Citizendium Blog

[The following is a mail I sent to Citizendium-L earlier this evening.  UPDATE: title fixed, thanks Tom. ]

Congratulations, everyone!

I agree that the Charter has been ratified; I hereby ratify it.

This has been a long time in coming, and I am happy it is finished.  I am proud that the Citizendium has continued to grow in the time, now about a year and a half, since I was actively involved.

I apologize for being so uninvolved in this whole process, but frankly, I have felt that it is not my place to get involved much, after pledging at the outset that I would step down after 2-3 years as head of CZ.  Every time I have gotten involved since the spring of 2009, my pledge has lurked in the back of my mind (and frequently in the front of it), which has sapped my motivation for trying to impose my will on anything that might be going on.  To be sure, I’ve made a few of my wishes known, but the project and the charter drafting process has continued on almost entirely independently of me, I’m sincerely happy to say.

Per Article 52 of the charter (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Charter_drafting), this email ends my term of office.  I believe it is now up to persons other than me to put the next relevant articles, 53 and 54, into effect.  I would like to thank the committee for honoring my service in getting CZ started with their Article 52.

CZ is unlike many online communities.  We have adopted a charter that defines the community as a division of power, and with different bodies capable of proposing and making innovations.  Many important terms are limited, as I think they should be, and the most powerful positions are elected.  In short, we now officially have an online constitutional republic, just as I have wanted.  I hope that you all will support the nascent system and help to build it into something self-sustaining and flourishing.  I still believe in this project, and I think that the time may well come when we begin to grow more quickly.  Our traffic has been steadily growing, and I’ve observed new people continuing to get involved.  So, quite contrary to hopeful, mean-spirited reports of our impending demise, we’ve actually shown our resilience, despite my own lack of involvement the last 18 months or so.

I wish you the best of luck.  I will try to assist the transition as I can.  To that end, let me point a few things out and make a few recommendations:

·         I remain a Citizen.  I am still strongly aligned with and in support of our goals, and I will continue to speak out on our behalf if offered a chance.  I will not attempt to speak for CZ, however; any questions from the press that come my way that seem to be questions about the current state of the project, pending decisions, and future strategies, I will refer to CZ’s current management.

·         There are any number of changes that might be made that could really kick things up a notch in this project.  We have many cards we have not played.  When you think about operations and strategy, think creatively first, then critically.  Different design, different branding; new associations; new stated goals; new initiatives, perhaps shared with partners; new sources of content and participants; maybe paring back of needless and not-very-helpful help pages; initiation of important new software projects; etc.  I hope that the new management committee will show leadership in considering and, more importantly, deciding and executing such initiatives.

·         Please bear in mind that the funds available to pay for the Citizendium servers are running low.  I think I can arrange for a significant cash infusion to cover any short-term shortfall, but you should be thinking about how to keep the servers paid for.  I think this could be a prime opportunity to move the hosting to a lower-cost service, as well as developing a relationship with an entity that can receive donations and make payments on our behalf—perhaps a university, academic press, or nonprofit.  Of course, you are free to continue on with the Tides Center.  In any event I would encourage you to make sure to have the relationship with the entity in clear writing, making it perfectly clear that CZ’s decisions will be independent and constrained only by the decisions of Citizens and the Charter, and law.

·         I hope the community will use the opportunity of a new charter to make other needed positive changes.  I believe there needs to be a settled and regular way to identify and resolve disputes.  The Charter describes the outline of a method but I believe it needs to be elaborated.  There are people whose involvement in the project is a significant net negative, for example because they are ideologues who brazenly refuse to write neutrally, because they repeatedly violate standards of professionalism, or because they are cranks who have no respect whatsoever of the proper standards of evidence and scholarship.  The project will bleed able and much-needed contributors if they must deal with people who should not be involved.  Of course, it can be difficult to determine the line between overzealous rules-enforcement and perfect openness to any sort of behavior.  But I think that this needs to be done, and it will help that it’s done independently of me—in the past, when I had to get rid of people, they were frequently able to make it personal.  I hope a process involving several people, following fair rules in an open manner, will not be so easy to attack.  I just hope, of course, that the process also remains relatively efficient (i.e., not too complex and bureaucratic) while also being open and fair.

