What the heck is Wikology?

To those who just doesn’t have a clue… Wikology is a wiki-based business and website directory. By wiki, we mean everyone can edit any page. This website was founded by John Bresee. If you want to know why he founded Wikology, read on…

The basis of this business idea comes about as a response to the inherent problems in Yahoo, DMOZ.org, and Wikipedia.org. Yahoo was founded on the notion that people sending in their web address can lead to an interesting collection of sites. Eventually Yahoo couldn’t keep up with the influx of sites and eventually began hiding the link that lead to their submit form. The number of submitted sites was so great that they could not write enough descriptions of the sites to keep up.

This lead to the creation of DMOZ.org, or the Open Directory Project. The founders of the open directory project were fed up with the great power that Yahoo held. So they created a project which was comprised of volunteer editors. Sadly, power corrupts and the DMOZ project became corrupted. It was impossible to determine who was a volunteer editor, how you become one, etc. The directory is filled with crappy dead links etc.

Wikipedia came along, shooting to be the be all end all directory of human knowledge. The wiki model is very powerful because anyone can edit any page. However they are a bit snooty and don’t want anything as crass as a for profit business listed in their precious directory, unless it is related to George Lucas or Slashdot.

So that led me to believe that a wiki based editing system on top of a directory structure might be a good thing. Basically recreating Yahoo and DMOZ the way they should have been originally…using user based content and editing. No crazed hierarchy, a truly open directory, at least as far as content goes.

The revenue model is a simple one of running google ads and leasing the content out to people who are tired of DMOZ.