Citizendium Blog

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Citizendium After One Year
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 30, @05:21PM
from the 3,200-articles dept.

Education The Internet

Larry Sanger writes “Citizendium, ‘the Citizens’ Compendium’ – a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts – has just announced that it’s celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether ‘we’ve made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.’ We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we’ve still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It’s looking that way.”

Just came across an article in Library Journal by Cheryl Miller Maddox, “The Promise of Citizendium.”  A nice takeaway quote:

While Citizendium, only in its beta stage, is too new to evaluate for usefulness as a reference source, Sanger’s vision of a democratic, dependable encyclopedia is compelling, and as a librarian, I trust his system as an idea.

For immediate release

Citizendium Wiki Celebrates One Year Online
New Knowledge Society Takes Root, Flourishes

Article number triples in six months. Growth of knowledge base accelerates. What began as an online knowledge experiment is here to stay. New developments announced to celebrate first anniversary of the Citizendium online reference source. Robust growth, faster application turnaround, credibility seen as keys to the Citizendium project’s continued success. Trusted source of knowledge sees increasing growth ahead.

October 30, 2007 – It has been one year since the private launch of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) wiki, an online reference source aiming to create “the world’s most trusted knowledge base.” The innovative non-profit project combines free-wheeling, open wiki collaboration with real names and guidance by expert editors.

Since then, more than 2,100 people have joined as authors and editors and 3,300 articles are under development. The project has tripled its article count since its public launch last March. Also, the rate at which it creates new articles has tripled in the last ten months and doubled in the last one hundred days.

“We’ve grown nicely, and are now clearly accelerating,” said the project’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Larry Sanger, who is also co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger, in a progress report (http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html), used the occasion to “debunk myths” about the project, acknowledge significant progress, announce several new initiatives for the expert-guided online project, and make some bold predictions.

According to Sanger, the Citizendium’s readers have only just begun to see the power of the project’s model. “Simply put, we’ve pioneered a new and better way to use wikis, and an interesting, dynamic way to build an online knowledge base,” Sanger said. “Increasingly, the Citizendium is looking like the next step in the evolution of the collaborative Internet.”

The project has been virtually free of the sort of vandalism and irresponsibility for which other Web 2.0 projects are frequently criticized, partly because real names are required for participation. By allowing self-driven public contribution, with oversight by editors who are established experts in their fields, there is a framework to ensure dynamic growth without sacrificing quality and credibility.

“Some said it couldn’t be done, but the Citizendium proves that experts and the general public can work together collaboratively to create high quality encyclopedic content,” said Sanger.

The project announced some significant new features and projects:

+ A new automated registration process allows for the turnaround of user applications within a few hours at most. So the project has finally launched its first recruitment campaign, with significant results already.

+ An innovative use of wiki software involves placing various sorts of reference information on “subpages” of the main topic page. For example, attached to the article about Biology (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology) are wiki pages listing related articles, a bibliography, external links, and an image gallery. The pages are linked together via a tab interface.

+ The new “Core Articles” initiative identifies and prioritizes new articles for addition to the Citizendium.

+ The Eduzendium initiative (http://www.eduzendium.org/), now in a pilot project, encourages professors to use the Citizendium for serious public writing assignments. Several excellent articles have already been written this way. Sanger wrote in the progress report that it’s “perfect” for such college work, “because most topics are wide open, and the project is managed in a way that will appeal to most professors.”

+ A monthly “Write-a-Thon” spans the globe for one day each month, adding extra collaborative activities during a concentrated time span. The next one is Nov. 7th.

+ The project, part of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is hoping to raise at least $10,000 in an end-of-the-year fundraiser.

For several other interesting achievements, see: http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html#demonstrated

Also in the progress report, Sanger predicted that an “explosion of growth” will come in the next year, and that the project will have 100,000 articles by 2011, if not sooner.

“We look forward to welcoming all new visitors to the Citizendium website,” Sanger said, “and I encourage any user who appreciates what we are creating to sign up to become an author or editor.”

LINKS:

Website: http://www.citizendium.org/
Progress report: http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html
Biology article: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology
Eduzendium: http://www.eduzendium.org/
Press page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Press
This press release: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Oct302007

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Larry Sanger, Editor-in-Chief
Write for phone number.
sanger@citizendium.org
http://www.larrysanger.org/

Here’s a recruitment post I made to IRTRAD-L, the main list about Irish traditional music.

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If you don’t know how to stay on top of your e-mail, and you have a half hour to learn how, this is very cool.  I don’t know if it works (or if it will work for you), but it makes sense to me.

I’d appreciate your suggestions about how to stay on top of e-mail, if you have any!