·         One area in which I am disappointed with the charter—I never expected it to be perfect—is the lack of any requirement that articles be family-friendly (or, choose the term that is least offensive to your political sensibilities).  There is some seriously twisted stuff on Wikipedia that has no business in a resource calling itself an “encyclopedia.”  I hope CZ will never host such stuff—or, to the extent it does, at least properly labels and places it behind appropriate disclaimers.  But generally, I hope that you will maintain standards of appropriateness for school use similar to that used in other resources written for adults and at about the college level, such as Britannica and The New York Times.  School kids are among the those who stand to benefit most from CZ, and I’d like to make sure that they’re well served.

I’m willing to offer other advice if asked, but I expect to do so largely behind the scenes, one-on-one, because I do not want to impose improper influence on what should be a democratic process.

On a personal note, I’ve been greatly distracted lately by new developments in new projects (a major new set of WatchKnow features, and an upcoming associated program to teach children to read) as well as baby #2 due in just a few weeks.  I’m also in transition on WatchKnow, which is also gaining a wonderful, able new CEO, freeing me up to develop the reading project full time.  I’m frankly glad to be developing and executing brand new ideas, which is probably my forte.  But this is not an excuse–I am sorry that I have not answered all the emails that people have sent.

Again, congratulations to everyone!

Regards,

Larry Sanger

Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/

Executive Director, WatchKnow | http://www.watchknow.org/

Founding Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/

sanger@citizendium.org | sanger@watchknow.org

This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender. Disseminating, distributing, or copying this e-mail are prohibited without the express authorization of the sender.

On April 7, I posted the text of a report I made to the FBI to the EDTECH mailing list, in which I stated that, in my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation may knowingly have posted “child pornography,” by which I meant “obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.”  In short, the Wikimedia Commons “Category:Pedophilia” page hosted images with realistic and disturbing drawings of child molestation.  The Register reported on this and it snowballed from there.  Among other venues, it was discussed on Slashdot, where I posted a reply which I put in my personal web space.

I think CZ isn’t an appropriate place to discuss this, so I’ve disabled comments from this post.

“How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?”  A zillion famous scientists and other luminaries have given answers.  Here is mine.

THE UN-FOCUSING, DE-LIBERATING EFFECTS OF JOINING THE HIVE MIND

The instant availability of an ocean of information has been an epoch-making boon to humanity. But has the resulting information overload also deeply changed how we think? Has it changed the nature of the self? Has it even — as some have suggested — radically altered the relationship of the individual and society? These are important philosophical questions, but vague and slippery, and I hope to clarify them.

The Internet is changing how we think, it is suggested. But how is it, precisely? One central feature of the “new mind” is that it is spread too thin. But what does that mean?

In functional terms, being spread too thin means we have too many Websites to visit, we get too many messages, and too much is “happening” online and in other media that we feel compelled take on board. Many of us lack effective strategies for organizing our time in the face of this onslaught. This makes us constantly distracted and unfocused, and less able to perform heavy intellectual tasks. Among other things, or so some have confessed, we cannot focus long enough to read whole books. We feel unmoored and we flow along helplessly wherever the fast-moving digital flood carries us.

We do? Well — some of us do, evidently.

Some observers speak of “where we are going,” or of how “our minds” are being changed by information overload, apparently despite ourselves. Their discussions make erstwhile free agents mere subjects of powerful new forces, and the only question is where those forces are taking us. I don’t share the assumption here. When I read the title of Nick Carr’s essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I immediately thought, “Speak for yourself.” It seems to me that in discussions like Carr’s, it is assumed that intellectual control has already been ceded — but that strikes me as being a cause, not a symptom, of the problem Carr bemoans. After all, the exercise of freedom requires focus and attention, and the ur-event of the will is precisely focus itself. Carr unwittingly confessed for too many of us a moral failing, a vice; the old name for it is intemperance. (In the older, broader sense, contrasted with sophrosyne, moderation or self-control.) And, as with so much of vice, we want to blame it on anything but ourselves.

Is it really true that we no longer have any choice but to be intemperate in how we spend our time, in the face of the temptations and shrill demands of networked digital media? New media are not that powerful. We still retain free will, which is the ability to focus, deliberate, and act on the results of our own deliberations. If we want to spend hours reading books, we still possess that freedom. Only philosophical argument could establish that information overload has deprived us of our agency. The claim at root is philosophical, not empirical.

