Larry Sanger seems to have a thing about free online encyclopedias. Although his main claim to fame is as the co-founder, along with Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia, that is just one of several projects to produce large-scale, systematic stores of human knowledge he has been involved in....
The main Digital Universe portal is made up of many subsidiary portals. Each portal categorises weblinks by type, and there will be related content such as video and audio streams. Potentially, each portal will exist in multiple versions for different languages. There will be an encyclopedia for each portal, and that's where Sanger comes in. The encyclopedias will be built collaboratively using MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, although the presentation will be different. The wiki will be run by acknowledged experts - the "elite" that Sanger feels Wikipedia has turned its back on....
Sanger is also starting a collaborative project called Textop (Text Outline Project), which aims to create "a central outline of human knowledge based on specific details of definition, explanation and argument contained within scholarly texts". He believes this "will facilitate research and learning in a way never before possible", because it can be used "to organise all sorts of textual information, such as a dictionary, a guide to debates and summaries of recent events"....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
