Citizendium Blog

Well, it’s not as dramatic as you might think.  It seems Assignment Zero is doing a big story about CZ (”Citizendium: The Emergence of Professionalized Crowdsourcing“) and apparently they made a deal with Wired.com, so that the story is going to appear there.  Consequently, they’re somehow spinning off just the Big Story — meaning, of course, the one about CZ.

By the way – you folks working on Assignment Zero – “professionalized” might not be the best description.  Neither Jason Potkanski nor I are being paid very much for our involvement.  In fact, it’s kind of embarrassing; we aren’t proud of it, and we’d like to change the situation.  :)  And, of course, nobody else on our personnel roster is getting paid, either.  Seriously, there’s an important difference that I’ve discovered recently (not that this is rocket science or anything) between professionalism and “expertism.”  CZ is a wiki with experts — not necessarily with professionals.  We’re expert-friendly, but, considering that hardly anybody’s getting paid, we’re not particularly professional-friendly.  On the other hand, we require professional behavior, but that’s another matter.

I think CZ should return the favor.  They can write a news article about us, and we can write an encyclopedia article about them!

UPDATE (4/27/2007): here’s our article about Assignment Zero, in progress.