My interlocutors might cleverly reply that we now, in the age of Facebook and Wikipedia, do still deliberate, but collectively. In other words, for example, we vote stuff up or down on Digg, del.icio.us, and Slashdot, and then we might feel ourselves obligated — if we’re participating as true believers — to pay special attention to the top-voted items. Similarly, we attempt to reach “consensus” on Wikipedia, and — again, if participating as true believers — endorse the end result as credible. To the extent that our time is thus directed by social networks, engaged in collective deliberation, then we are subjugated to a “collective will,” something like Rousseau’s notion of a general will. To the extent that we plug in, we become merely another part of the network. That, anyway, is how I would reconstruct the collectivist-determinist position that is opposed to my own individualist-libertarian one.

But we obviously have the freedom not to participate in such networks. And we have the freedom to consume the output of such networks selectively, and holding our noses — to participate, we needn’t be true believers. So it is very hard for me to take the “woe is us, we’re growing stupid and collectivized like sheep” narrative seriously. If you feel yourself growing ovine, bleat for yourself.

I get the sense that many writers on these issues aren’t much bothered by the un-focusing, de-liberating effects of joining the Hive Mind. Don Tapscott has suggested that the instant availability of information means we don’t have to “memorize” anything anymore — just consult Google and Wikipedia, the brains of the Hive Mind. Clay Shirky seems to believe that in the future we will be enculturated not by reading dusty old books but in something like online fora, plugged into the ephemera of a group mind, as it were. But surely, if we were to act as either of these college teachers recommend, we’d become a bunch of ignoramuses. Indeed, perhaps that’s what social networks are turning too many kids into, as Mark Bauerlein argues cogently in The Dumbest Generation. (For the record, I’ve started homeschooling my own little boy.)

The issues here are much older than the Internet. They echo the debate between progressivism and traditionalism found in philosophy of education: should children be educated primarily so as fit in well in society, or should the focus be on training minds for critical thinking and filling them with knowledge? For many decades before the advent of the Internet, educational progressivists have insisted that, in our rapidly changing world, knowing mere facts is not what is important, because knowledge quickly becomes outdated; rather, being able to collaborate and solve problems together is what is important. Social networks have reinforced this ideology, by seeming to make knowledge and judgment collective functions. But the progressivist position on the importance of learning facts and training individual judgment withers under scrutiny, and, pace Tapscott and Shirky, events of the last decade have not made it more durable.

In sum, there are two basic issues here. Do we have any choice about ceding control of the self to an increasingly compelling “Hive Mind”? Yes. And should we cede such control, or instead strive, temperately, to develop our own minds very well and direct our own attention carefully? The answer, I think, is obvious.

Wikipedia was a first draft.  I expect that, increasingly, the Citizendium will be regarded as the next draft.

Most readers of this blog have probably seen the recent article about Wikipedia in the Times of London by now (”Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply“).  The article reports on Wikipedia’s apparently sharp decline in participation.  (Eric Goldman must be crowing.)

First, I’ll say exactly what you’d expect me to say, and which I have said many times before: disaffected Wikipedians are welcome in the Citizendium community.  If in fact participation in Wikipedia is declining so severely that the quality of its articles deteriorates significantly, then I hope former Wikipedians will remember (or learn) that they can join us.  They can join simply if they are willing to work under their own real names, under the gentle guidance of experts in an open, bottom-up system, and under the Citizendium charter that is even now being drafted.

Second, let me share something with you: I think the Citizendium has an excellent chance to become the dominant reference resource in the long run.  I came to this view during CZ’s first year.  And yes, it probably still sounds silly.  As soon as it had become established that experts and non-experts could work side-by-side in a fully open, bottom-up, largely pleasant system, as CZ’s is — in other words, when I saw that CZ was a going concern — it became clear to me that there would be no reason for CZ to fold over the long term.  Therefore, it would probably continue growing its stores of high-quality content.  With more high-quality content would come more credibility and more traffic.  After a while, we would reach a tipping point.  I admit I was off about when we would reach our tipping point, but I still think it’s likely that we will reach one.  It’s only a matter of time.  The original arguments for the Citizendium model are sound, and our original demonstration that this novel way of organizing a wiki community is also sound.  So now it’s just a matter of time and patience.  Of course, in today’s hyper-accelerated society, adverting to “time and patience” might sound silly; but it does not to the wiser heads among us, because they know from experience what time and patience can bring.  The point is that CZ is a natural home for those who want to create a better encyclopedia and who have been put off from the Wikipedia experiment.  Wikipedia was a first draft.  I expect that, increasingly, the Citizendium will be regarded as the next draft.

