I am pleased to announce a new venture entitled Optipedia.org. This is a new project to develop and maintain an online encyclopedia containing articles related to the Vision and Eyecare field and profession.

Some of you may already be familiar with Wikipedia.com which has a growing online encyclopedia covering any and all topics. If you are familiar with them, then you know the concept has both strengths and weaknesses.

The strength is that it is very easy for anyone to create or edit an existing article. This helps the encyclopedia grow with new articles and also allow corrections and additions to existing articles.

The weakness is that it is very easy for anyone to create or edit an existing article. (Yeah, I know. The same feature is both a strength and weakness.) This allows anyone to create nonsense articles or articles with bogus information. It would also allow people to edit and remove information from existing articles. (Thankfully the software keeps copies of old versions so it's easy to restore an article.)

Given this here is what we plan to do with Optipedia.org:

How It Will Work
We are in the process of setting up an Optipedia Board of Governors. Their job will be to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the article posted and edited. They will also be able to 'lock' articles from future edits.

We have also setup two additional forums on OptiBoard for this project. One is the Optipedia Discussion Forum for all discussion and feedback concerning Optipedia. The other is the Optipedia Report Forum in which members can report questionable articles that the BoG can investigate for accuracy and appropriateness.

The ultimate success of this is going to depend on the OptiBoard Community. We have a chance to create something worthwhile, not only for the industry but for anyone interested in learning more about Vision and Eyecare topics.

This will also be a work-in-progress so there will be a few rough bumps along the way (not the least of which is the MediaWiki program that can be difficult to learn.) Nonetheless with everyone's help I'm sure this will be a success.