Who’s more command-and-control, Wikipedia or CZ?
I did an interview with ECT News earlier today, and inter alia they suggested that the Citizendium had more of a command-and-control system than Wikipedia, and asked for my reaction. It occurred to me, then, that anyone who actually contributes to CZ knows that this is wrong and unfair: as I tell anyone who cares to listen, we’re a robustly bottom-up wiki. Our authors and editors really do work shoulder-to-shoulder in a friendly atmosphere. I then considered whether the opposite might be more correct: does Wikipedia have more of a command-and-control system than the Citizendium?
Yes, Virginia. Wikipedia has more of a command-and-control system than CZ. You didn’t know that? Well, it’s true.
Before you scoff, put your prejudices and what you think you know aside, and consider. How hard is it to get your edits on Wikipedia to “stick”? If you edit any even slightly popular article, how many self-appointed Defenders of the Wiki will be standing over your shoulder, citing policy at you and telling you you’re doing it all wrong? If you get into a dispute or encounter some other problem, how quickly will an “administrator” arrive to “lay down the law”?
Yeeeeaaah. That’s right. Hmm.
By contrast, on the Citizendium, it’s extremely easy to get your edits to stick. There are zillions of topics that are still wide open, or that need great expansion. We genuinely love it when new people get involved; we won’t shoo you off. And how many self-appointed ”managers” will your work have? If you’re lucky, a few. But, at this point, it’s more likely you’ll have one or none. If you like to work largely free of the typical Wikipedia busybodies and know-it-alls, you’ll find CZ much more congenial. And how quickly will editors or constables “lay down the law”? Well, you can get away with a lot on CZ, I’m afraid. That’s because people behave themselves so well most of the time that we are genuinely surprised when someone needs to be reined in.
Sure I’m a little biased, but I really love the CZ community! (Group hug!)
I can virtually see you skeptics shaking your heads. You want to ask: if I go to add to an article, how often will editors show up and undo my work, or tell me that I’m doing it all wrong? Well, sure, that happens. But, as far as I can tell, not very often. Our editors generally go out of their way to treat everyone collegially. This is one of the great discoveries of CZ: you plop experts down in an open wiki community, and even give them some modest authority, and guess what? They’re nice. They do not wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs. For that matter, our constables don’t wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs. They’re wonderful!
Now, I know that our wiki is open, bottom-up, and largely free of “command-and-control” in part because we’re still much smaller than Wikipedia. Yes, that’s obvious. Yes, I know that growth has a way of making governance harder. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are for now much freer and less constrained than Wikipedia is. You know what? If you sign up, you can still edit our front page. It’s not protected. And we at least still have a chance to retain the more open, freer, more congenial nature of our “small town” community as we grow; it’s too late for Wikipedia, which has become largely a “big city” mobocracy, one that I for one find more oppressive than liberating.
Sure — in time, we on CZ will have far more collaborators than we might always want, for our own individual work. We too will start complaining that too many cooks spoil the broth. However that is, and however we solve that problem when we are so fortunate as to have it, I also think that we can avoid having this lively community devolve into a rude, controlling mobocracy. CZ’s differences make all the difference. We use real names, which makes people more responsible and polite. We require that people treat each other professionally — and greatly cuts down on rudeness, just as moderating a mailing list often has the same effect. We separate different kinds of authority, with different groups having only limited powers, and no person being able to serve on more than one of the high-level groups in authority (Executive Committee, Editorial Council, Constabulary). This means that nobody is in a position to lord it over others with impunity. We actually require that people agree to our fundamental policies as a condition of their participation, which means that many of the most disruptive people, whose silly antics cause Wikipedia administrators to react like Nazis, aren’t involved. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve learned something from Wikipedia’s governance mistakes.
If you have been skeptical of CZ, maybe it’s time to give us a second look.
