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This would take more money than just quit-my-job money, but it I had the money, I would ask around for suggestions (here on HN and in other places) on how to build a new crowdsourced general encyclopedia that would provide a competitive nudge to Wikipedia. (I'd probably try to hire away some of the existing Wikipedia team, depending on what kind of noncompete agreements they are subject to, and would look to bring in a new kind of staff for overall direction of the project.) I was an editor in a few earlier workplaces, so I'm interested in the challenge of how to manage a mostly-volunteer, world-facing general encyclopedia project. Wikipedia sets an amazingly high standard for a project that started out so haphazardly, but here on HN and elsewhere I've seen criticisms of Wikipedia that get me thinking about how to do a similar project better. Of course, different readers define "better" in different ways, and the first challenge would be figuring out what intentional differences from Wikipedia would help a competing project be successful over the long term. The reason I would do this is to enjoy the result of thousands of new, well written articles on a variety of subjects, a resource my children and grandchildren and people all over the world could use for decades to come. The reason I would ask other people for advice on the project is that it would be interesting to hear how to improve upon something that is already free.



Speaking as someone who worked for the Wikimedia Foundation: noncompete agreements? That just doesn't exist in our culture, as far as I know. But your idea seems to overestimate the staff's importance when it comes to writing the encyclopedia.

The community does all the content and most of the policy decisions, by themselves. The staff is there for things like ops, fundraising, legal, bugfixes, research, PR, and projects that require a longer-term vision.

Ian Baker aka Raindrift recently did a cool project to expose how things really work on Wikipedia. People usually underestimate the process.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Raindrift/Workflows

For example, here's the diagram for Articles:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Article_lifecycle.svg


There is a way to kill wikipedia and it is simple in essence, just build a beautiful encyclopedia by field. Start with a world atlas, with stunning images, then continue with animals, a book on birds, plants, books on flowers. Even greek mythology, history, religion, art.

Knowledge, beautifully presented.

And free.




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