Veropedia is a new service which has been set up to collate, clean up and stabilize Wikipedia content. The idea is for their team of ‘experts’ to grab hold of the volatile material on Wikipedia and add some control, so it can be made more stable and reliable. In effect this is an attempt to apply old style editorship rules onto the new style Wikipedia model. It seems to be a worthy cause, even though critics will probably accuse the Veropedia founders of of piggy-backing off the world’s largest public domain information service in order to earn Adsense advertising dollars.

It’s interesting because they’re not trying to re-invent the wheel – all the content and editing is taken from Wikipedia – and also because they’re concentrating on quality rather than quantity. The team is starting off with academic material first to help give students and teachers a reliable resource. I have to say this kind of over-sight on Wikipedia has got to be a good thing. It’s clear that there are a few problems with the Wikipedia model, and hopefully this will help to improve matters.

As an aside I believe that these problems (with arrogant editors, intractable rules and possible malfeasance) could be avoided if Wikipedia pages were somehow demoted in the Google search results a little. A lot of the wrangling over the site only came to the fore when Wikipedia became such a prominent source of search result information on Google.

 Veropedia is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia’s content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited. The result is a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information.