Bronze-level articleKnowino

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Knowino (formerly known as Tendrl) is an internet encyclopedia, and the first Citizendium "fork,"[1] initiated by Australian computer programmer Thomas H. Larsen.[2] The website was founded on November 15, 2010, following uncertainty about the future status of Citizendium.[3] The announcement of a Citizendium fork was met with a hostile reception by some Citizendium council members.[4]

Larsen has called it a "principles" fork rather than a "content" fork,[5] which is lucky, since he hasn't added much content, but disappointing, since he has yet to define any principles (as of June 2011), leaving Knowino as little more than a playground for three disaffected ex-Citizendium belligerents (and one RationalWiki user).

As of January 2014, it mostly consists of spambots and reverting spambots. It still exists, but account creation has been disabled, and there is no new content being generated. It managed to be even more dead than the site is a fork of.

In December 2014, after a long period of the only contributors being spambots, the site's domain expired and is now a holding page.

Contents

[edit] Avoiding the mistakes of Citizendium

Although Knowino was created with the objective of avoiding the problems of Citizendium (itself created to avoid perceived problems at Wikipedia) it is not clear how it will manage to do this. Furthermore, exactly which problems of the two other sites it is meant to solve is unclear because, as of late December 2010, it seems a little reticent about enumerating them.

For example, our Citizendium article talks at length about the difficulties at that site which include:

  • Problems with community management.
  • Lack of financial transparency.
  • Ownership of articles by non-expert "experts" who in fact are cranks with an axe to grind.
  • Tolerance and protection of said cranks, leading to integration of pseudoscience and woo into the project; contrasting with...
  • Browbeating and micromanagement toward those with genuine academic expertise.

While Knowino seems to be making some positive movements in respect of community management and financial transparency, it's not clear how they intend to overcome the "expert" and pseudoscience problems that plague Citizendium. There is a temporary workaround of simply avoiding "polemic" articles,[6] but it raised another issue, of how Knowino handles privacy violations.[7]

[edit] Technical set-up

Like Citizendium, Knowino uses the MediaWiki platform, but has adopted the MySQL database system, as opposed to PostgreSQL. Financial, legal, and higher-level community administration will be done by a "Community Council," composed of seven members, elected from the Knowino membership.[8] Although it shares similarities with Citizendium, Knowino uses the same default skin as Wikipedia, Vector, has eliminated the Metadata tab box present at the top of each Citizendium page, and dispensed with the author-editor dichotomy.

Knowino is VPS hosted by the Canadian owned MyHosting.com site. Tendrl was formerly hosted by JC-Hosting, based in Nashville, Tennessee, in Larsen's space on the BasicProgramming.org website. This was a temporary arrangement from November 15, 2010, to December 17, 2010, when the site migrated and was renamed.

Static Knowino (similar to static Wikipedia) is available for downloading and offline browsing.

[edit] Earlier history

Motivated by Citizendium's many failures, in July 2008, Larsen had proposed a project named "Wikipendium." It would've required participants to register an account with a username "in the form of" a real name (but not necessarily their actual names).[9]

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Citizendium promotes itself as a "citizen's compendium," as opposed to an encyclopedia.
  2. Thomas H. Larsen's userpage on Citizendium.
  3. "Anyone interested in a fork...?" Citizendium Forums. 2010 November 19.
  4. "I have made a formal request to the Constabulary to delete this entire thread. I find it truly outrageous that Thomas H. Larsen... is allowed to start, and then perpetuate, a page calling for a direct competitor to CZ -- using CZ resources to do so." Source: Hayford Peirce. "Anyone interested in a fork...?" Citizendium Forums. 2010 November 19.
  5. http://wikimedia.7.x6.nabble.com/Knowino-td1124539.html
  6. Polemic articles on KN
  7. Knowino:Village Inn, User talk:Thomas Larsen
  8. Knowino:Community Council
  9. Thomas H. Larson. "Justification of Wikipendium’s account implementation." Wikipendium blog. 2008 July 13.
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