Third, I am not going to prognosticate, unlike Eric Goldman.  Of course it’s possible that Wikipedia will find a way to move to an even stronger position.  But I will criticize.  For now, it is clearly running afoul of exactly the problems I identified in the project early on — and which I encouraged Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia community at large to fix, and which precipitated my own departure.  The pigeons are coming home to roost.  The Wikipedia experiment has deeply suffered as a result of its radical embrace of the most extreme egalitarian and anarchistic principles — which have made the community, as such principles always will do, descend into mob rule and a failed state, so to speak.  As I explained in a recent paper (”The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia“), “Wikipedia’s success is not best explained by its radical egalitarianism, its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management, all of which are consistent with a low-key role for experts.”  Because it has rejected constitutional rule, real identities, and any, even modest, official role for subject-matter experts, the project may have finally run afoul of the limits of its own deeply-ingrained, self-imposed, constitutional flaws.

And need I say this?  I think I must: CZ’s growth rate has been only modest because most of our potential contributors have instead put their efforts into Wikipedia.  But if it is becoming increasingly obnoxious to edit Wikipedia, then there must be an increasingly untapped source of volunteer labor for working on an encyclopedia.  I think that, if they look into what we’re doing, ex-Wikipedians will find that they can help make CZ into what they hoped Wikipedia would become.  They can pursue the same noble goals — but they’ll have a much better chance of doing it right this time.

So here’s a little message to the Wikipedians: sure, it takes a few minutes to sign up to CZ, and yes, you have to use your own real name.  But CZ is still open and bottom-up, and contrary to what you may think you know, there aren’t editors approving your edits or telling you what to do.  Our community is also 100% saner than Wikipedia’s.  Perhaps it’s time for a second look.

Putting aside all criticism, I do have this bit of advice.  The Wikimedia Foundation ought to post a few snapshot copies of Wikipedia from the last few years, warts and all.  If Wikipedia’s quality declines, at least the world will still have some “not too bad” Wikipedia articles to view.  I have always maintained that Wikipedia is tremendously useful, and it would be a shame if there were not some “canonical” versions of the resource that we could consult.

[By the way, I haven't worked directly on the CZ wiki for a while.  But I'm still being consulted and helping move things along as needed behind the scenes.  CZ is mostly off the ground, in my opinion, and it won't be completely off the ground qua online constitutional republic until I get out of the way.  I am a serial non-profit knowledge organizer, and my latest such project is WatchKnow.org.  Expect me to start other things, too.]

 WREG, channel 3 in Memphis, was the first to do reporting about WatchKnow.  They covered the launch event which was held at the house of the project funder.  Excellent positive coverage, we’re very happy about it!

UPDATE: another Memphis-area news source covered WatchKnow: “Web site a directory for learners, teachers alike” (Desoto Times Tribune)

The new site makes educational videos for kids ridiculously easy to find.  We are launching with over 10,000 videos placed in over 2,000 categories, arranged in a very handy directory.  The site is a new kind of wiki: working together, contributors can edit video information, and they can also edit the directory by drag and drop, which will make building the resource truly “wikiwiki” — fast.  While the project is wide open and easy to get involved with (even anonymously), the project engages teachers to act as community moderators.  It is non-profit and generously supported by an anonymous donor through the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi.  See how to edit the site in this screencast video:

We decided to get the word out on the grassroots level — in other words, virally — before we do a press release in a couple days (maybe next week).  So please, please, tweet about WatchKnow, blog about it, talk about it with your friends, etc. — and start working on the site!  This is one Web 2.0 project that really has the potential to change the world in great ways, so it needs your support.  If you love WatchKnow, say so and spread the word!

We now have an officially empanelled Charter Drafting Committee (below).

