Confused about Citizendium
JP Rangaswami, aka the blogger “confused of calcutta,” has written an entertaining evaluation of the Citizendium. Though I know he says it in humility, I must ungraciously agree with him: he really is confused.
But let me address him directly. JP, you say:
I must be Confused. …
Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re going to solve your spam problem for you. What we’re going to do, we’re going to set up this small committee that looks into every e-mail you get, and we’re only going to send you the ones we think are OK. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about who’s going to be on this committee and how they get there. After all, we know best.”
…
I know one thing. I’m a lot more worried about The Cult of The Expert than I am about The Cult Of The Amateur.
We’ve had the Cult Of The Expert for centuries now. And we’ve seen how and why it breaks down, why it fails. Small groups of experts can be “gamed”, often without realising it. Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.
JP, you take a very simplistic assumption — that the Citizendium is just another top-down, elitist project — and you dress it up to sound hip. I wouldn’t know about the hipness, that’s something I’ve obviously never aspired to, but as to the assumption, well, it’s just completely wrong.
“Citizendium,” the name, is formed from “Citizens’ Compendium.” That’s our identity. We ain’t elitist. At present, we have around 2000 authors drawn from the general public, and some 200 expert editors. Editors are not infrequently challenged on their views. It is, after all, a wiki. We are soon going to set up a dispute resolution body; it will be staffed in part by non-expert authors. Editors are the village elders wandering the bazaar; they aren’t attempting to redesign their cathedral to look a little more like a bazaar.
So, basically, you, and not a few other people, have got the Citizendium all wrong. But I have a sneaking suspicion that this is intentional, actually. You, and others with your reaction to CZ, see that we have made a role for experts. This, of course, is completely outrageous. It’s so wrong, in fact, that it really doesn’t matter that we are a wiki; it doesn’t matter that it’s an open, public project; it doesn’t matter that editors and authors really do work shoulder-to-shoulder. If we deviate from the party line — radical epistemic egalitarianism — then we are Elitists, pure and simple. And therefore the enemy.
I’m asking you to stretch your world of possibilities a little. If your mind is not completely closed to the possibility, you will see that it is not simply contradictory to have a merely guiding role for experts in Web 2.0 projects. There is a middle way; it’s not necessarily old-fashioned elitism vs. radical egalitarianism. Unlike Andrew Keen, I am an advocate for that middle way. If you’re interested, I’ve written something of a manifesto for this view.
And by the way: I agree with you that diagnosing the exact problem about search is hard. Simply having experts choose the winners and losers isn’t the answer. But ignoring expert opinion entirely is silly, too.
Larry, thanks for this. I think that I’m closer to the middle way approach as well, and for sure I am not a fan of Andrew Keen. I have no doubt of your intentions, by the way …. otherwise you would not have been a co-founder of Wikipedia.
I try not closing my mind. Sometimes I get that wrong as well. I look forward to reading your middle view manifesto and the other references.
I’ve tended to believe in a community participation rule of thumb which I’ve blogged about a few times, which roughly translates to:
* For every 1000 people who join a community:
* 920 are lurkers, passive observers
* 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
* 15 are activists, actually doing something
* …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession
So I’m comfortable with the idea of a community having some people more equal than others. What I guess I’m pushing back against is the Cult of the Expert. You could say I’m “not Keen” on it.
Thanks for coming back to me by commenting at my blog. I tend to read every reference people make there in comments.
By the way, I’m not a combative commenter either, so I don’t intend a He Said She Said session. If Citizendium has managed to avoid the traditional risks of elitism then I wish it well. And I’ll post about your response rather than just leave it in the comments.
Comment by JP Rangaswami — September 9, 2007 @ 9:30 am
I think it’s only to be expected that potential authors would check editor user pages before submitting an application to join the project. I’m interested in the history of anthropogy as an academic discipline. A while ago, I visited the user pages of all the History Workgroup editors and found one who has a background in that area. But I also found 3 empty User pages and a 4th with just two short sentences. The September 9 update of the CZ Editors category page says:
QUOTE: “Any former editor who is no longer on this list may reinstate his or her editorship by (1) adding a bio.”
I went back to look at them again. The empty ones have gone, but this one remains on the list: direct link. It looks bad. I wonder how many potential authors you’ve lost because of absent or poor quality bios.
