Citizendium Blog

In a very positive article in The Irish Times yesterday, Karlin Lillington reports about my Institute of European Affairs talk and focused on this point: if Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 communities don’t regulate themselves more responsibly, they might — much to my own personal dismay — find themselves increasingly regulated by anti-liberal governments.  So, I recommended that online communities do a better job of regulating themselves.  The article does a fairly good job of summing up the point.  Excellent publicity for us, to be sure!  Slainte!

Finally.

To join CZ, you can now apply via a Web form.  You no longer have to use e-mail.  And maybe more importantly, our fine constables can approve an application by simply clicking a button — and their work is done!  Thanks much to Aaron Schulz!

This will allow the same number of constables to handle two or three times the number of applications, and we’ll be able to respond faster, or I think we will — maybe on the order of minutes to hours, instead of hours to a day. That’s what I will encourage, anyway.  As a result of this, one of the next initiatives I will be putting time into is — again finally — a big, organized, ambitious recruitment campaign.

Aaron Schulz is a student at my alma mater, Ohio State, and proposed to help with this rather out of the blue last summer. He’s done really excellent work (yet another victory for the Buckeyes!), and the constables are really happy with his ConfirmAccount extension. Here’s a link to it, by the way.

We would have had this installed sooner, but we had to update to the latest MediaWiki version (which is why the wiki has been wonky lately), and that took some doing. Thanks greatly to Greg and Jason for that, and to Zach for pitching in as well.

This is an early Thanksgiving.  It occurs to me that I have not thanked people enough, especially the hardest-working people.  I thank people all the time, but it is usually for over-and-above stuff, and when people first show up.  So, at the risk of embarrassing them, I’m going to thank a whole bunch of people.  I hope you don’t mind, folks.

But I should add something, because I don’t want this sort of attention to go to anybody’s head, either — I mean, frankly, I think it’s a little ridiculous that praise from me would go to anybody’s head.  Most people aren’t that way and they realize that I’m just this guy, so big deal.  But, you see, I’m worried and I speak from experience.  In listing these people and their useful work, I do not mean, in any way shape or form, to be establishing something like a project aristocracy.  I can imagine that some people might be puffed up by this sort of attention, and think that such recognition gives them rights in the project that others do not have.  That would be very wrongheaded.  In fact, not to malign them unjustly I hope, but certain Wikipedians seem to carry about their titles and achievements and “barnstars” and whatnot as so many bludgeons that they can use to get their way.  Damn me if that ever happens on the Citizendium.  I have sometimes accused Wikipedia of being egalitarian in a bad, utopian way, but in this regard I would like CZ to be *more* egalitarian than WP.  I would like us to settle content disputes by kindly, rational compromise first, by reference to expert knowledge second, and by fair, open, law-governed dispute resolution processes last — but NEVER by a presumption that “I’ve been here
longer, I’m a Big Shot, so you gotta listen to me and my friends, or else!” We should always be a freer, more open, and indeed more equal community than that cliquish, competitive attitude implies.

And if you would never dream of being that way — well, clearly, I’m not talking about *you*.

That said in preface, here’s the rogue’s gallery from the Citizendium’s first year, in alphabetical order, and what I honor them for.  And I’m very sorry if I left anyone out, or if I failed to mention some shining achievement of yours — I’m just going based on what I remember and what I had personal experience with, and the project is already bigger than I can always personally track.  But yes, I do actually know all these people and am at least somewhat acquainted with their work for the project!  I am sure I must have left out some hard-working people, some may have slipped through the cracks, and I’m sorry that I did…

Click through to the list.

As a result of the Write-a-Thon yesterday, we broke 3,000 articles! Woo-hoo!

Well, extrapolating from month-old numbers generated by Aleksander Stos, we probably have over 4,000, but we aren’t taking credit for them all (nor should we; these are mostly Wikipedia copies).

And before you start making the inevitable comparisons with Wikipedia’s article count after 11 months, bear in mind: our articles are much longer and meatier, and much higher quality than those early Wikipedia articles were. We’ve got close to 5 million words in our articles, the median article size being 511 words. For comparison, this e-mail is just 184 words. (In 2001, an article the length of this mail would have been a longish article.) Besides, we didn’t go public until last March.

I noticed that Alek updated our wonderful statistics page and, considering that we were considerably more active in September than last summer, I think we’re not just growing, we’re accelerating in many metrics. I expect even more clearly accelerating growth in the months after our next press release (not anytime very soon–but soon enough to make me nervous!).

In short, we’re doing well! Why not celebrate by writing a new article!

From a grant proposal.

In some ways, the Citizendium works similarly to Wikipedia: an open, bottom-up wiki, a wide variety of people may join and contribute to whatever topic they want, whenever they want. The interface, using MediaWiki software, is fairly simple and easy for any reasonably technically adept person to learn. This system has allowed the Citizendium, like Wikipedia, to create thousands of articles in a short time. Yet the project is truly a by-the-bootstraps operation; when first announced, the project had a zero budget, and has been able to survive for a year on little more than $40,000 in donations and with one full-time employee.

