Justapedia:Justapedia Foundation

Justapedia® is an open and freely accessible online encyclopedia that is being developed and maintained by volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system; editors are referred to as Justapedians. Justapedia is the registered trademark of the Justapedia Foundation (JPF), a tax deductible section 501(c)(3) charitable organization for educational purposes, officially registered on October 5, 2022. The encyclopedia project, Justapedia®, was officially launched to the public on August 9, 2023. Justapedia® was founded by Betty Wills, a longtime editor of Wikipedia. Justapedia attributes Wikipedia and its many volunteer editors, several of whom are also Justapedia's volunteers, for the freely licensed content under CC-BY-SA, where most of Justapedia's content originated. The same free licenses also apply to Justapedia's revisions and new articles as noted in the page footer.

Origins

Justapedia was born of founder Betty Wills' desire to restore the spirit of neutrality and objectivity that Wikipedia had long since lost, a spirit that initially attracted her to become a Wikipedia volunteer in 2011. A retired television producer, photographer and magazine publisher, Wills enjoyed sharing, editing, and helping others as a tutor for JP:New Pages Patrol on Wikipedia, the first line of defense in protecting the encyclopedia from inadvertently publishing undesirable content. Wills considered her volunteer work to be a "project of love", which she stated in an interview with the NPR station WGBH (FM)–Boston during the 2019 WikiConference North America, hosted by MIT. Wills has also expressed her classic liberal views about politics with a polite measure of humor as evidenced in her measured responses when she was interviewed by Slate and Fast Company.

About

The Justapedia Foundation (JPF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization dedicated to providing and operating an open source, neutral and objective encyclopedia that will remain free to the world in perpetuity. Foundation headquarters at the time of origin are located in north Texas. Betty Wills as founder, CEO/president, Christian Gribneau as CTO/vice president, Ryan Stiles as secretary/treasurer, and Laraine Katzev as Member at Large, comprise the Board of Directors and subsequent Executive Committee that manages the Foundation and its programs, which at the time of its inception includes the English Justapedia.

The Foundation is dedicated to maintaining a friendly and welcoming community for its volunteers, and is looking forward to hosting fun educational activities, spirited debates and various sponsorships and endowments with the help of tax deductible donations. The Foundation envisions Justapedia continuing its mission to maintain and protect the spirit of objectivity and neutrality in its encyclopedic content as volunteers continue to add to the building blocks of true knowledge in perpetuity.

Foundation's mission and goals

The Justapedia Foundation's mission is to host and operate Justapedia, a free and open-source encyclopedia, by providing the platform and tools to enable volunteers to easily edit, create and share their knowledge while maintaining compliance with Justapedia's five fundamental principals, and its policies and guidelines. Criticism is a useful tool for necessitating improvements, and Wikipedia has received more than its share of criticism relative to lacking objectivity, being used as a weapon, and for having a left–far left bias that is unacceptable for a neutral encyclopedia. Mainstream media's criticism ranges from politics to social and medical sciences, including a wide range of topics such as global warming, COVID-19, government and more. Wikipedia's failure to maintain objectivity and neutrality in contentious topic areas are no secret as evidenced by Wikipedia's own articles, including gender bias, systemic bias, political bias, and science. The Washington Post published the following criticism: "Groups that are underrepresented in academia tend to be missing at an even higher rate on Wikipedia. And there is growing evidence that Wikipedia articles have tangible effects, including the power to influence the contents of scientific papers. Wikipedia does not just passively reflect biases. It amplifies and reinforces them."

Mission statement

Justapedia's mission is to develop and maintain articles that:

1. are created and edited by editors with a good command of the English language;
2. comply with Justapedia’s Manual of style, and are compliant with Justapedia's Policies and guidelines, particularly its core content policies concerning Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research and Verifiability;
3. are fact-based, verifiable, corroborated and properly cited to reliable sources that are objectively chosen in an effort to include all significant views;
4. contain minimal opinions, corroborated statements of fact, but when opinion is included, it will be with properly cited sources using in-text attribution,
5. do not include breaking news as there will be a 7-day moratorium before any breaking news can be included.

