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.
Veropedia began with a group of people from the English-language Wikipedia, so inevitably our first project is based on that Wikipedia. That said, we already have several other projects in mind, including other languages, and will be happy to hear any ideas you might have too.
No. Veropedia is based on Wikipedia content, and in order to contribute to Veropedia it is necessary to improve Wikipedia first. We are not competing with Wikipedia in any way - in fact, our own success is dependent on the success of Wikipedia. We prefer to think of ourselves as a meta-layer, highlighting the best that Wikipedia has to offer.
Absolutely not! In order to be included in Veropedia, articles must meet very strict criteria of our own. There can be no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images. In addition, each article will be given to recognized academics and experts to review. These experts can either provide their stamp of approval or make suggestions as to how the article can be improved further. In that way, users will know that the article is reliable.
Not at all. Our material is written by Wikipedia contributors. The role of experts and academics will be to check it and, ideally, approve it. Their comments will be given back to our contributors to incorporate back into the articles to make them even better. We provide a meta-layer for Wikipedia, or in simpler terms, if you think of Wikipedia as a diamond mine, we think of ourselves as jewelers who provide a finished product to the public. We think of this as true collaboration.
Certainly, but the work to improve the article takes place on Wikipedia, and the newer version is imported back to Veropedia. In that way, both Wikipedia and Veropedia benefit from better quality content.
No, in fact, at this early stage, we have a very small fraction of the articles in Wikipedia. While we are growing every day, our focus is on the core articles of a good set of encyclopedias, that will be most useful to students and teachers. Our focus is and always will be on the quality of our articles, rather than on their number.
The number of articles on Veropedia is growing day by day, but there are still many articles that we do not yet have. If an article has already been "verofied" and is in our database, it will appear as a green link. If an article has not yet been "verofied," it will appear as a blue link, and direct you to the current Wikipedia version. Just hit your backspace to return to Veropedia.
Our contributors are selected from among the best of Wikipedia's editors. They are people who have proven themselves by the quality of the content they have created and edited and who have a known reputation for excellence. Over time we hope to draw more people into the Wikipedia editing process with the assurance that great work can be preserved.
The scope of fair use in Wikipedia has always been the subject of heated debate. We have decided to avoid that debate and go back to the core principles of the project by focusing on free content. Only by insisting on free content can we revert the current trend of extending copyright and encourage people to release their content to the public.
Please let us know! Send us an email, and we will do our best to correct it as quickly as possible. This includes any instances of non-free use of media that have managed to make their way into our site as we were building it.
Our goal is to collect the best free content available and make it accessible to as many people as possible. This costs money, just as the liberation of content costs money. Rather than ask for donations from our primary target audience of teachers and students, we believe that unobtrusive advertising is preferred. The money earned will be used to keep this site alive and vibrant, to sponsor contests to improve content, and to support other efforts to bring high quality free content to people everywhere.
Drop us an email and tell us about yourself, and any work you have done relating to free knowledge. However, we plan on growing our community slowly, with only one or two new members per day, so please be patient with us. In the meanwhile, keep working on improving Wikipedia, and let us know which articles you think can be added to our growing collection.