Jude from Golden here. Agreed that WP is one of the most amazing things ever built and interesting to see your various lenses on our mission.

To the cynical self: see dropbox launch on HN back in the day. PS I’m no way claiming we are dropbox :>

To the angry self: There are various constraints that we want to release ourselves from in working on this problem by starting fresh. We believe the constraint space is too high to not build something new here. There are things that can be reused to build on what has been done already (linking out to WP, WP linking back to us when appropriate, the name space being similar/forked, various policies being built on/forked or rewritten, lessons learnt, content summarization with AI, fact cross checking etc).

To the academic self: we want to cover 10bn+ topics, google knowledge graph is around 3bn+ entities. We are not attempting to map all lamp posts in san francisco which would make a useful data set for a self driving car company but we do want to map all businesses, concepts, science topics, people of interest, species, products, services, etc etc. Instead of notability, we are aiming more at a validation model ie ‘does this entity exist’. There is also a difference between ‘article’ of WP and ‘entity’ of Golden for our model. So I believe there is space for positive coexistence between Golden and WP. We will still want discussion around the validation and ‘what next after 10bn entities are done’ debate.

In terms of the morality part, we wish to be at a more open standard than WP. The trade being for the common user: we open up all the pages on CC-4.0-BY-SA, go hopefully 1000x more entity cardinality, open source useful queries in exchange for less work per topic than alternatives (due to the leverage of the automation on alternatives). So I think we are on strong moral ground here, otherwise I would not work on it. We also have paid helpers as well to fill in gaps on our side to increase content and using part of our revenue to increase content at an ever faster speed. We reviewed the micropayments model and we don’t think it will work (see lunyr failure and others on that front).

Thanks for replying! I agree micropayments are incredibly difficult to make work, as is evidenced by the race to the bottom advertising model that seems to be everywhere all-the-time.

I hear from you that you want to essentially cover 10 billion topics, and essentially validate that they exist, but that says nothing about validating the content of what someone is saying about it, nor organizing it, etc.

I hear lots of AI buzzwords, but essentially I don't see any staff that would leverage all the thinking humanity has done on organizing, validating, and cataloging information. Where are the information scientists? The librarians? The archivists? The journalists? The philosophers? Etc etc etc.

Essentially you are talking about a profoundly /human/ endeavor that requires input (IMHO) from many corners of human knowledge to do in any way that begins to approach wikipedia (or even an encyclopedia, much less a library) in terms of quality and scale.

I hear buzzwords, and see an alarming lack of acknowledgement of how difficult these questions are (or even that they exist).

However, you have the $$ and the people, and I'm just here hiding behind a keyboard criticizing. Clearly you've convinced more people of your ideas than I have of mine, and by all means it's a noble goal, so I wish you the best of luck and will be interesting to see what you are and what Golden looks like in a decade or so!

Thanks so much, in terms of the hard questions after todays madness of launch comes down a little I'll tackle the hardest comments/questions here. In the coming months we will do some technical blog posts to explain how we will tackle the problem space. Many of the problems we have not figured out yet and welcome the community to contact us with new ideas. I 100% agree some of the problems are very hard. In terms of giving a glimpse into some problems we have solved so far, please test out the AI assisted editor, the magic table cells in the editor for auto filling tables, the citation tool by pasting a academic paper in the citation UI, the event detection on the timeline UI and the AI suggestions as well to get to some of the early results we have on automating the problem. Topic prediction, taxonomic detection, claim validation, structured data extraction, auto field detection/suggestions, crosslinking, spelling/grammar checking, sentiment checking, event detection, tense detection, quality on human edit feedbacks and ultimately prose writing (see recent open AI auto writing research) [non exhaustive list] - some we have solved and some not yet, but we will keep working on it. Generally speaking, keen to work on something difficult for the next 10 years...

Hi Jude,

On your page you said "If an extremely niche topic is valuable to just a handful of people and positively contributes to society, it will have a home on Golden."

Who will make that judgement call of what "contributes to society", and who will be paying their salary?

