Citizendium Blog

If you are interested in how Citizendium works and how to make it work better, read on.

This is certainly shaping up to be another successful Write-a-Thon – by new article count, far and away the most successful, as we’re closing in on 100 new articles. I am not sure but I think it’s also the most successful in terms of number of edits per day; we’ve had 500 edits in the last eight hours (as I write this).

Obviously, Stub Week has something to do with this. And this gives me ideas (uh oh, look out). Actually, the conjunction of several purported insights is very suggestive:

1. Write-a-Thon plus Stub Week equals very high activity and record numbers of articles per day. No one is surprised by this, either, I suspect. Hmm…
2. CZ has, after one year (half of which was in a private pilot project), amassed more words than Wikipedia did in its first year (some 5 million). I estimate that our average (mean, not median) length article is six times longer than Wikipedia’s was in early 2002. I recall that, as I touted Wikipedia’s success in our first press release and in the project’s first public speech (to a Stanford class), I was embarrassed by the preponderance of very short, low-quality articles. But I also knew that incrementalism (doing a task in bits and pieces, rather than all at once) is what got people involved…
3. Like it or not, number of articles is what people pay attention to, more than length or quality of articles. We are supposed to have done not so well because we have “only” 3,400 articles…
4. We’ve got something like 2,200 “CZ Authors,” but only about 10% edit the wiki every month. I know that this is par for the course for projects like ours (the long tail and all that), but I can’t shake the feeling that we could be getting a lot more of these people involved. Why go to the trouble of creating an account (it is some trouble, after all) if you don’t intend to edit the wiki at all?
5. As is well known, people get involved in a project (or any activity) if they experience easy and satisfying success early on.

These thoughts together suggest a certain line of argument in favor of stub articles and incrementalism.

One of the reasons Wikipedia had more articles after a year was quite simply that their standards were lower, and particularly their standards of minimum length. It was possible to start ten new articles in an evening. That would be truly heroic on CZ.

This permissiveness may have had some bad effects, but it also had some strikingly good ones, which I at least have been forgetting or ignoring (until now). By allowing, and even encouraging, people to start stubs, look at what naturally happens:

• It is downright easy for new people to get involved. Pick a topic. (Most are still open.) Write a few sentences; every educated person can do that with most important topics, without too much effort. There is an instant psychological reward and instant social recognition in the community. These real effects must not be dismissed lightly.

• With people working roughly the same amount of time but on a larger number of articles, there are more opportunities for interaction. If there are 50 active people working on 50 articles in a general encyclopedia, it is unlikely that any one of them will be interested in the other 49 articles. But if each of the people is working on ten stubs apiece, there are 500 active articles, and a much higher probability that you will, through serendipity, find something on which to work with others.

Shorter articles
    –> more articles
       –> more potential topics of collaboration
          –> a more exciting and “sticky” community

• There is, obviously, a higher rate of article creation, on the assumptions that at least the same number of people are participating and that they work at least the same amount of time. This higher rate makes the project seem more “happening”; high article numbers is a natural motivator of participants, and also would help the project to get more public prominence, which gets more participants in the first place. It also creates more opportunities for links from Google, which also — again — attracts new participants.

In short, if we encourage people to start stubs more, even very short (two-sentence) stubs, the overall level of activity on the wiki is likely to increase. The higher activity will in turn, in the long run, help improve and expand articles.

Here is a small thought experiment. We easily could have created 20,000 articles in our first year, if had wanted to, simply by focusing on more short articles. It wouldn’t have required more labor (in fact, I think it would have required considerably less, which means that with the same amount of labor, we probably would have produced more than 20,000 articles). But if the news story had been “Citizendium produces more articles than Wikipedia did in its first year, and its growth rate is accelerating,” don’t you think everyone would have been a lot more excited? And wouldn’t that excitement have naturally translated to more activity on the wiki?

The people who are with us now are the ones who are patient and diligent, who see nothing unusual about working on the same article day after day until it is perfect. Of course, we love these people very much, but they are driven completionists (i.e., they want to finish a task before they move on to another task), and completionists are surely only some of the people who could be involved. I feel that we have neglected the incrementalists, who include some excellent writers and scholars, who will not get deeply involved in something unless they have experienced many early, easy, “incremental” successes.

Ultimately, you might think that whether we permanently encourage stub articles, a la Stub Week, comes down to a certain sort of existential dilemma: quality versus quantity. Many academics come down on the side of quality, of course. But what I’m saying now is that this may actually be a false dilemma. Maybe we can have both, i.e., asking people write stubs will, by increasing the overall amount of activity on the wiki, actually increase quality as well. More eyeballs, fewer mistakes. This after all is how Wikipedia has managed to create so many long and reasonably good articles. There is absolutely no reason we cannot enjoy the same effects.

What is nice, however, is that we can enjoy those effects in a community that requires real names, is guided by experts, and is governed by an explicit set of basic rules, a “social contract.” In this social context, merely by ramping up the amount of activity on the wiki, we will naturally also increase the quality of the content.

If we do encourage stubs, we will probably have many short articles for (on the order of) several years. This is something we’ll have to answer for, but there is an obvious answer: we’re a work in progress and Rome wasn’t built in a day. But in time, precisely because of our community model, all articles that should be long and detailed, will be.

We will always, of course, be open to people working for hours on a single article — the completionists. But suppose we also encourage people to dive in and create stubs. If we do this, I think the whole feel of the community will change. You’ll see more discussions on the talk pages as the number of interesting issues that come up multiplies. It will seem more dynamic and less completionistic (if that’s a word), more wide-ranging and less narrowly-focused, and more open to new people just diving in with aplomb. We’ll be open to the completionists, but we’ll also be open to the incrementalists.