Citizendium Blog

Those of you who have been following this project may recall that Citizendium-L was absurdly active in its first several days. A similar phenomenon has occurred after Citizendium-Editors launched, a little more than a day ago.  Well over two-thirds of CZ editors–so, well over 100 very smart people–are subscribed.  The archives have 88 messages, and about a half-dozen of them are complaining about all the mail. Well, you can’t blame them. I’ve proposed that we wait a few days to see how things shake out. I think discussion will inevitably quiet down. The only question, I think, is whether we should move to forums. The Citizendium Forums are still going very well, and they were launched by the Citizendium-L excitement. Clearly, the question is not, “What active means of discussion can we create?” but “What configuration of means of discussion should we have?” This is something I really haven’t grokked yet, despite having thought a fair bit about it…

Since Phase 2 of the pilot project launched on October 29, 110 editors have activated usernames on the pilot project wiki, and 151 editors have been invited. Most of these people possess doctorates, although not all of them do; if they had the terminal degree in their field (such as JD or MLIS) plus a certain amount of experience and publications, then they were invited.

In addition, approximately 90 author applicants have been invited; around 70 constable applicants were asked to be authors (we have filled our quota of constables, namely five for now); and about 60 highly-qualified people, who might become “specialist editors” if we opt to include such a category, were asked to be authors. We are waiting for more information, or for endorsement of the Statement of Fundamental Policies, from approximately 90 people.

In all, there are 263 usernames on the wiki with read/write access. If you are thinking there are still quite a few invitees who haven’t created usernames, or who haven’t had their usernames activated, you’d be right!
(Actually getting all these people into the system is what I’ve spent much of the last 3-4 days doing–that’s why I haven’t been seen much anywhere else.)

There are 183 articles tagged “CZ Live,” i.e., someone is or intends to be working on them.

I’d estimate we had about 300 edits yesterday. Nothing compared to Wikipedia, but then, as I can tell you since I was there, it’s a heck of a lot more than Wikipedia had after its first ten days.

This evening, we launched two different important groups:

The Executive Committee. Seventeen members at present, eight editors, four constables, the three technical guys, and two more. I’m asking these people to take my very long “to do” list and help me spearhead efforts to get to work on it. I hope you’ll see them out and about and making noise in the coming weeks. This committee will not be making policy; it’s the executive, not the policymaking body.

The Citizendium-Editors list. It will be the main editors’ forum. They will answer such questions as these:

• What top-level workgroups should be set up?
• What should the editor registration process be?
• What should the article approval process be?
• What should the dispute resolution process be?

If you’re an editor and you’re not on it (I didn’t add you or send you an invitation), then let me know.

Note that only editor-specific issues will be discussed on CZ-Editors. Other issues will be handled by Citizendium-L and the forums, as before.

Both of these groups are by invitation only. The Executive Committee, since it deals with sensitive issues of many sorts, will be closed-archive. The editor group will be open archive.

We’re happy to be able to say that we have now gone through and made at least our initial replies to all applicants to join the pilot project. If everything went smoothly, you should be in the system now. Otherwise, we’re waiting for something from you (typically, more info, a real name, etc.).

Thanks very much to our constables and personnel administrators, Ruth Ifcher, Sarah Tuttle, Mike Johnson, Phil Wardle, Fred Salsbury, and a few others, for pitching in.

Next, we’re going to send mails to people in different categories. There are three main categories:

(1) We’ve asked for info from you and you haven’t sent it yet. There are quite a few of these.

(2) We’ve asked you to be an author or an editor, and asked you to create a username, but you haven’t done that yet.

(3) You’ve made a username and we’ve activated it. (We’ll simply be asking these people to get to work.)

We’re bound to have made mistakes with this many applications. Sorry if that’s true in your case. We’re also sorry it has taken so long to finish.

In an interview with Pallab Ghosh on BBC Radio 4 (Real player 8mins), Tim Berners-Lee argues for Web Science. Sir Tim says that engineering and social science disciplines need to come together to better understand and enable the benefits of the WWW.

TBL is concerned that the web’s unique social properties easily lead to bad outcomes, e.g. new generations of spam-like nuisances, undemocratic social-engineering, and importantly for Citizendium: the web has misinformation and unreliable information. The knight-of-the-web remains upbeat: with the right understanding he is confident that the web will deliver. Important questions remain: how can we predict what will happen? How do we stop the bad derailing the good?

The web is an open creative space with its own rules. A space where a small idea like a blog becomes the blogosphere, and that little idea of a wiki becomes the Wikipedia and the Citizendium.

Tim says that the future web will be a powerful place: a creative medium where the best thing is to be astonished at what others can do.

Peter Hitchmough

Through working as a Personnel Administrator (along with Sarah Tuttle, Ruth Ifcher, and Freddie Salsbury) and helping field some of email Citizendium receives, I’ve had a chance to watch some of the talent joining the pilot project. We’ve gotten some really fantastic applications- both in terms of sheer expertise and of enthusiasm for the project mission. I think the users (Citizens?) that are joining the project will be a great core group to help guide the community once we open things up to the general public. Basically, things look really good (and exciting) from where I’m standing.

On a personal note, it’s also been rewarding for me to watch the “recent changes” page on the wiki and see people I’ve interacted with over email start to edit articles on the wiki. Citizens, if you haven’t already, check out http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges - it’s not only neat to watch but it also gives some good starting points for collaboration with other people working on the wiki. And hopefully over the weekend we can get completely caught up with the flood of applications (we’re very close)… I do apologize to those applicants we haven’t contacted yet. It’ll happen very soon, for sure.