Your continued bashing of Wikipedia is starting to get on my nerves, Mr. Sanger. It frustrates me that you must reduce yourself to the name-calling that you have demonstrated above. Saying things like “[editors and “constables” of Citizendium are] nice. They do not wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs” is slanderous of the Wikipedia community - speaking as a Wikipedia administrator, I know that I’ve handled questions and complaints from people fairly and kindly. I don’t think I’ve ever “wielded” some “authority”; the only authority I should have is trust from the community to use some extra tools like deletion and blocking and protecting. I don’t “lay down the law”, as you’ve suggested; the worst I might have done is blocking vandals. Your blatant insinuations of power-greedy, authoritarian admins are hurtful to me as someone who genuinely wants the project to remain open to all comers. I am not a Nazi - do you accuse me of acting like one?
Further, I am unconvinced by your argument that you are somehow more open than Wikipedia. As a science student, in any real-world academic context, I would be scorned as some tiny underling because I do not yet have a degree, because I am younger, less experienced. Similarly, on Citizendium, I would be scorned because I do not have credentials, because I, despite being committed to the idea of a free encyclopedia, relatively intelligent, and willing to help in good faith, am too young to qualify for any position of trust such as “constable” or “expert”. It strikes me that Wikipedia’s system is vastly more open - that I am trusted to help out, and can do so, even in trusted positions like that of “the mop”, as adminship is known to those familiar with Wikipedia.
It only vindicates my decision to avoid Citizendium when I read posts such as these with your petty caricatures of Wikipedia administrators. No, Wikipedians aren’t perfect. Yes, I know that Wikipedians, even administrators, have acted badly before. None of these mean that any other system is somehow better; the members remain human.
Comment by Nihiltres — February 28, 2008 @ 6:53 pm
I do not mean to imply that all administrators on Wikipedia are bad. Indeed I am sure most of them are good; you could be one of them. But, in any event, I and many others have heard all too many stories of “rogue admins,” that your protests do not seem very credible, though your upset certainly is. I don’t mean to tar all admins; I am indicting the system as a whole, that (among other things) does not effectively rein in rogue admins.
Wikipedia’s system is indeed more open in the sense that anyone can become an admin. You are correct there. But that is not a sense of openness that strikes me as particularly valuable. CZ’s system is more “open” in the sense that the rank and file can actually get stuff done uninhibited by all sorts of nonsense — and that is a more valuable sort of openness, I think. That was my point.
The notion that admins merely wield “mops” belies a realistic understanding of the very nature of authority — this is a common, self-congratulatory, and completely unjustified concept of the admin role.
And, “Nihiltres,” my characterizations were not petty in the least. They were serious and substantial. Just because you disagree with a criticism does not make it “petty.”
Comment by Larry Sanger — February 28, 2008 @ 8:13 pm
Administrators on WP are bad, I can say that because I was (maybe still am, haven’t checked in a long time) are and I have seen the damage they can do. The problem with the structure of wikipedia is that it is broken. It broke down a long time ago. I could give you lots of reasons why it is broken and cannot be fixed but it suffers from a kind of institutional creep that is a very interesting phenomenon to study from a sociological perspective. My criticisms of WP are from having been actively involved during the period it went from a “hobby” website (to use the term Mr. Wales has used) to an Alexa top 100 site. It was envisioned as a small organization where people were actively involved, but the rules (most of them written, rewritten by very young people, uneducated or inexperienced people who don’t know much about rules) were and are poorly applied and as it expanded the “powers that be” just withdrew into their own power cocoons, insensitive to the real problems and issues such an organizational activity must face. Take the so-called NPOV. It is not properly applied by most admins and editors; why? because they are deleting content and they don’t even know if the content is good or bad, people who know something about a topic are attacked by gangs of teenagers who just want to create controversy. The whole thing is pretty sad, if there wasn’t some useful info in it the whole thing would crash and burn.
