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Veropedia was a free, advertising-supported online encyclopedia launched in 2007. Veropedia editors chose Wikipedia articles that met the site's reliability standards; information was then Web scraping, or chosen by an automatic process, and thereafter a stable version of the article was posted on Veropedia. Any improvements required for articles to reach a standard suitable for Veropedia had to be done on Wikipedia itself. This model was intended to improve the quality of both projects.
By October 2008, the site, still in beta, had checked and imported more than 5,800 articles from the English Wikipedia into its public database.
The project was mainly financed by those involved in the project, although it was intended to eventually support itself completely through advertising. The site was discontinued in 2009.
By November, around 100 Wikipedia editors were involved in the project. Veropedia sought the help of academics who had worked on Wikipedia. An explanatory page on the site stated that similar projects in languages other than English might be launched; it distinguished Veropedia from "expert-driven" wikis such as Citizendium.
The website was operated by Veropedia, Inc., a for-profit corporation registered in Florida, As required by its use of Wikipedia material, all Veropedia content was licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
In December 2008, the encyclopedia contents were removed and replaced with a message stating that "The original version of Veropedia has been taken down for now while we work on a new Veropedia. This new Veropedia will have a superior method of handling articles and introduces an improved interface."
Tim Blackmore, an associate professor at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies of the University of Western Ontario, expressed scepticism toward the project, since there are already encyclopedias in existence where "content is checked and articles are reviewed". The main lure of the internet, according to him, is "free information" and Wikipedia has already emerged as a pioneer in open content information resources.
A different evaluation in The Australian said Veropedia "seems more likely to succeed" than Citizendium, another then-recently founded online encyclopedia, because "it is less directly competitive" with Wikipedia. The story opined that both Veropedia and Citizendium "should in theory help improve the fairness and accuracy of available online information about many contentious topics although the academic bent to each raises questions over what, exactly, they will construe as fair when it comes to coverage of corporations and their actions."
A story in Wired News discussed whether Veropedia (and Citizendium) could avoid some of the same problems that Wikipedia has supposedly encountered: "Though office politics and internecine bickering abound at the Wikimedia Foundation – one former insider described the atmosphere as "MySpace meets 'As the World Turns' for geeks" – both Wool and Sanger deny that internal squabbles were why they started their own encyclopedias. Whether their ventures fall prey to the same turf wars, bureaucratic quagmires and academic catfights as the site that spawned them remains to be seen."
In a review of various Wikipedia alternatives, TechNewsWorld argued that Veropedia's estimation of 5000 articles was not credible, as "many of these articles are small and insignificant almanac-type entries that serve mainly as filler". It thus argued that like Citizendium, Veropedia avoided "the tough challenge of handling controversial and time-sensitive subjects" that Wikipedia had taken on. The article also stated that most Veropedia articles were identical to their Wikipedia counterpart.
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