edit is much lower.

In my experience as a Wikipedia editor, 80% of the time I spend writing an
article is searching for (good) sources; 10% is editing friction like looking
for the right infobox or the right model for what I want (although that time
is reduced by experience); 10% is actually writing the article. Wikipedia’s
contributing documentation discoverability is quite bad.

Your “high resolution” citations is a really great idea I wish WP would had.
Does it support having multiple citations for the same part of the content?
Overlaping parts?

------
pradn
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
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
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
Thanks, glad you like it.

------
Cynddl
> 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.

~~~
judegomila
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)

~~~
opportune
As far as I see for issue like the morphogenetic engineering page you linked,
the notability issue is to prevent people from gaming SEO or making their
personal company/theory/whatever from being listed. Which is to say, maybe
it's not a good idea for anybody to be able to list their business, thesis, or
book (for commercial or discovery purposes) alongside actually notable topics.
It seems ripe for marketing or other gaming.

------
pcmaffey
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.

------
Liron
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-
st...](https://medium.com/@lironshapira/how-to-sanity-check-your-startup-idea-
dbb3ad4c9888)

------
evo_9
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
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
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.

------
lkj
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
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/Produc...](https://en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Hunt")

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
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.

------
emmanueloga_
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.

------
teddyh
> _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_%22Re...](https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

~~~
ztratar
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.

~~~
hk__2
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-
na...](https://uxmovement.com/forms/why-your-form-only-needs-one-name-field/)

------
herogreen
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
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
How about API access and textual dumps for the other kinds of analysis?

~~~
baddox
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
Hey Thomas, love what you are building.

------
troymc
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
CC-BY-SA-4.0 correct, we are correcting the blog post.

------
Invictus0
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)

------
mjgeddes
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)

------
mises
> 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
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.

------
antpls
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".

------
cjbprime
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?

------
pazimzadeh
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?

------
bluejay2387
The cynic in me sees an attempt to crowd source a knowledge base for a IMDB
style business model...

~~~
rambojazz
What is IMDB business model?

~~~
bluejay2387
Sorry, meant CDDB (now Gracenote). So many acronyms.

------
imafish
Is it Wikipedia - but with a modern editor?

~~~
lkj
And "AI". And all about blockchain and VC.

------
bovermyer
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
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.

~~~
jazzyjackson
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.

------
tonak_li
It is similar to ideaflow but a lot better :)
[https://www.ideaflow.io/](https://www.ideaflow.io/)

------
fjfaase
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
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
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.

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pcj-github
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.

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navaru
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?

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aznpwnzor
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
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 $$$

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qwerty456127
> 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.

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maxdamantus
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.

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

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sixdimensional
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)

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naringas
why not join efforts with wikipedia?

or at least borrow heavily from?

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saadalem
What will be the monetisation ?

~~~
ztratar
So far looks like tools for companies & pro research, like their query
builder.

Will be interesting to see if it scales up...

~~~
jazzyjackson
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
You can already do that with Wikidata.

Edit: and before that, with Freebase (which was later merged in Wikidata).

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

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amitport
Freebase is back! (until google buys them again)

just kidding (I hope), good luck!

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flexx
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
JG here. Will look into this.

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

------
mduncs
"Knowledge is Golden" \-- Cute name.

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X6S1x6Okd1st
Small UI complaint: I can't quickly open lots of links that are near each
other due to the little popups.

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trpc
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.

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gibsonf1
Why not actually work on capturing knowledge in a machine-readable and usable
way?

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

~~~
pazimzadeh
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.

------
msla
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?

------
pmuk
How many topics do you cover now?

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lucb1e
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!

------
incompatible
"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
Thought the same! Haha

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alexcabrera
So... a wiki?

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gcb0
a press release of a Wikipedia for profit, with no information.

just flag it.

------
qnsi
[deleted]

~~~
judegomila
The content is on CC4.0 and not going to be paywalled.

~~~
riordan
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
My hope is that all the content, not just prose, will be CC licensed. Jude,
will it be so?