Quite frankly I believe because of the non-existent “management” of WP that the basic GFDL licensing scheme is inoperative and most contributors were fooled into thinking the people who “control” Wikipedia were going to be “transparent” and open. It has turned into a closed gang of about 1000 admins and an incestous group of people in the “inner circle”(just check out their profiles on facebook) who just like listening to the sound of Jimbo Wales’ voice (and want to get some of his fame by proximity) who can’t take any criticism and can’t listen to anything but their own voices, there is no dialogue at the upper echelons of Wikimedia IMHO. That “free knowledge” for the world is the mantra of a slave owner who is trying to keep his little children from revolting and learning that Wikipedia will never be more than a bunch of notes like high school and college students write before taking exams, useful to some degree but never great writing and not something to immortalize as a great work of literature like Diderot’s “Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.” There is no comparison at all WP is written by a bunch of anonymous teenagers, not by some of the greatest writers of all time.
Please note I am no longer affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation since circa December 2006.
Comment by Alex Roshuk — February 28, 2008 @ 8:39 pm
Hmmm… you’re saying that people’s edits on CZ will likely stick more because people on CZ are supposedly friendly and supposedly more collegial than on Wikipedia. While I won’t dispute that people on CZ are friendly and collegial, I don’t think they’re fundamentally better than most Wikipedians just because they agreed to some Statement of Fundamental Policies.
The stickiness of edits is mostly a function of the maturity of the content of the wiki and of the number of contributors. You are right to say that “there are zillions of topics that are still wide open” but that’s the primary reason why edits on CZ stick, and not because Citizendium is fundamentally better.
And you then go on to bash Wikipedia because of that? Tooting your own horn at the expense of another doesn’t seem to me to be a professional way of promoting Citizendium, especially when you keep on saying that Citizens act more “professionally”. I will be much more impressed with your promotion of Citizendium’s good points if you didn’t have to resort to crab mentality.
Comment by Eugene — February 29, 2008 @ 7:38 am
To Nihiltres: please read not only the comment by Alex Roshuk but also Nicholson Baker’s piece in the New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131
Comment by Paul Wormer — February 29, 2008 @ 8:01 am
Eugene, my point is much more complicated than simply that it’s harder to get edits to stick on Wikipedia than on CZ, and I admitted in the document itself that our openness is due to our youth. Indeed, if my only point were that it is harder to get edits to stick on Wikipedia than CZ, then my argument would look pretty bad. But that isn’t my only point.
Comment by Larry Sanger — February 29, 2008 @ 9:02 am
Alex - you seem to be remarkably one sided in your view. Admins are “bad”, contributors are “fooled”, the site is run by an “inner circle” that “just like listening to the sound of Jimbo Wales’ voice”, and the site is “written by a bunch of anonymous teenagers” which is clearly incorrect and an exaggeration.
It is hard to take your view as a serious, balanced, fair one, when you exaggerate in this way.
Comment by A wiki admin — February 29, 2008 @ 9:23 am
A little off topic:
Larry, please think a moment about what the Nazis did - then think again whether you should call bad wikipedia admins like that. It’s inappropriate, to say the least.
Comment by Jens Mildner — February 29, 2008 @ 11:58 am
Jens, have you ever heard of exaggeration before? Yeah, it’s this new thing. It’s kind of wacky and hard to understand, but I occasionally get a kick out of it sometimes.
Comment by Larry Sanger — February 29, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
OK, then let me just quote the comment above mine: “It is hard to take your view as a serious, balanced, fair one, when you exaggerate in this way.” Nihiltres will agree, I suppose.
Comment by Jens Mildner — March 1, 2008 @ 6:37 am
Big deal. It’s even harder to take a view seriously, for more people, when it constitutes a well-reasoned, full frontal attack on your most cherished beliefs, and you have no substantive reply to offer.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 1, 2008 @ 6:57 am
My experience on Wikipedia was overwhelmingly that there was not only a lack of respect for internationally acknowledged experts, but that they are openly resented and despised. On the whole, Larry’s characterisation of CZ administration as being fundamentally decent is also (I think) the perception of most people using CZ — even when decisions are not perhaps entirely to their liking. Equally, many people’s experiences of the admin of WP are negative: maybe Larry’s characterisation of “Nazi” is a little over the top, but only slightly. The complete lack of accountability of the management of WP is something to be contrasted with open and largely democratic procedures, and maybe we can draw some limited comparisons with dictatorial regimes of the past.