Licensing

Justapedia is a work in progress that began in October 2022 with content originating from Wikipedia, all properly attributed in compliance with their free CC-BY-SA license. The same free license also applies to revisions and new articles authored by Justapedia volunteers as noted in their page footer.

Community

The Justapedia Foundation firmly believes in maintaining a collegial environment for our volunteers as indicated in Terms of Use and JPF Code of Conduct. Hindsight has made the Foundation's leadership, which consists of longterm experienced Wikipedia editors, more appreciative of old-fashioned good manners, and how best to handle disruption resulting from incivility. Hindsight has played a key role in many of the decisions that determined the policies and guidelines for Justapedia. For example, under Justapedia's zero tolerance policy, administrators will simply not allow blatantly disruptive behaviors such as gaming, POV railroading, POV creep, to name a few. For content issues, Justapedia's Editorial Review Board will help in eliminating the "hegemony of the asshole consensus", a phrase coined by Bryce Peake, a media and communications professor at UMBC.

Justapedia greatly differs from Wikipedia, beginning with the elimination of "thought police" and noticeboards that encourage draconian measures imposed by small groups of influencers who patrol them. Justapedia's position is to promote free thought by eliminating the "weaponry" that forces free thinkers to conform, which frequently includes groveling and agreeing to change one's approach by accepting the majority's ideology and admitting wrongdoing they never committed. The latter has only served to generate biased articles and eliminate neutrality and objectivity, while creating hard feelings, embarrassment, humiliation, and unnecessary obstacles. Justapedia administrators will not settle content disputes, or be involved in article deletions which is now within the purview of the ERB and trained NPP reviewers working New Page Patrol. Editors can easily avoid enforcement by simply being polite and respectful of other users. Content disputes that cannot be resolved on the article Talk Page, or by an uninvolved third party, may request a review by the Editorial Review Board, or BoT.

Community Board of Trustees

Work in progress; comments welcome

A seven (7) member volunteer community Board of Trustees, hereinafter BoT, will serve to oversee the efficient operation of the community, and the needs of its volunteers in order to:

• maintain a collegial and welcoming editing environment,
• assist in dispute resolution,
• help ensure the proper development and growth of Justapedia, and
• protect the Foundation's mission and goals in hosting and operating Justapedia as a free, open-source, objectively written encyclopedia.

Editing

Main page: JP:Terms of Use

Justapedia is committed to providing a collegial environment where registered users can feel part of our growing community, and feel inspired to help build the encyclopedia by creating new articles, improving existing ones, and getting involved in different projects. Users are required to register, but may edit anonymously using a pseudonym. There will be no drive-by IP editing. Users are responsible for their own actions, comments, and all of their edits. JPF does not endorse any opinions, or make any representations or guarantees as to the reliability or factual accuracy of user generated content; JPF provides access only.

In Focus project

In Focus is a Justapedia project that includes gathering and listing freely licensed articles originally imported from Wikipedia that need to be fixed or entirely made over because they either lack objectivity and neutrality, or fail to comply with Justapedia's core content policies. Such articles are considered a top priority, and will also be the source for articles used in competitive Fixathons, which will be a judged event offering prizes and rewards for outstanding work.

Such competitions require editors to not only have a good command of English, but also a good understanding of:

• objectivity and how best to present ALL significant views;
• neutrality in choosing sources to cite for content, which can include biased sources, but extra points will be given for the most objective and balanced sources;
• the importance of strict adherence to Biographies of living persons policy.

The articles will be judged by Justapedia's Editorial Review Board (ERB), and when approved will be protected and stamped with the ERB's seal of approval, indicating it is a quality article with a special provision that requires pre-approval for revisions and updates.

See Category:Justapedia In Focus articles

We currently have the Main Page#Feature Showcase which is not part of the In Focus project.

Note: In light of Justapedia being in the early stages of development, the terms and procedures stated above are subject to change.