Knowledge Standards Foundation Update
Last year we began a collaboration with the Knowledge Standards Foundation. The Knowledge Standards Foundation (KSF) was founded in September 2019 by Wikipedia ex-founder Larry Sanger and a growing team. Their mission is to bring all the online encyclopedias together under the banner of Encyclosphere and to decentralize the knowledge across multiple aggregators.
Larry is now a well-known and outspoken critic of WIkipedia, which as its founder he is certainly entitled to be: “The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone.” As he told the Daily Mail in 2021: “Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work.”
Earlier this year we were honored by their invitation to run the first independent aggregator for the KSF. Using our unique blend of IPFS and blockchain technology, we will add immutability and censorship-resistance to the Encyclosphere.
At the time of writing we are yet to host the terabyte of articles but have everything in place to begin doing so shortly.
In the meantime the DARA Encyclopedia Aggregator is up and running and hooked into several encyclopedia API including Wikipedia, Handwiki and Citizendium. This allows users to search for articles from these sites and archive them with one click by pressing Fetch.
The articles are saved in the ZWI file format, developed by the KSF specifically for zipping up encyclopedia articles.
Larry Sanger recently commented in Slack: “The origin of the file type name is zipped wiki (that’s Sergei Chekanov’s coinage).” Sergei Chekanov is a particle physicist but also a software engineer at the KSF. Larry continued: “The KSF is organizing encyclopedia articles and formulated (and continues to) the format to support that project.”
DARA honours the KSF’s ZWI standard and DARA developer Louie Miles works closely with their team, and either he or founder Dorian Sherman usually attend the KSF’s regular Friday meetings.
The DARA Encyclopedia Aggregator also offers powerful search functionality for archived articles and permits users in territories which block Wikipedia to search, fetch and share any of their articles simply by going to encyclopedia.dara.global
DARA does not often automate archives since our philosophy is that our users selectively curate and archive the specific items which are of most importance to them.
However, when it came to Wikipedia articles nominated for deletion we made an exception, and Louie Miles named it Death Row.
Death Row, which can be found at deathrow.dara.global, is our archive of all Wikipedia articles nominated for deletion since the end of January 2023 when the service was launched.
We believe that projects with mutually shared goals are more likely to achieve those goals by working together. For this reason we are always happy to make connections, and we’re pleased to say we got KSF and Project Gutenberg together since the former is looking for proofreading services offered by the latter.
We hope that Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, and Tim Chambers and Larry Sanger of the KSF, can find an accord and collaborate.
For more information about the Knowledge Standards Foundation please go to encyclosphere.org. Start searching at encyclone.org