In the longer term, one Personnel issue that I think the Citizendium project and community will need to address is how much of a factor work experience should be in qualifying to be an editor. It’s obviously important since there’s a lot of expertise outside of academia, and a tendency to draw editors only from academia will produce an unbalanced encyclopedia– but how should work experience be balanced against academic experience? A Ph.D is just a proxy for expertise, but it’s probably a pretty good one. What types of work experience might be equivalently good proxies for expertise? What are the experiential, private sector equivalents to academic publications and original research? I certainly don’t have any answers (I suspect Larry is at least two steps ahead of me here, as he often is), but I’ll sign off with a few observations on expertise that won’t be news to anyone involved in this project yet might bear repeating.

The first is that expertise is not uniformly distributed between fields. In some areas, the vast majority of people who know anything about the subject seem to be in or closely tied to academia. In other areas, cutting-edge expertise seems to be more concentrated in industry or business.

The second is that work experiences in industry, business, and professional areas often lead to different kinds of expertise than does research in academia.

And, to wax philosophical, I think the issue of identifying experts outside of academia is a challenging problem with many edge cases, but clearly isn’t a fundamentally hard problem of the type that doesn’t have a real answer: as a professor of mine used to say, “The existence of dawn and dusk does not preclude the existence of day and night.”

So asks Danielle Sacks. She thinks that the advent of the Citizendium says something interesting about open source generally:

This of course raises the central debate of the entire open-source movement: does the revival of the expert mean we’re already over the whole utopian idea of a democratic, user-generated world? Have we realized that it just doesn’t work?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Danielle takes hold of the less-hip horn of a false dilemma that a lot of OSS advocates have purveying: either you’re a top-down elitist who rejects the benefits of open source and open content, or you’re a bottom-up amateurist who embraces the free stuff movement. Right now I seem to be a voice in the wilderness, advocating that experts and the general public can come together on roughly equal terms, as part of a bottom-up collaboration, with experts making final decisions as necessary, and the work of everyone being released under a free license. In fact, there’s no reason we can’t view open source itself as involving experts, in a way; it’s just that experts outside of the field of software development need to learn from the “bazaar” model of production.

A month ago, Citizendium was just an idea. Now it’s a pilot and soon it will be big enough to leave the nest: to stretch its wings and battle with the wild currents of public opinion and criticism. Soon after Larry began sharing and developing his ideas for Citizendium on the mailing lists, it became clear that some ideas needed a proof of concept so that we might all better understand what was going on and where that may lead us, intellectually and technically. Hence the pilot was conceived.

As the dim lightbulb came on in my head, I began to contribute to the discussions. I’ve been keen to see the project succeed at applying the positive aspects of collaborative knowledge development while avoiding some of the problems seen at Wikipedia. Then, given my own technical background, I’ve tried to convey a sense of the technical as both the servant and a lever available to such an enterprise. And so in my weakness, I find myself as a member ot the Citizendium Technical Focus Group.

The Technical Focus Group comprises Jason Potkanski, Greg Sabino Mullane and me Peter Hitchmough. Our first real challenge has been to apply the electrodes to the dead body of a server and build an Internet-ready pilot environment. Our second challenge is in keeping it running. We have a private development site built on GForge where we store source code, build the site and track bugs. As you can imagine we are kept busy.

Our hot issues are: managing the data imported from Wikipedia, keeping good performance, looking at immediate expansion plans and handling user queries. If you are a Citizendium user we look forward to serving you. If not, why not consider signing up? See the Call For Applications.

I have to admit that I was a bit worried at the relatively slow start we made with our first 100 invitees last Sunday, but the technical difficulties, together with a Sunday launch, seem to have explained that. Yesterday participation really shot up, and today has increased even more. There were 307 edits today (i.e., Wednesday, though I write this after midnight!). Some 57 articles are “live,” meaning that we have worked on them or started them from scratch. I estimate a half-dozen of these are brand new articles, but I just don’t know–could be two or three times that. Presently there are 131 people registered as having read/write access to the wiki. About half of these, I would estimate, are editors. There are also a few dozen people who have registered usernames, but whose usernames haven’t been activated (hint, they need to tell us to activate their usernames; we’ll get around to it, though, even if they don’t tell us). And there are still over 200 applications–no exaggeration–waiting for the “personnel administrators” (there are five of us doing this now) to “let them in.” And we’re still receiving, I would say, at least 10-20 new applications per day.

After we’ve let everyone in (or at least gotten rid of the backlog), I am going to send a mail out to all invitees, cheerleading and orienting. I’ll bet that will help ramp up work even more. People unfortunately need to be told that it’s OK, it’s a wiki, you can get to work now, and if enough of us do it will be something fantastic.

Also, I’ve received several calls to open up the Citizendium-Editors mailing list and to start organizing editor work. (I haven’t done so yet because I don’t want to kick off discussion until all invite-able editors sitting in the queue have been added to the list.) I think that will change and markedly improve editor effort, because unfortunately a lot of editor types are very timid. My “be bold” injunction (true here as it was on Wikipedia) makes them nervous. When editors start talking to other editors, telling them to come in, the water’s fine, the result will be a really energized group of really smart people. Anyway, when we get editors organized, and particularly when we get discipline-level editorial workgroups organized, then by golly I hope to see a higher level yet, in both quantity and quality, of work done on the wiki.

I haven’t really had time to take stock on what’s happened this week until now. As my wife knows better than anyone, I’m at it nearly every waking hour. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. But as I peek my head out “from the trenches” and attempt to take stock, it seems (from this unreliable perspective) that the pilot project is shaping up to be not just a success, but a roaring success.

I’m very happy to report that I’ll be speaking to two different major foundations in the next few days.  Nothing is promised yet, but the fact that they have approached us to talk is an excellent sign.  We do have a significant seed grant in our new Citizendium Foundation bank account, from a third foundation.  There are several other earlier contacts and leads to follow up on from previous weeks, as well.