Question for Wikipedians out there: is Wikipedia available for use under CC-by-sa yet?  I haven’t heard anything about this.  If it hasn’t been decided, why not?  Will this ever be declared?  Surely we should expect it to be, given the triumphant announcement Lessig and Wales last December.  Right?

I have to say I’m not so happy that Wikipedia might be using original Citizendium articles without the licenses really being interoperable.  In short, if they want to release our articles under the GFDL, we should be able to release theirs under CC-by-sa.

We’ve installed the “EmbedVideo” MediaWiki extension.  This means we now allow people to embed videos taken from, e.g., YouTube.

Here’s an example in use (which also, incidentally, shows off how we use subpages–this is a “video” subpage), a large assortment of videos, mostly homemade, of various County Donegal-style fiddle players.

Hello, any coders out there!  Today, we spent many hundreds of dollars posting ads for the WatchKnow programmer position.  Can you help get the word out? Can you post this in your networks or send it to friends?

Here’s a copy of the job ad…which I posted to craigslist San Francisco Bay Area, even though I’m located in central Ohio.  The point is that I don’t really care where you live, as long as you can do the job. Being in the U.S. is probably a requirement, but beyond that, hey, telecommute from Alaska!  It’s a 3-4 month contract job, and may work into permanent employment, and it will pay pretty well.

UPDATE (June 20): yay, we now have a good set of candidates to choose from…

We’re now starting to spread the word about a major new Citizendium program. This initial announcement is meant to be low-key (no press release yet). I wanted our “Citizens” to be the first to receive it.

WatchKnow will be a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest. It is currently under planning and development. See http://www.watchknow.org for a long FAQ.

Here’s the basic idea. Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll pay the winner(s) within each topic a small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol. The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education.

We hope to launch the beta project this fall. We will be spreading the word this summer, to attract school teachers and others to help staff the program in various ways. We hope within the next few weeks to hire a technical person to actually build the beta system. See the ad here.

 For future updates, please add yourself to the announcement list.  You can discuss the new program here on the CZ forums.

I have been asked to lead the program. So, you wonder, why have I agreed? First, the aforementioned Memphis philanthropist has been very generous in supporting the Citizendium, as an incentive to us to work on this project. (He doesn’t want to be named, by the way.) He has been very persistent for over a year in recruiting me (and us) to get this project started. Second, it is largely in keeping with our overall mission of bringing online communities together, to create reliable, free, and (broadly) educational content.

I suppose it’s often this way in life–you start out doing one thing, and you find yourself presented with excellent reasons to branch out into something else.

If you are worried that this means I’ll be quitting as Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium soon, please don’t. I’ve in fact been working on both projects for several months now, spending *most* of my work time on CZ rather than WatchKnow. One exciting thing about this project, as an opportunity for us, is that, if it succeeds very well, it might bring large amounts of relatively “permanent” funding from a whole variety of sources. There will be no shortage of funds for a really useful free educational video project. As the parent project of WatchKnow, CZ naturally stands to benefit. Already, we can tap the WatchKnow engineer to serve a System Administration role for CZ as a whole. A successful beta project will no doubt provide us the funds to do something that I have been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to do: actually pay my successor a suitable salary!

Besides, once the system is off the ground, it should largely “run itself” and require relatively little work from me. If it doesn’t–if it requires heavy management–we’ll hire someone to do that.

CZ’s Executive Committee already knows about the project and has given our involvement their blessing. Several members have been rather enthusiastic about it. We have also received advice and help from a number of other people, including two “big names” in the world of free culture–but I will not release their names until the entire new WatchKnow Advisory Committee is constructed. We’ll be looking for interested and suitable members of that Committee–i.e., distinguished educators, ed tech gurus, and free content advocates.

I think WatchKnow will be good for CZ in another way. While we’ve been doing all right so far this year, we have not had a real “shot in the arm” in terms of the sort of announcements, press attention, and active recruitment efforts that punctuated our earlier months. WatchKnow will not only put CZ’s name back in the news, it will demonstrate that we are still very much active, expanding…and funded! Finally, think of this: the video project might end up being very high-profile. There’s reason to think it will; so far, everyone who hears about the idea loves it, and the idea is totally innovative and fills a gaping hole and need. If WatchKnow is very popular, it will help boost CZ, and vice-versa. So, in sum, I’m very comfortable with this as move strategically.

Again, here are the key links:

• FAQ
• Mailing list
• Discussion forum
• Engineer/sysadmin ad

We enjoy considerable goodwill from many people. But the Citizendium is also misunderstood. This page is devoted to correcting many errors about us.

Let’s debunk some myths [edit]

Myth: we’re experts-only.

Fact: we love experts—we admit it. And we want more of them. But this is still a remarkably open project. You can be an author with no degrees and only a basic facility with English. We agree heartily with the larger “Web 2.0″ crowd on one point: most reasonably well educated people have something to contribute to a project like this. Our youngest registered members are 13, and we have some active high school students who have done good work.

For further reading, see The Editor Role, The Author Role, and our sign-up form.

Myth: we’re a top-down project, with expert editors giving orders to underlings.

Fact: no, we’re very much bottom-up. We’re a wiki—really. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. We are a strongly, “radically,” collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody “owns” articles or “gives orders” to do this or that. Of course, we aren’t the first to use this method; it gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric Raymond, who compared communities that create free software collaboratively to “bazaars,” as opposed to the old-fashioned “cathedral” model where everyone has a specific role and function, and orders are given from the top down. (See “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added “village elders” wandering the bazaar. Their welcome, moderating presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.

