Sphinn - Are there free online encyclopedias that can compete with the Wikipedia?

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Are there free online encyclopedias that can compete with the Wikipedia?

Posted By: perkoch 697 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.pandia.com)
Category: Other Searching

I have taken the time to search for serious alternatives to the Wikipedia, and have to conclude: there are none. Nor is it reasonably to expect that any alternative volunteer based project is going to succeed. The attempts that have been made so far, have failed.

My question is: Do you think it would be a viable options for some of the professional encyclopedias to open up their full text to the public? Is there a business model there?

Britannica have more than 120,000 articles, all of it high quality linkable, lovable content - a search engine marketer's wet dream.

Britannica actually did open up its full text to free on-line searching, between 1999 and 2001. It then then closed it again, probably because of falling sales of CD-ROMs and printed volumes. But that was before the success of Google AdWords. Would a combination of context sensitive text ads and video ads do?

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from dannysullivan 697 days ago #

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I was just wondering about this. And it's funny, especially when Jimmy Wales is pushing that you need this alternative to Google, that there's actually no good alternative to Wikipedia. Hmm, interesting to see if someone tries to jump in. Maybe Googlepedia....