Citizendium in fifteen seconds
When people have asked me what Citizendium is, I’ve tended to say
It’s a lot like Wikipedia, except
1. We require that people edit under their real names;
2. We give verified experts some additional weight in disagreements;
3. Once articles get really good, our experts vet and approve them.
Of course, this leaves out a terrible amount of nuance, and I think we’re different enough that starting from a baseline of we’re like Wikipedia, except X, Y and Z isn’t ideal. But I think this is serviceable for a 15-second explanation. (And yeah, I’m a big believer in the rhetorical triad.)
I was reading Larry’s speech on The New Politics of Knowledge, and in introducing us to his audience, the three differences from Wikipedia he gave were
1. Real names,
2. Experts,
3. Contributors must agree to a social contract (which we do enforce) to behave professionally.
Which made me think. I think the social contract angle is important (perhaps a more immediately meaningful concept to the hypothetical “average person” than article approval), and I might have to revise my 15-second explanation.
At any rate, it seems to me that this is really quite important. A project gets known to the outside world through these sorts of short explanations- and if a project can’t be summed up in 15 seconds or so, or at most a paragraphs-worth of text, people start to lose interest.
How do other folks explain Citizendium in 15 seconds?
Mike
The number three option depends on if you are lookng at wikipedia environment or a citizendium environment.
How much time is spent fighting vandalism on wikipedia? Enough to realise that approval is important. I suspect the reason Larry does not put as high a priority on this is that the real names policy has effectively ended the juvenile vandalism that is prevalent on wikipedia. Whether this raises its ugly head in the future remains to be seen but the real names policy and the no nonsense attitude to destructive behavior means it is unlikely to be a problem in the near future.
Fighting over content will always be a problem, even between editors, whether on wikipedia or citizendium. This is inevitable within a community that is passionate about an encyclopedia and its content. The policy on professionalism is key as it allows arguments to discipate quickly, in theory.
In wikipedia I’d say both these are important. In CZ is it becoming apparent that the later is more important.
Comment by Chris D — November 20, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
Just to poke my head up here for a second…the reason I don’t put a high (enough) priority on approval is that our approval system is unfinished. It needs to be augmented in various ways that will make it much more efficient and active. But this is going to take a lot of time and energy to make happen. It’s not like I lack ideas, though…it’s just that I want to get the governance changes in place first.
Comment by Larry Sanger — November 20, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
“Citizendium is a world-reaching non-profit encyclopedia project that improves on the Wikipedia model by requiring all contributors to do so under their real name and by providing articles approved by credentialed topic experts.”
Comment by Stephen Ewen — November 20, 2007 @ 11:20 pm
(I think after the license is decided we need to write and adopt a brief mission statement.)
Comment by Stephen Ewen — November 20, 2007 @ 11:22 pm
I say that it takes the lessons learned from Wikipedia, preserves what works, and addresses what it doesn’t. I usually focus on the governance and atmosphere, because the people I talk to are usually well aware of the problems Wikipedia has in those areas, and avoid mention of “experts”, because they usually think they’ve heard of some encyclopedia project which doesn’t let anyone but experts contribute.
If the experts issue does come up, I tell them, look, if they let *me* in, how high can the bar possibly be?
Comment by Petréa Mitchell — December 8, 2007 @ 10:28 am