A gmail account was used to collect the votes, and Hayford Peirce did the tallying. He says a few other people had access to the account. Hayford then (today) gave me access to the account as well as the worksheet he used to tally the vote. Just a while ago, I did a separate tally of the vote on my own spreadsheet. (I.e., I didn’t simply compare the e-mailed votes to the spreadsheet, I actually made a whole new spreadsheet.) I caught two clerical errors that made absolutely no difference to the results. In fact, the number of votes (200) and the number of Citizens who voted for each of 5, 4, 3, or 2 candidates is exactly as Hayford has it. This experience has given me renewed appreciation for our volunteer election workers.

An “Advisory Board” was to be named by me, according to our current governing document, the Citizendium Statement of Fundamental Policies, which would adopt a Charter. As promised I would earlier on the forum, I hereby appoint this group of people as a temporary Advisory Board for that purpose.

Listed alphabetically, not in order of number of votes received, the Committee is:

Martin Baldwin-Edwards
Howard Berkowitz
Shamira Gelbman
Matt Innis
Meg Ireland
Russell Jones
Daniel Mietchen
Joe Quick

Congratulations to everyone!

Anyone who wants to see the votes each candidate received may write to Hayford Peirce for that information.

Further information about where the Charter itself will begin being drafted should be available via http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Charter_drafting_committee That page also states the rules of the committee.

I posted the above on Citizendium-L and other project lists. But I want to add here, for the benefit of people outside the project, that this group strikes me as being very representative of the project as a whole. There are 6 men, 2 women. Most of the people elected have been with the project for well over a year, but one is a relatively recent arrival, and one left last year (and is, evidently, back now). Four or five of the eight have Ph.D.’s, two are in their 20s (I think), I guess most are youngish to middle-aged. They all have one thing in common, however: they are all very smart.

I thought I would link to this blog post from FT’s Richard Waters, which dramatically claims, to my surprise, that I am “ready to jump ship” from the wonderful Citizendium, which I continue to love, and which I would never intentionally harm. In fairness, I think Waters reported the main facts pretty much accurately and fairly. But I did have this to say in reply (comment #1):

Richard, “jump ship” carries the wrong connotations, however eye-catching it might be. A less dramatic and more accurate statement would be that I have reiterated — once again — to carry out my promise to step down as Editor-in-Chief after 2-3 years, to ensure that the project proceeds as a bona fide constitutional republic. This does not mean I will be “abandoning” the project. If I sincerely believed that my departure would mean the end of CZ, I would make sure I stayed on board in some keyed-down capacity.

I have not updated my personal website (larrysanger.org) for many months. I’ve been very nose-to-the-grindstone with WatchKnow.org. Once it is off the ground I plan to return to CZ to help a transitioning process.

As for the Wikipedia article about CZ, its coverage of the “issue” is inaccurate and biased, as I explained on the article’s talk page. There’s no “scoop” there. It’s actually very old news.

I should add that I apologize (again) to the CZ community for my recent silence. My excuse is that I am starting up yet another non-profit educational project, this time for preK-12 videos. Don’t look at it now…it’s about to undergo a big design and software change, and will probably be under wraps for several weeks as we lead up to a (hopefully!) big launch.

(And…uh…speaking of inaccuracies on the blogosphere…I am not Jewish. But I like and admire many Jews and support the right of Israel to exist. Also, if Jimmy Wales is Jewish, that is news to me.)

Should the drinking age be lowered from 21 to a younger age?

Yesterday I turned 41, and I got a zillion “happy birthdays” in various locations, more than I got on my 40th birthday, which I thought was very strange. I finally did some poking around online and figured out why. I was mentioned, again, by Garrison Keillor, this time on “The Writer’s Almanac” (brief MP3). To have your birthday marked by Garrison Keillor — and why should anybody notice anybody’s 41st birthday? — is a bizarre experience.

Unfortunately, Citizendium and WatchKnow aren’t mentioned. I’m afraid I haven’t worked much at all on the former, because I’ve been spending almost all my time lately on the latter. We’re up to 3,600 educational videos for kids, put into a wiki-style directory. We’re deliberately flying under the radar now, because we want to make a big first impression — launch should be early this fall. Expect some really cool, and innovative, new software. I don’t know if it will be “the next big thing.” Considering how everybody’s trying to make the next big thing, it seems unlikely. But I do hope it will be really useful to school kids, teachers, and parents. That’s the aim.