Scholarpedia – the reliable wiki

Scholarpedia is a new online encyclopedia and competitor to Wikipedia. I am a big user of Wikipedia and have wasted a lot of time clicking through articles. I have exactly the same habits as the user in this XKCD cartoon. Despite it’s addictiveness, Wikipedia does have a problem with the quality of its content as it is not accepted by any academic institution.

Scholarpedia’s author selection is a lot more strict than Wikipedia and it is peer reviewed. It can still be user edited, however new editions must be approved by the original curator. The main idea behind it is to have an online encyclopedia like wikipedia, but with higher quality articles.

So far, there are only encyclopedias in Computational Neuroscience, Dynamical Systems, Computational Intelligence and Astrophysics. I am not an expert in any of these fields, however the amount of content so far looks promising. I am a little bit skeptical as to whether this will expand quickly because of the greater amount of work required to produce an article. It is based on the same MediaWiki engine as Wikipedia, so the look and feel is completely natural.

Check out Scholarpedia soon!!!!!