Comment by Eire Islander — September 9, 2007 @ 10:09 am
One thing you have to bear in mind is that we, CZ staff, see a lot more information about a person than you do. That is as it should be, because of privacy concerns. It’s not as if we make our decisions about who is and is not an editor based just on what you see on the pages.
Still, I have to agree in this case. We need more information from that particular editor.
Comment by Larry Sanger — September 9, 2007 @ 10:48 am
I just noticed I made a typing error in the word “anthropology,” but back to my main concern — it’s not relevant that CZ staff see a lot more information about a person than we do. What matters is that potential authors will be reassured by the bios. There needs to be a minimum standard for listing editors’ qualifications and experience on the User pages. Until the day arrives when CZ staff are receiving dozens of editor applications each day, why not ask the staff to post those minimum prerequisites on the User pages at the time of approval?
Comment by Eire Islander — September 9, 2007 @ 11:27 am
We do now. You simply found an editor who was added back when we trusted people to add their own bios.
Comment by Larry Sanger — September 9, 2007 @ 11:44 am
Thanks for pointing that out, Eire. We’re on it.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — September 9, 2007 @ 4:33 pm
Just to be clear, I mean thanks to Eire for pointing out that instance of a (lack of) bio.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — September 9, 2007 @ 10:58 pm
It’s nice that Citizendium has experts for quality assurance, but I don’t think it’s a major selling point for rank-and-file contributors. My guess is that the ones who say goodbye to ‘The Other Place’ are fed up with vandalism, protracted disputes, partisan bias and the recently publicized spin-doctoring from corporate and government IP addresses. The real names requirement is a reasonable safeguard, but I doubt that ‘elders patrolling the bazaar’ ranks high on their wish-lists. Controversial topics need supervision, but flawed or not, the Britannica/Wikipedia comparison published in Nature didn’t boost the cachet of expertise.
Comment by Mojo — September 10, 2007 @ 11:30 am
Why would you expect a boost of expertise? There is still all the vandalism issues. You can only remove some many “I’m the man” and “dick was here” type comments before getting fed up? At least the wiki bots are now on top of the most gratuitous vandalism but the subtle stuff is still time comsuming to monitor.
Comment by Chris D — September 12, 2007 @ 6:48 am
Forgive me if this comment appears more like a mini-essay. I have been following the responses since this post was added a few days ago. I waited to see if comments appeared from registered authors in support of expert supervision.
Non-participating members of the public accessing the site to read the articles may welcome the editorial role of university academics. By contrast, contributors are surely motivated by the feeling that their in-depth knowledge about particular topics will be treated as something of real value. Too much interference by editors who also happen to be university staff, and they will depart. No one is going to pay them a salary, or offer them tenure, for putting up with editors who pull rank. Human nature being what it is, that will happen from time to time regardless of what the official policy says.
Anyone who reads PDF documents on university websites can discover major disagreements between academic experts - even in the hard sciences.
My suggestion is that, with the exception of granting approved status to good articles, editors should not be allowed to edit author-contributed content in articles under development. Official policy should limit their involvement to proffering suggestions on talk pages, with transgressions punishable by revoking their editorial status (that would NOT bar them from commencing articles themselves). Regular authors can edit questionable material added by their peers if the goal is article approval. And there are constables for backup. You have around 200 editors. If each of them produced just one article or stub each week you would have quite an impressive figure to display on your main page by now.
Take the example of a retired person like me. As a psychology student at university in the 1960s I had to regurgitate narrow behaviorist theories in answer to examination questions in order to obtain a degree. The founder of behaviorist psychology, J.B. Watson, declared that he could find no support for hereditary patterns of behavior, nor for special abilities in music, art, etc., that tend to run in families. Today, the head of the psychology department at my old alma mater is an evolutionary psychologist who believes almost the exact opposite. His armchair speculations about genetic predispositions have appeared in newspapers.
The big plus for Citizendium is that anonymous edits are not allowed. But if the editorial team try to reinforce academic orthodoxies in disciplines where indisputable facts are thin on the ground I suspect complaints will appear in the blogosphere. Now that Wikipedia has 2 million articles in English (including lots of stubs, no doubt), they could afford to change their policy and require registration. I find it hard to imagine that they will be able to rely on a dedicated core of Wikipedians to keep vandalism under control forever. In the meantime, you have the advantage of keeping out spam and spin.
Comment by A.M. Sherwood — September 12, 2007 @ 1:14 pm