Archive for December, 2007

Open Site

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

The sister site of DMOZ, Open-site.org, is an internet community project designed to accumulate and distribute trusted information with no charge. Open-site is a collection of articles on everything from dust mites to SEO with editors checking to ensure the content is of the quality required by the site as well as being free of slant or propaganda.

While this concept sounds a lot like the overwhelmingly popular Wikipedia, there are critical differences.
Open-site.org is set up on a CMS platform, not a wiki. The open-site framework is much closer to that of a true online encyclopedia, not a wiki. Open-site.org does make it clear that they are neither a dictionary nor an encyclopedia, however. The site considers itself a “informational, volunteer-based web-site”.

Of course, it may not be written by scientists and specialists in the field, but editors must be approved before they can add or change content and even then, that content must be approved by a senior editor. The public can’t modify information at all without applying and being approved as editors. The site is also organized by category, much like a print encyclopedia might be making it simple to browse from one category to another and find related information. (more…)