Comment by Martin Baldwin-Edwards — March 1, 2008 @ 11:55 am
“Jens, have you ever heard of exaggeration before? Yeah, it’s this new thing. It’s kind of wacky and hard to understand, but I occasionally get a kick out of it sometimes. ;-)”
There are areas where you shouldn’t go when you make jokes. It isn’t “professional” to use the Nazi label in a case like this.
And it certainly doesn’t help when the goal is to be seen as “fundamentally decent” and to win people for the project.
Comment by Christian Kleineidam — March 1, 2008 @ 6:09 pm
Larry, I have no substantive reply because I agree with you. Surprised? I just don’t like people being called Nazis without good reason.
Comment by Jens Mildner — March 2, 2008 @ 4:27 am
This is silly to continue to discuss, my friends. For the record, I didn’t say that admins are Nazis, but that “the most disruptive people [have] silly antics [which] cause Wikipedia administrators to react like Nazis.” There are charitable ways to interpret this claim which do not, in fact, make it much of an exaggeration, you know. So I think the reaction here is overblown. Having seen the reaction, though, I would probably choose a different wording in the future, just to avoid giving people the opportunity to divert attention from the main message.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 2, 2008 @ 6:40 am
Mr. Sanger, I think that the collective response is that the Nazi comparison was over the top, regardless of how you meant it. As regards “There are charitable ways to interpret this claim which do not, in fact, make it much of an exaggeration, you know. “; no, I find it hard to consider this given your statement that “[your “characterizations”] were serious and substantial”. The insult was over the top and the main reason I accuse you of pettiness; other people have managed to criticize Wikipedia without such name-calling, and I respect those criticisms when well-argued.
The question of which of the wikis is more open is, to risk using a cliché, like comparing apples and oranges: Wikipedia’s huge scale and presence and Citizendium’s relative obscurity make comparisons between the two often irrelevant. On the one hand Citizendium’s eager focus on the authority of experts (and, by extension, though this might be contentious, the exclusion of amateurs) can be weighed against Wikipedia’s community, which enforces, through dozens of concerned editors, standards through policies and guidelines which are the result of much debate, such that these debates need not be repeated for each article. Some issues cannot be compared - the extreme difference in scale and visibility prevents comparisons from being relevant, as is mentioned in this blog post. Issues involving such elements as edit stickiness or lack thereof, or criticisms of one’s work as not being up to standards, are, at least in part, a function of the size, maturity, and prominence of the wiki. Eugene’s comment above says it well.
My point of view as regards openness favours Wikipedia; without being the required age or having the recognition of experience brought on by a degree, Citizendium is liable to treat me as merely another author, trusted little, regardless of the expertise I may have in particular fields, and on certain topics, that would rival or even surpass someone with a basic degree (for that subtopic, at least). On Wikipedia, however, it is more simple, and, I would say, open - everyone is held to community standards, which are open to discussion and editing by anyone - unlike “Editorial Council”-style declarations such as where a formally limited group of users has editorial control over what the desired format should be. It is telling to examine the history of major Citizendium policy pages such as “Article Mechanics” where there is a clear principal editor, as is visible at and as opposed to the more varied history of Wikipedia’s similar page:
Citizendium does have some advantages; I should not, and do not, suggest that Wikipedia is necessarily *better* than Citizendium in any particular respect. Each project is devoted to some extent to the idea of a good free encyclopedia, and that goal trumps by many measures the process used to generate it. The two are, however, at heart based on different philosophies, and Citizendium’s underlying philosophy is arguably more authoritarian in that so-called experts are arbitrarily handed control, as opposed to Wikipedia’s anyone-can-edit philosophy where everyone is held to the simple standard of verifiability.
Comment by Nihiltres — March 3, 2008 @ 2:12 pm
I find it interesting that I have touched a nerve: perhaps there is some truth in what I say. I’ve got too many other things to do than to continue this conversation.