You also said "We believe this advanced query tool is extremely useful for investment funds, large consultancies and large companies, so please get in touch if you want to experience one of the best query tools out there."

That sounds great but its a far cry from "human knowledge". There wasn't much about advanced query tools for academics, nonprofits, activists, or government employees.

Sorry to be so cynical but one can only hear so much of "making the world a better place", to quote Silicon Valley.

> To the academic self: we want to cover 10bn+ topics, google knowledge graph is around 3bn+ entities. We are not attempting to map all lamp posts in san francisco which would make a useful data set for a self driving car company but we do want to map all businesses, concepts, science topics, people of interest, species, products, services, etc etc. Instead of notability, we are aiming more at a validation model ie ‘does this entity exist’. There is also a difference between ‘article’ of WP and ‘entity’ of Golden for our model. So I believe there is space for positive coexistence between Golden and WP. We will still want discussion around the validation and ‘what next after 10bn entities are done’ debate.

How does this differ from wikidata.org?

it will have to be profitable to pay back investors. for one difference.

> we wish to be at a more open standard than WP

As far as I can see, CC-BY-SA license only applies to the text and not the knowledge graph that users contribute.

Hey judegomila,

You're using my images - hundreds of them, it seems - in breach of the licence. Where do I send my invoice?

I'm sure as you wish to be "on strong moral ground", you won't want to deny me what you owe me.

So, you're aiming for an exit as per Metaweb/Freebase?

JG here. No, just a damn good website for you all.

If you've taken VC, then surely there's an exit in about 5 years?

JG: I hope not :>

Like a lot of others here I really wish you good luck, this can become amazing!

Like a lot of others here I'm also afraid hat will happen as VC starts to demand profit, now.

For the record, I'm in no way against successful companies being wildly profitable, quite the contrary: I see that as a guard against being forced to do dumb things.

What I am wary of however is companies being forced by VC to do all kinds of crazy stuff, like back when Quora decided to publish everything one looked at and I left there and then never to return, or when short after WhatsApp joined Facebook talk would start about "integration" and I would immediately start moving my account and all groups elsewhere.

What I could hope for[0] - especially with companies that are hoping to crowdsource a lot of data - would be some kind of effective guarantee and/or escrow to prevent short sighted plays by VCs or hostile takeover by Google, Facebook or similar companies, i.e. that companies would "tie themselves to the mast" to escape the siren songs.

[0]: but don't really expect in most cases as it would limit a number of profitable exits. An upside I could see would be that it would be easier to get crowdsourced data, from both companies as well as from individual contributors if one could believe that the data would stay accessible and not be abused.

Don't let your VC see this because they're definitely expecting to see a return on their investment reasonably soon.

All the best.

It seems like Wikipedia might have some inherent incompatibilities with what they're trying to do, such as its editorial rules and its definition of notability, which can't easily be "fixed" by whatever definition of fixing they need. I appreciate a more inclusive view of notability that lets you take it all in and surface whats relevant more selectively although that is open for insane amounts of debate around it as we've seen on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a great resource, but it's also one of those success stories that owes as much to the incompetence of its competitors as it does to its own merit. I've often thought it would be interesting to create a "Wrapipedia" of sorts, basically a copy of the Wiki codebase that could be used to circumvent Wikipedia's often-nonsensical notability and deletion rules.

Basically, instead of going to wikipedia.org to look up something, you'd go to wrapipedia.org, which would issue the query on your behalf and supply its own page if the Wikipedia lookup fails. Wikipedia pages that were created by users but subsequently deleted by editors would essentially be treated as pure virtual functions to be implemented by wrapper classes. As with Wikipedia itself, users could create new entries and edit existing ones.

That way the original Wikipedia project could remain true to its charter without leaving its users frustrated or unsatisfied. Its editors would also appreciate an alternative to being insulted and browbeaten by annoyed users, I'm sure.

