« Understanding Performance Trade-offs | Home | Metaphors That Outlive Their Origins »
Veropedia and Information Ethics
By Jacob Cohen | October 29, 2007
There is a new online encyclopedia called Veropedia, which is being developed by selectively taking content from Wikipedia, cleaning it up, and securing it in a non-editable format.
The idea seems to be that Wikipedia articles are often incomplete, and the accuracy of the information is not strictly controlled, since anyone can submit an edit for an article.
Veropedia is a for-profit endeavor that supports itself with advertising revenue, I believe this creates two ethical conflicts.
First of all, they are not creating the content themselves. They are taking what has been contributed by the community, sprucing it up, and fixing it in place. If they claim the derived work as their own, that would be deceptive. If they give credit to the original author, they’ve removed that author’s ability to make corrections and updates to the content. If people compare the Wikipedia entry to the Veropedia entry, and notice any discrepancy, how are they meant to react to that? Is the original author less correct because Veropedia is making claims about the verified accuracy of its information? Or is Veropedia less correct because their article is not receiving the latest information from the author?
The second issue is that they are supporting themselves with advertising revenue. This is risky, because there is a potential for a conflict of interest if the articles contain information about the companies that are paying to support the service. How can we be assured of the intentions of the people who are validating that the articles and information are accurate?
I think for an encyclopedia to be accepted with a clear conscience, it needs to either follow the Wikipedia model, or it needs to bite the bullet and support itself with its own sales, and research and create the content itself. I think it is pretty questionable to take the content created on another service, pack it up and seal it, give it a stamp of approval, and then take advertising revenue to support the effort.
As far as I know, there’s nothing wrong with Veropedia’s approach from a legal standpoint, the content they are using is all available for them to do so. I just don’t think we can necessarily trust the intentions, and consequently, I am not sure the product is more deserving of trust than Wikipedia.
Topics: General |