But Citizendium’s differences with Wikipedia have proven extremely consequential and successful. Because the Citizendium requires the use of real names and biographies, there has been virtually no vandalism; furthermore, the community is mature and collegial, yet still dynamic. Because the Citizendium has a guiding role for experts, articles tend to be of remarkably high quality. Moreover, there are over 40 approved articles and over 600 “developed” articles, i.e., articles close to approval.

In addition, the Citizendium has recently enabled contributors to add various other kinds of reference information: bibliographies, external links, tables, image galleries, timelines, and much else. There is a particular need for an enhancement to MediaWiki that would incorporate these different types of information into the software. With support, the Citizendium Foundation could hire a programmer who would transform the text-oriented MediaWiki platform into something that handles all different sorts of information intelligently. The Citizendium, in turn, would show the world how to use the software.

Support for an administrative assistant would also help the project to do a serious recruitment drive; until now, most people have arrived via the many mentions of Citizendium in the technical press. Similarly, support for a development director would help the project tap into the no doubt millions of dollars that are available for a project that has already proven itself in this way.

In short, while the Citizendium has already shown that it has the potential to solve Wikipedia’s problems, further support would make this assured.

The Internet and vanity are no strangers.  The eminently mockable vanity inherent in the self-revealing ”personal home pages” of the 1990s — I admit it, I had one on Geocities – can be found once again on MySpace, FaceBook, and personal blogs.  But unlike in the 1990s, our vanity is really getting in the way of a really lively, intelligent discourse.  Too many people would rather pretend to be broadcasters, which they’ll never be interesting enough to be, than find a neutral ground in which to exchange ideas and engage in a good old-fashioned dialogue.  Let’s bring back the discussion list!

I would go on, but I’ll save it for a post on SharedKnowing, the new, but old-fashioned, mailing list discussion about online knowledge communities.  Join here.

UPDATE: Digg this!

Apologies but yep the wiki was unreachable for several hours this morning.  I don’t know what the cause was.  Probably it was somehow related to our recent (labor-intensive) upgrade to the most recent MediaWiki version.  Thanks greatly to Greg Sabino Mullane and Steadfast Networks for getting it back up.

In the future, if necessary, you’ll be able to find notes about server outages here, on this blog, or (if the blog is down, too) Citizendium-L (which is hosted by Purdue — partly for reasons of redundancy).  If there is an outage and nothing has appeared in either of those places, then please assume we don’t know about the outage yet, and report it.  I was offline this morning (writing), so I didn’t catch this until late, and people no doubt just assumed I knew about it and that I was working on it…but I didn’t and I wasn’t!

In case of emergencies, feel free to e-mail bugs@citizendium.org.  If you just have an ordinary bug report or feature request, however, please use the Trac system.

Dear All,

I’d like to invite you to join an old-fashioned discussion list, SharedKnowing:

http://mail.citizendium.org/mailman/listinfo/sharedknowing

This unmoderated (or semi-moderated) list will be devoted to well-reasoned, polite discussion and announcements about the nature of online knowledge production communities. It is open to everyone. I hope it might become a central clearing-house of general information and free, open, yet polite discussion about a cluster of issues that are of great interest to many people, and of growing importance to society at large.

See the list info page. There, I have explained:

• Purpose of the list 
• How to subscribe and unsubscribe
• How to post
• When will the discussion start?
• Who should join
• Core and example questions
• Relevant and irrelevant Internet communities/websites
• Other encouraged posts
• Subjects that will be deemed off-topic
• List rules
• List management

To give people time to arrive, discussion will start in a few weeks.

I’m starting this list for several reasons. First, as a scholar (of sorts) and project organizer, I have an active, practical interest in these topics. Second, as I write and prepare speeches (something I’m doing a lot these days), I would like to have a big group of knowledgeable, like-minded friends to bounce ideas off of. Finally, quite honestly, I miss good old-fashioned discussion lists. Back in the 90s, I ran several, and one of them, ASP-Disc, was really great. I’d like to replicate that sort of lively community.

Please post this message as widely as possible!

Regards

Larry Sanger

(more…)

The Institute of European Affairs, a prestigious Dublin, Ireland thinktank, invited me to kick off their “Our Digital Futures” program.  So I came and said a few more things about the politics of knowledge.  Here’s their summary of the talk:

Larry Sanger began by asking why governments have not regulated internet content more. The new “cyberpolitys”, communities on the internet, are generally assumed to be able to self regulate. Yet, looking far into the future, he posited the view that if Citizendium, his latest project, were to become an authoritative encyclopaedia for mankind, its internal governance would be of utmost importance. The more successful collaborative projects such as Wikipedia become, the more likely it is that an external authority will attempt to regulate their content. To avoid government intervention, the authoritative projects of the future must self govern to some extent. The best protection against undue government interference in open collaborative projects is internal governance. The Republican State may provide the best model through which future cyberpolitys can self govern. 

I had a number of comments about recent events.  I was delighted that Ireland’s Minister for Communication, Eamon Ryan, was on hand, among others, and had some kind things to say.

While there I also received a copy of IEA Senior Researcher Johnny Ryan’s new book, Countering Militant Islamist Radicalisation on the Internet: A User Driven Strategy to Recover the Web.  I might write more about that later — but who’da thunk Internet communities might be terrorism-fighting tools?  That’s what he suggests, and he makes a pretty compelling case for the thesis, from what I can tell.

You can listen here.