Citizendium Blog

Alex Halavais was interviewed about Citizendium for Assignment Zero and among other things said this:

Q: You were quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October of last year as saying that you didn’t think Citizendium was going to work, that “it looks far too restrictive, and it costs too much effort to join and contribute.” Now that it’s firmly on its way, do you still feel that way?

A: I’m not ready to eat my words yet, although that quote really only got at a corner of what I thought on the matter. I still think Citizendium is going to face some of the difficulties that Nupedia did. It’s a little like early aircraft design: there is a clear point at which a collaborative project takes off and gets off the ground. If it makes that point, then it will probably keep flying for a while.

Wikipedia took off by taking out a lot of the checks and balances that we expect to find in an encyclopedia. Citizendium is including those checks from the beginning, and I think that’s an interesting model. I suspect that starting off loose and tightening up the ship as things move forward–much like the cyclical process of most programming projects these days–is probably a good model.

The truth is that Sanger has made clear he doesn’t think of this as an elitist approach, and that there is a role for credentialed expertise in an open encyclopedia. Ironically, Wales seems to be approaching that view from the other side, recognizing the importance of stabilizing the content of Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia remains too loose, and Citizendium is still short on the momentum needed to launch it forward, but they are converging on a similar ideal.

I think it’s good that Citizendium is there, and I think it is a very worthwhile endeavor. I just don’t know that it’s going to be able to gather enough excitement among its users to allow for the kind of mass of articles needed to make it appealing to a large user base.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that I couldn’t tell, without some research, whether this was merely a report of research done for another article, or an article unto itself.  That’s one aspect — not necessarily a disadvantage, but it can be in some cases — of the “publish, then filter” model, which Assignment Zero is following.  Except that they are really following a model similar to CZ’s: it’s “post, then filter, then publish as approved.”