Citizendium Blog

Speech delivered at the Jefferson Society, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 9, 2007, and at the Institute of European Affairs, Dublin, Ireland, September 28, 2007, as the inaugural talk for the IEA’s “Our Digital Futures” program.

I want to begin by asking a question that might strike you as perhaps a little absurd. The question is, “Why haven’t governments tried to regulate online communities more?” To be sure, there have been instances where governments have stepped in. For instance, in January of last year in Germany, the father of a deceased computer hacker used the German court system to try to have an article about his son removed from the German Wikipedia. As a result, wikipedia.de actually went offline for a brief period. It’s come back online, of course, and in fact the article in question is still up.

Here’s another example. In May of last year, attorneys general from eight U.S. states demanded that MySpace turn over the names of registered sex offenders lurking on the website, which as you probably know is heavily frequented by teenagers. The website deleted pages of some 7,000 registered sex offenders. And the following July, they said that in fact some 29,000 registered sex offenders had accounts, which were subsequently deleted.

Those are just a few examples. But we can make some generalizations. The Internet is famously full of outrageously false, defamatory, and offensive information, and is said to be a haven for criminal activity. This leads back to the question I asked earlier: why haven’t governments tried to regulate online communities even more than they have?

We might well find this question a little absurd, especially if we champion the liberal ideals that form the foundation of Western civil society. Indeed, no doubt one reason is our widespread commitment to freedom of speech. But consider another possible reason—one that, I think, is very interesting.

Read the rest here.

Here’s an “action item”…a favor.

Could you link to two specific Citizendium articles, “Butler” and “Telephone newspaper,” from your websites, home pages, or blogs, wherever they might be? And please use the specific text “butler” and “telephone newspaper”. You see, this is known as “Google bombing,” and it helps if the text is always the same. But we’re doing it for a good cause. Trust me!

Here are HTML versions of the links:

<a href=”http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Butler”>butler</a>
<a href=”http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Telephone_newspaper”>telephone newspaper</a>

For an example of my own links to these pages, you can look at my personal home page (in the first paragraph).

Why? Well, it bothers me somewhat that Citizendium has a Google PageRank of 6. This is bound to increase, of course, merely with the passage of time. But a little push couldn’t hurt. Besides, I’d like to get the idea out there that it’s OK to link to CZ articles.

UPDATE (late evening the same day): it’s Saturday, usually a fairly slow day on the wiki.  For whatever reason, however, we’ve had over 1,000 edits in the last 24 hours.  That’s pretty remarkable, I think.

In the wake of the mass mailing last Sunday/Monday, we’ve still got a lot of newer and returned people at work. I spent a little time this morning thanking some of the new people (who were doing work in the last 24 hours). There were 16 of them, by my count, in the last 24 hours, but I might have missed a few.

Of course, ongoing thanks are due to the “old hands.” These days, you can always expect to see something from Steve Ewen, Richard Jensen, Robert King, Yi Zhe Wu, Michael J. Formica (who is pretty new actually), Paul Wormer, Joe Quick, and many others who are clearly committed…or clearly should “be committed”… (Just kidding!)

I’m seeing many fewer “beginner faux pas” on recent changes, too…which is not surprising…it’s not like the basic rules are complex.

As a result, we’ve sustained our daily edit count and new article creation rate at very high levels the last few weeks, and passed 3800 live articles yesterday. That’s 500 articles, a 15% gain, in 18 days. For the sake of comparison: the previous 500 articles required 43 days.

It is interesting that, if you do the Google search for “biology,” you won’t find the fine Citizendium article on the subject.  It is actually better than the #1 result (the Wikipedia article), and it is certainly of more interest and use for people who do the “biology” search than many items in the top 100.

This alone demonstrates that there is something wrong with Google.  But what, precisely?  What is Google doing wrong, and how could they do better?

UPDATE (evening): 500 edits in six hours, well over 50 articles today (it might be more like 75), and I’ve received dozens and dozens of mails from people who said, “Sorry, I’ll start contributing soon.”  It’s really great to have confirmation of so much deep support for what we’re doing here!

A huge number of new people, or newly-active people, arrived following my mailing to thousands of people with Citizendium accounts.  Apparently, they just needed a reminder.  (This isn’t a sort of reminder I’ll send regularly, though, trust me.)  Right now, there are more unfamiliar names than familiar ones on recent changes – that’s just how I like it.

Actually, I separated accounts into five categories:

1. People with bios who had made an edit
2. People with bios who hadn’t made an edit
3. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages who had made an edit (there were some)
4. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages, who hadn’t made any edits
5. People with poorly-formed usernames

(Actually, I’m about to send out #5 — with no small amount of nervousness.  )

Here is the letter I sent to #1:

(more…)

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.

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The Financial Times had an article about us on the back page of the first section:

Larry Sanger is still predicting big things for Citizendium, the expert-moderated alternative to the “open” encyclopedia Wikipedia he launched a year ago.

Given the scale of his ambition, the results so far are decidedly modest: 3,300 articles, growing at the rate of 14 a day, compared to more than 2m on Wikipedia. Still, Mr Sanger, who was in at the beginning of Wikipedia, is unabashed, as his update goes: “At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively - say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude. And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate.”

Comments such as that make it sound like Sanger is succumbing to wishful thinking in his efforts to hit back at old nemesis, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Still, he has a point. Projects such as this are deeply viral, and many of the experts he wants to attract will only jump in once they feel a tipping point has been reached.

As Wikipedia’s extraordinary expansion continues, I, for one, hope Mr Sanger gets the formula right. It’s way too early in the development of the internet to hand so much influence over what passes for human knowledge to a still experimental website such as Wikipedia.

That’s nice publicity, but I have two comments.  First, the notion that the reason I am working on the Citizendium is that I want to “hit back” at Jimmy Wales is, frankly, completely ludicrous.  Yes, I wake up every day fired by the thought, “This is how I’m going to get back at Jimbo!”  Puh-leeeze.  I’m far more fired up by the notion that something I started, namely Wikipedia, has had all sorts of unintended and undesirable consequences (along with the good, of course, of which there is much) — well, I think I can do better, so I think I’m obligated to.  Really, if you thought you had a shot at doing better than Wikipedia, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?  Of course you would.  So I am.

Second, it is equally ludicrous to compare CZ to WP now.  CZ has been around for one year, and only half of that as a public project!  I never thought that we’d grow explosively in our first year.  I knew it would take time to get off the ground.  I am, however, very pleased to have learned (recently) that we actually have more words in our database than Wikipedia did after its first year.  After one year, our average article (mean, not median) is six times as long as what Wikipedia’s average article was after one year.

Well, I think we should work on getting the article count up, though.  Thus the just-launched Stub Week.  We might actually start encouraging people to write stubs for us.

Someone just pointed my attention to this page, which says that Wikipedia had 4.9 million words in January 2002 — slightly less than what we have now.  And I still maintain that the comparison would be more meaningful to make next March (use your browser to search on the page for “3,200 articles after one year”).  You might say that Wikipedia was growing faster at that point in its career — but then, we’re decidedly accelerating now, too, notwithstanding a Halloween lull just now.

Pretty cool.