Citizendium Blog

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

Dear Irtradders,

Larry Sanger, long-time listmember and Wikipedia co-founder, here. I’m now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/), a new wiki encyclopedia project, and I’m writing 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.

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Some differences

Maybe your first question is: OK, there’s Wikipedia. So why another project?

Because the non-profit, free, international Citizendium (”the Citizens’ Compendium”) has a better model. “CZ” as we call it is a wiki and a general encyclopedia project.

* 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.”

* The only other encyclopedia of Irish (or Celtic) music that I know if is written by Michael Robinson, whom I had the pleasure to meet when I was living in the Bay Area last year, here: http://www.standingstones.com/musencyc.html I’ve read and enjoyed his articles, but well…he’s one writer and editor, and as much as he’s been able to do and compile, it is limited in scale.

In short, as useful and as high-quality as these resources are, I am certain that we can do better if we come together, and under more sensible rules than Wikipedia has.

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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 3,200 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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Why contribute if you can’t take personal credit?

I could go on at great length about this question, but I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that (1) if we succeed, and there is an excellent chance we will, it will be **enormously** beneficial to humanity (imagine Wikipedia done right); (2) it can be great fun, the psychological rewards can be curiously intense; and (3) for the Irtrad experts on the list, editorship and other positions of responsibility can be claimed on a CV (I make no guarantees that this will help–but it’s something!).

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:The_Author_Role
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:The_Editor_Role

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But what about our level of quality?

It’s a young wiki, so most articles are “in progress.” To get an idea of the level of quality we are aiming at, and very capable of, please see our lists of “Approved Articles” and “Developing Articles”:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:Approved_Articles (scroll down)

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:Developed_Articles

In the previous year, we have discovered something very interesting: wiki-based expert/public collaboration is capable of producing large numbers of really high-quality articles. I’m particularly proud of our approved articles–check out “life” and “biology.”

There are only a few articles written about music (including one by me about John Doherty), but I am hoping that this announcement and these arguments will help change that.

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Help us fill in the top 99 music topics

I’d also like to invite you to create any from a set of 99 “core articles” about musical topics. Here’s the (incomplete) list:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Core_Articles/Arts#Music_-_Stage_3

(We’re still compiling the list–you could join in on that, y’know!)

Use this link if the latter is broken: http://tinyurl.com/2j7yvl

I would be happy to discuss Citizendium privately, or on this list, or on the “Non-member discussion” board of the Citizendium Forums, here: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/board,73.0.html

There’s much more to read on the website: http://en.citizendium.org/

Again, do join us!
Here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount

Regards,
Larry
—–
Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/
Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/
sanger@citizendium.org