....pedias, knols, and endium's - oh my!

Today, I learned about some new and interesting web resources from an Inside Higher Education article, Making Wikis Work for Scholars. The article comments on faculty use of Wikipedia and summarizes additional resource sites. A common theme among the developing resource sites is the emphasis on content accuracy and identifying authors which is a stated concern of Wikipedia. I'll provide summaries from each website and a link to help you digest the nuances between the sites.

1. The "Knol" project by Google is currently in development. "Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project." Please click on "Knol" above to read the entire article.

2. And, then there are the "...pedia" and "...endium" resources.

• Wikipedia

• Scholarpedia
• Powered by media wiki
  
• Scholarpedia differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways:

• Each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public).
• Each article is anonymously peer reviewed to ensure accurate and reliable information.
• Each article has a curator - typically its author -- who is responsible for its content.
• Any modification of the article needs to be approved by the curator before it appears in the final, approved version.
• Herein also lies the greatest difference between Scholarpedia and traditional print media: while the initial authorship and review processes are similar to a print journal so that Scholarpedia articles could be cited, they are not frozen and outdated, but dynamic, subject to an ongoing process of improvement moderated by their curators. This allows Scholarpedia to be up-to-date, yet maintain the highest quality of content.

• Veropedia
• 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.

• Citizendium
• We aim at reliability and quality, not just quantity.
• We welcome public participation—gently guided by experts.
• We write under our real names—and are both collegial and congenial.
• We're now 6,200 articles plus and gathering speed.
• Eduzendium participants write articles for academic credit.

• Eduzendium
• Eduzendium is a program in which the Citizendium partners with university programs throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for the Citizendium

• Encyclopaedia Britannica