I do want to take the time, though, to explain why you are wrong, “Nihiltres,” in your notion that Wikipedia is less authoritarian because, according to the collective fantasy, “everyone is held to the simple standard of verifiability.” Hmm, well who decides whether some text is verifiable? “Everyone,” you say. But this is a fantasy, because it can’t be everyone — people disagree, of course. Who makes decisions when there are disagreements? “Matters are decided through rational discourse and then consensus among equals,” I suppose you want to say. Balderdash. Everyone with the slightest bit of experience on WP knows it does not work that way. Matters are decided by admin rank and other pull, sockpuppetry, free time, and stamina, i.e., by the mob — and yes, occasionally also rational discourse and reasonable consensus. I submit that polite discourse (as required on CZ) and actual proven expertise (as provided, usually in a very gentle, scholarly way, by our editors) is a far better way.
One other thing: “cleverly” speaking of “so-called experts” (outside the fold of Wikipedia kool-aid drinkers, anyway) is only going to make you sound like a crank. Yes, there are experts. People spend their whole lives advancing their understanding of relatively narrow areas of knowledge. They deserve respect for their knowledge.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 3, 2008 @ 6:22 pm
“My experience on Wikipedia was overwhelmingly that there was not only a lack of respect for internationally acknowledged experts, but that they are openly resented and despised.”
It is unfortunate that it seems that way to you, or that you had that experience. However, I don’t ever recall running into that at Wikipedia. I am sure there are some trolls somewhere that do that, but I don’t gather it represents the site as a whole.
WP certainly has respect for authoritative sources, including scientific journals and statements on behalf of major scientific associations. Unsourced statements are not tolerated as much as they used to be. What WP does not do is try to give expert users more weight than others. Since we don’t confirm identities like Citizendium does, we couldn’t do it informally either (otherwise, people like Essjay could get more editing weight). Additionally, because of the “Original research” policy and focus on peer reviewed and consensus opinion, citing single “lightweight” (not well known) experts doesn’t really happen often. This helps to avoid cranks and users throwing around contradictory sources and perhaps cherry-picking (not that there aren’t other ways to do that, but it helps). Citing of “heavy weights” is done, but journal/major organization statements and such are still preferable. The cost, and I think it is worth it, is that more cutting edge research and theories will be hard to get sourced and therefore included on WP. That is the sort of material for journals and magazines.
As Nihiltres said, they are different projects with different goals and advantages. One advantage to CZ is that editors are more like to have a much better idea of what the basic knowledge of the field is, which allows for them to identify “extraordinary” claims (which need good backing), and they can write good “examples” for math/science topics without making mistakes due to ignorance of the topic. Their subject knowledge allows for them to better paraphrase technical sources because they are more likely to actually understant what it is talking about.
Comment by Aaron Schulz — March 8, 2008 @ 12:40 am
@Nihiltres: “so-called experts” sounds like an extremely ignorant think to say, unless you had something specific in mind. It seems like either you are implying they are somehow “fake” or you are expressing some sort of Postmodern viewpoint. Could you elaborate on that?
Comment by Aaron Schulz — March 8, 2008 @ 12:53 am
With regard to the “so-called experts” comment, in context Nihiltres wrote “Citizendium’s underlying philosophy is arguably more authoritarian in that so-called experts are arbitrarily handed control, as opposed to Wikipedia’s anyone-can-edit philosophy where everyone is held to the simple standard of verifiability.”
It’s interesting how often this concept is repeated by the media and wikipedians (the idea if you’re not an expert you are somehow not worthy to edit in citizendium). Everyone works side by side in CZ (experts and authors) to create articles and obviously CZ also works within the boundaries of verifiability. From my perspective the only point an expert has more control is in a content dispute (which should be no issue since verifiability is the gold standard) and at the time of approval. In no way does this control stop anyone adding content or contributing in any way differently to wikipedia.
Comment by Chris D. — March 15, 2008 @ 12:19 am