There is/was the Deletionpedia:

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

True, but that sounds more reactionary and less constructive than what I had in mind. I'd envision it more as an alternative access URL for Wikipedia, one that acts as a supplementary source when necessary but otherwise is indistinguishable from using wikipedia.org directly.

Should we be thinking of Wikipedia alone, or Wikipedia plus all of the fan and other wikis that have sprung up around it? When you consider the collection of all of them there isn't much of a notability restriction and cardinality takes a jump forward too. Of course the collection of them doesn't get you an ontology carefully elaborated by a single mastermind, you just get whatever emerges from this decentralised web.

And perhaps it's ontologies like these that you get if you do go with emergence

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/27/rare-and-strange-i...

Thank you for the comment! I think it sums up some important critical questions very nicely.

While I am happy to see talented people working on important topics like this, I am really sad to see that this seems to be a for profit effort.

If you have the right team and vision it should be easy enough to get five million from public funders like the NSF without the leash of having to maximize profits (likely) at the expense of being able to maximize the overall benefit for society. For things that can go wrong just have a look at the dumpster fire aka fb.

Although I do believe that companies like Golden start out with the best of intentions, experience shows that the reality of financial expectations will likely win out in the end (e.g., Google, FB, Twitter).

So, why not go with an institutional structure that doesn’t have as many strings attached? INAL but maybe something like a public benefit corp [1]?

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation

> Also, what are your thoughts on the morality of essentially crowdsourcing all the input that you will feed to your query engines and profit off people using? Aren't you essentially making your contributors all unpaid workers?

My mind went in a different direction, although your point is very valuable and the question needs to be asked.

My concern is this: Wikipedia editors work hard to maintain a level of quality high enough that the kooks and cranks and racists of the world feel like Wikipedia is biased against them. Well, guess what: It is. Wikipedia gives no platform to people who think vaccines cause autism. NPOV is biased towards the scientific consensus.

So, will Golden even attempt that level of quality? Will it keep the constant tide of insanity out or will it be inundated by the loudest few who believe the craziest shit? Crowdsourcing is dangerous when some people are endlessly motivated to game the system, and I don't just mean making Moot win Man Of The Year competitions.

Jude from Golden here. Yes we will work very hard to keep to scientific consensus and reach that level of quality or higher. Please bear in mind this is not only crowdsourcing but there is automation in the collection of the information, that too will have its fair share of issues as well no doubt :> There is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area. Feel free to shoot over ideas as well if you have further thoughts.

"there is likely opportunity to auto detect cranky/racist/gaming behavior and we have some plans in that area."

Ask facebook and twitter how easy automated content moderation is...

True, very hard problem. But combinatorial opinion free form comments phase space >> than phase space of canonical knowledge thus number of patterns of things that can go wrong for them much larger. Still keeping our shields up and not discounting this issue.

As well, think of the kind of impact 5mil would have on archive.org.

To angry self: I dont entirely trust Wikipedia to give an objective/apolitical view of things all the time: there've been times where articles have been noticably influenced by a defacto, anachronistic political (progressive) position. I wouldnt mind having a redundant source of information where the possibility exists of current politics corrupting its articles' integrity

> articles have been noticably influenced by a defacto, anachronistic political (progressive) position

I hate it when the right pretends that everyone is biasing everything in terms of a progressive agenda, when that's just not the case, even in Wikipedia's case.

There was the case of Cross doing absolutely right-wing, biased, pro right-wing Israeli governments entries and edits and being protected by Wikipedia editors to do so.

I think what's often gets conflated is that munch of Western society and organizations are socially progressive, sure, but they're very much economically right-leaning, something that rarely gets acknowledged and which makes it difficult for me to have a honest conversation with the other side.

I'd also note that Wikipedia's founder is very much right-leaning, regularly attacking the likes of Corbyn and certainly not holding progressive economics dear.

Ok, my point still stands then; it's good to have multiple sources of information

Sure, I agree with that.

Many people have tried this, and they invariably end up creating propaganda cesspools like conservapedia. Progressivism fundamentally values objectivity, so I don't think you can easily exclude the former without also losing the later.

Examples?