The Citizendium registration system, coded up by Ohio State student Aaron Schulz, is a remarkable success.  We have gone from a few days (on average) to get new contributors into the wiki last summer, to 24 hours in recent weeks, to (usually) minutes within the last week.

The reason for this is quite simple, and instructive for Web 2.0 project organizers: automation.

And, as a result, we are now enabled, and empowered, to start a serious recruitment drive!

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This is my kick-off mail for our new recruitment effort, sent to PHILOSOP and PHILOS-L.  It explains why philosophers should get involved with CZ, despite the existence of Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Feel free to forward it to philosophers!   –Larry

Dear philosophers,

Larry Sanger, long-time listmember and Wikipedia co-founder, here. I’m now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) and I’m writing, again, to invite you to join the project, which you can easily do
here:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount

A human being will look over your (brief!) application and let you in typically within an hour or two. But why should you join? Read on.

================
Some differences

Some months ago, I announced here the start of the non-profit, free, international Citizendium (”the Citizens’ Compendium”). “CZ” as we call it is a wiki and a general encyclopedia project. Since first announcing the project, it occurred to me that many of you may have not seen its point. So I wanted to describe the project’s interesting niche. What makes it different from other projects, and why should philosophers join in?

* Unlike Wikipedia, contributors to our wiki are required to use their real names; experts have a role (they approve articles and can make decisions about content issues in their areas of expertise); and the community is managed by “constables” who ensure that contributors follow the rules. As a result, our open, but expert-led community is remarkably pleasant and virtually vandalism-free. It’s been called “Wikipedia for grown-ups.”

* Unlike the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy–both fine reference works, which I have used regularly over the years–CZ articles are not signed, and they are constructed collaboratively. Furthermore, CZ is considerably more open and interdisciplinary. These are “differences that make a difference,” as I’ll explain below.

=============
We’re growing

We’re about to celebrate the first year anniversary of the launch of our pilot project. In the intervening time, we have developed over 3,100 articles–three times what we had last spring. Every month, over 200 different people edit the wiki, and some 2,000 people have signed up with accounts, of which about 240 are expert editors. We continue to grow robustly and, recently, at an accelerating rate. Wikipedia started small, too. In a few years, we will have over a hundred thousand articles (my opinion of course). There is no reason that we cannot replicate Wikipedia’s sort of growth, which as Wikipedia’s organizer I engineered; our fundamentals are very solid.

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Elephants

Our deadline for essay-length comments – before the Citizendium begins the process of actually choosing a license for articles that we ourselves have created – is October 20.  We have seven essays so far (and will have at least eight, as I intend to write one).  You’re welcome to weigh in!

A few months ago, Jason Calacanis posted a piece on Wikipedia’s Technological Obscurification: Three ways Wikipedia keeps 99% of the population from participating. Not ever having missed a chance to be provocative, he opens with an argument that

The Wikipedia is currently designed to lower participation so it is easier to manage.

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to limit participation in Wikipedia–perhaps that’s what necessary to keep the project on track. However, I think we should be really honest about the fact that Wikipedia is not an open system–at least not open in the sense that anyone can participate. Let’s look at just three examples:
1. Wikipedia pages have become increasingly complex and Wikipedia doesn’t support a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get,” and that means that as you edit if you make something bold or underline you see bold or underline–just like Microsoft Word. Wikipedia doesn’t use a WYSIWYG because if they did more people could edit the pages–people without technology skills–and that would make the entire system collapse–at least according to the folks at the Wikipedia conference I attended.

For example, in this image you can see what it’s like to edit the George W. Bush page:

As you can see you need code in Wiki Markup language in order to edit this page.

 2. The Wikipedia uses “Discussion pages” to reach consensus, and these pages are also coded in mediaWiki so that 99% of people can’t figure them out.

3. The Wikipeda uses IRC chat, which 99% of folks don’t know how to use, in order to discuss the inner workings of Wikipedia.

Setting aside Calacanis’s speculations on why things are the way they are, I think he has some interesting facts on his side about participation.

The second and third points are fairly specific to Wikipedia, but the first point– that people can get buried in the complexity of MediaWiki’s arcane style of editing– is spot on for us, too. There’s no question in my mind that requiring contributors to learn arcane wiki markup language (instead of having an easy option for “what you see is what you get” editing) lowers participation and makes participation less democratic. Part of Citizendium’s stated mission is to be less insular than Wikipedia, and I think a necessary part of making that happen is to make editing easier.

Now, we’re juggling plenty of tech issues and plans, and it’s easy for important things to get put on the backburner. So I guess I just want to put the question out there, for when we have more resources: how important is it for Citizendium to have a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get way to edit articles?

-Mike