The internet, as powerful and versatile as it is, is today also broken in many ways – but there are those who are working to fix it.
One of the important components of the internet that also mirrors its strengths and weaknesses is Wikipedia – the vastly popular online collaborative encyclopedia.
To address Wikipedia’s shortcomings, Jude Gomila has launched Golden – a knowledge base platform that is designed to cover those areas that the established counterpart has proven to not be handling all that well.
Gomila, who in the past founded and sold mobile advertising company Heyzap – announced that the goal of the project is to host more than 10 billion topics and thus be the place of “canonical knowledge” online, particularly on niche subjects, companies, and technologies.
A significant way in which Golden aims to differentiate itself from Wikipedia is the criteria for covering topics, with the goal of eventually including all topics that “exist” instead of just those arbitrarily deemed “notable.” This currently leaves many technologies and companies out of Wikipedia – something Golden aims to rectify with its approach, as the Golden founder and CEO argues that validation and completeness are today more important than notability.
Another feature where Golden wants to stand out is the usability of the platform, that will feature a simple WYSIWYG editor along with automated citation tools.
In order to make the process of creating and editing entries more efficient, AI suggestions are deployed as a means of doing away with repetitive work.
One way Golden looks to deal with another of Wikipedia’s problems – factual reliability of the content – is by tying accounts to editors’ real names and identities.
According to Gomila, the project has already received $ 5 million in funding from venture capitalists and angel investors and will offer the website free to users, with text entries published under the open Creative Commons 4.0 license.
As for the future business model for the company, it will be based on providing advanced tools and services to paid users, geared towards companies and organizations.
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