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Veritula deserves to scale to the size of Wikipedia.
But it never will, unless its users innovate.
How can the global success of Wikipedia inspire Veritula?
I agree that Veritula deserves to scale to something huge.
Looking through the history of Wikipedia, I see that its core concept is that of “compiling the world's knowledge in a single location […]”. To be clear, I think the core concept of Veritula is to be a programmatic implementation of Popper’s rational discussion methodology; it then becomes a dictionary for ideas as a result. It’s also less about listing facts and more about listing ideas and their logical relationship (though criticisms do provide built-in fact-checking mechanisms). That said, with enough users, Veritula could become a place with a lot of knowledge.
The linked site traces some of the success of Wikipedia to volunteers: “The use of volunteers was integral in making and maintaining Wikipedia.” So early adopters such as yourself are crucial.
In addition, 9/11 apparently played a role in making Wikipedia famous:
The September 11 attacks spurred the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles. At the time, approximately 100 articles related to 9/11 had been created. After the September 11 attacks, a link to the Wikipedia article on the attacks appeared on Yahoo!'s home page, resulting in a spike in traffic.
Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them. An urgent story would draw a lot of users to the site, too.
Something like Wikipedia’s arbitration process could be interesting, too.
Something similar to Wikipedia’s page-protection feature to combat “edit warring” and “prevent vandalism” could address the issue of people posting criticisms in rapid succession to protect their pet ideas.
Your suggestion to look to Wikipedia for inspiration is spot on. Thanks.
To prevent edit warring and vandalism, maybe Veritula could have a reputation system similar to that of Stack Overflow, where you need to earn enough reputation before you can edit someone else’s post, say.
Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology? Larry Sanger (a founder of Wikipedia) has said that he now thinks Wikipedia should have competing articles on the same topic to allow for the fact that people disagree.
The idea of having a Wikipedia equivalent that presents high quality competing articles detailing different alternative explanations for things (with some sort of versioning and methods of criticism) excites me greatly.
I have thought of producing something like this myself, which was part of what drew me to Veritula.
Would it be possible / worth it to produce a competitor to Wikipedia based on Popperian epistemology?
Yes, sure.
The idea of having a Wikipedia equivalent that presents high quality competing articles detailing different alternative explanations for things (with some sort of versioning and methods of criticism) excites me greatly.
Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.
We ‘just’ need to get more users. As I wrote in #628, posting a breaking news story could work. If users submit ideas on events as they unfold and then criticize those ideas, visitors see what’s happening at a glance. It could be easier for them to know which ideas they can adopt than on conventional news channels or even Wikipedia, IMO.
There are also ‘timeless’ debates that have been going on for decades where Veritula can offer clarity. Like on the abortion debate. People shouldn’t have to keep debating that over and over when it’s a matter where objective truth can be found and then acted on.
I have thought of producing something like this myself, which was part of what drew me to Veritula.
I’m curious btw, how did you hear about Veritula?
Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.
One thing that Wikipedia articles are very good for is providing well-structured information on a given subject. Discussion threads are not so well structured (the order of information is not based on how high-level or foundational it is, like an encyclopedia entry would be, but rather on the nested chronology of whatever discussion happened to take place.)
Top-level ideas can be structured any way you as author want them to be. (Any idea at any level can, but top-level ideas are presumably where articles could live.) The structure of any particular idea can be different from the structure of the discussion as a whole.
Me, too. I think Veritula’s design allows for this pretty naturally since the topic of a discussion can be general enough for various competing ideas to be posted in the discussion.
Veritula emphasises making one point at a time for ease of criticism and discussion, which is useful in a forum but makes absorbing the totality of an idea a little more tedious compared to a quick glance at an encyclopedia article. (It is possible I have misunderstood some aspect of Veritula here.)
Veritula cautions against making multiple points at once so as to avoid ‘bulk criticism’. But people can write as much as they want in a single idea. For example, you can find several long-form articles in ‘How Does Veritula Work?’. It just depends on how confident people are in their ideas, and how much they have practiced using Veritula.
As much as I dislike LLMs, I’m thinking of using them to show summaries of discussions at the top of the page. Summaries would reflect ideas without pending criticisms.
My vision is for an online encyclopedia that contains complete articles describing the totality of a perspective, with articles for alternate explanations readily available. I see many problems with this idea but I think it is worth exploring.
I’m curious btw, how did you hear about Veritula?
I believe I came across it while exploring your blog. My ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea was particularly sharp in my mind in that moment, so I was very excited to see how you had set things up here. I think a tremendous amount of it is transferable.
I’m happy to have you and for your contributions, but I have to ask: do you see yourself building a Veritula competitor at some point in the future?
No, I think the ‘Popperian Wikipedia’ idea is too different to Veritula for it to be a competitor. Veritula is primarily a discussion tool. I envision more of an encyclopedia of competing ideas presented independently of each other, with no (or very little) discussion functionality.
For example, on the topic of addiction, this site would contain different articles explaining different models of what addiction is, how it works, etc. Each article would explain the given model from within its own framework, rather than from some pre-approved framework and set of sources (as is currently the case at Wikipedia).
I realise “methods of criticism” in my reply above may have confused that somewhat.
I think my idea could be made within Veritula, if you would be interested. Different explanations could be cataloged in Wikipedia-style articles (with versioning), which could then be referred to and discussed in threads here. Maybe we should open a discussion for this potential feature?
At the end of the day, I think something like that should exist in the world, and I am indifferent to how it might come about. It wouldn’t bother me if I wasn’t involved. I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.
I would also consider financially supporting someone who gave me good reason to think they had the vision, the motivation, and the technical skill to create it.
I’m interested. Let’s continue this discussion privately for now. Email me: dh at dennishackethal.com
"Veritula could be a place where people break news stories and others can quickly fact-check and improve upon reports by revising them."
I ask myself where I go when I want 'answers' to such problems and immediately I think prediction markets. It's mainly because I think the financial incentives and outcome based 'test' serve as highly reliable error correction. I wonder what different utility Veritula would add in this regard.
Idea: communities.
Discussions vary widely, but people gather around topics, like nutrition or software engineering. Communities would group discussions by topic, as subreddits group posts, so people can find the discussions on topics they care about.
Could live at /v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
Ben could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
Veritula doesn’t have enough discussions yet to split into communities. There are few, and most have only a handful of people in them, so most communities would sit empty, and empty ones make the site look abandoned.
Tags on discussions would solve the same problem with less. A discussion could carry several tags, and nothing would need its own pages, moderators or membership. Subreddits come with all of that.
Need summaries at top of discussions and for nodes in the discussion tree. Could be AI generated.
Maybe one day, when Veritula makes enough to pay for this feature.
Not if the criticism is clear and concise. That should be incentivized somehow.
How is this a criticism? My point was not about preventing long discussions but that we don't need to ai-summarize ideas that are already super concise.
Summary feature proposed in #4727 is for discussions not ideas.
Fair, but if the discussion itself is clear and concise, it doesn’t need an AI summary either. I agree that a long discussion could benefit even when each individual idea is concise.
… if the discussion itself is clear and concise …
Sure but often they’re not…
Idea: AI suggests criticisms to address before you even submit your idea.
Same criticism as #6058: this feature would need to pay its rent somehow.