For further reading, see Group Editing and How to collaborate.

Myth: edits appear on the Citizendium only if they have been specifically approved by editors.

Fact: editors do not approve edits before they appear on the website. Once you’re signed up, you can immediately change any article (or, for approved articles, any article draft—example). You can. You really, really can. Editors are not standing over your shoulder. Nor do they want to do so. They have their own projects here. Another author is as likely to critique and edit your work as an editor. It’s like we said. This is a wiki—a real, robust, bottom-up wiki.

For further reading, see The Editor Role. There’s nothing there about approving individual edits!

Myth: we’re Serious. We accept only your most careful, painstaking work. Writing here is like writing a term paper—no fun. We take ourselves Very Seriously.

Fact: this myth is particularly damaging to new recruits, especially to younger people who aren’t sure of themselves. You’re welcome here. You really are. This is a work in progress, and we have fun! Yes, we have a lot of overeducated people here, who are regularly writing really wonderful prose as if it costs them no effort. But we also have no problem whatsoever with you making a rough start on any topic, as long as somebody else will be able to pick up where you left off. We are permanently under construction. You do not have to be painfully careful, as if you might break something and people will start screaming at you, or will freeze you out socially, if you do. We’re much more relaxed than that. We want everybody to be bold, not so careful that you never make any mistakes. If you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not participating hard enough. And you don’t have to write a whole term paper to start an article, though we have a special initiative that encourages educators to assign Citizendium articles instead of term papers. It’s OK with us if you start a relatively short article, just a paragraph or two (we call these “stubs”).

For further reading, see Be Bold, Under Construction, and Stubs.

Myth: since real names are required, nobody will participate. Maybe nobody should—participant privacy will be violated, as our bios will be accessible from Google!

Fact: the fact that we have 200+ participants every month makes it obviously false that nobody will participate in a project in which real names are required. We admit that we might get more participants if pseudonyms were widely permitted. (Note: we do permit pseudonyms for certain special reasons, e.g., political dissidents in repressive countries. We have given out ~10 pseudonyms.) As to privacy, biographies are not indexed by Google (or any other search engine that respects the “noindex” tag).

We feel that the advantages of real names outweigh the small sacrifice of allowing our work-in-progress to be viewed publicly. On the one hand, using real names makes people behave themselves more civilly; on the other hand, it makes our articles more credible, since readers know that there are people willing to put their names behind them. Besides, you’re far more likely to impress your friends and employers by posting publicly here than on, say, FaceBook, where many people do use their real names!

For further reading, see CZ:Statistics and Sanger’s “Defense of Modest Real Name Requirements.”

Myth: since this is an academic project, we are not open to articles about pop culture.

Fact: we are open to pop culture. Don’t believe us? See Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin song) and Metal Gear Solid. We are better described as a hybrid academic/public project. Think of it like this: we reject both the idea that knowledge belongs exclusively in the academy, and the idea that, after Wikipedia, the academy has no special role to play in explaining what we know. We think the most productive and reliable system involves the marriage of expertise with wide-ranging public interests and knowledge. So, as long as we can expect to maintain a full set of articles of a certain category, then go to town! If snobs try to shut you down, have them talk to the Editor-in-Chief, who is a confirmed “inclusionist”!

For further reading, see Maintainability or look at Category:Games Workgroup, Category:Hobbies Workgroup, and Category:Media Workgroup.

Myth: since this is an academic project, our articles will have an academic bias.

Fact: our neutrality policy specifically requires that our articles feature the full range of opinion on a subject, including opinion that is outside the mainstream of expert opinion. The important thing is that all opinion be properly labelled and attributed. Besides, as we said, this is a hybrid expert-public project, not just an academic project; the input of the general public is a necessary check on the particular biases that sometimes plague particular disciplines. So far, this problem has not been much in evidence here.

For further reading, see Neutrality Policy.

Myth: the Citizendium is just Nupedia all over again. Or: it’s not different enough from Wikipedia.

Fact: this is a really egregious error made by those familiar enough with the history of Wikipedia and Nupedia to be “a little dangerous,” but not familiar enough to be accurate. Nupedia wasn’t collaborative; the Citizendium is. Nupedia was top-down in many respects (e.g., articles were assigned); we are bottom-up. (Nupedia itself is widely misunderstood, but that’s another matter.) Since Nupedia was allowed to wither and die, the comparison to Nupedia is used to suggest subtly that the Citizendium, too, will wither and die. This is now obviously false, since CZ has produced many thousands of article drafts, where Nupedia produced only a few hundred in the same amount of time, and because CZ has accelerated its growth significantly and will probably continue to do so.

As to Wikipedia, our main differences are that we use real names, make a special role for experts in the system, and require contributors to digitally sign a “social contract.” These differences really make a difference. We have no vandalism. We have very few bad articles, and many of our articles, even our “developing” articles, are excellent, despite our project’s toddlerhood; after five years, we will probably have left Wikipedia entirely in the dust, in terms of quality. We really are a different sort of community, one that takes a commitment to professional behavior seriously. We have our disputes—what vibrant community could be without them?—but they are very rarely the sort of bizarre, Kafkaesque affairs that are so common on Wikipedia.

For further reading, see We aren’t Wikipedia, Sanger’s Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir, and “Who’s more command-and-control, Wikipedia or CZ?” (a blog post).

Myth: there is no point to the Citizendium, because Wikipedia exists.

Fact: Wikipedia has uneven quality, and is extremely off-putting to most experts—indeed, to most people, period—who might otherwise contribute to it. We believe that, in the end, a lot more people will be comfortable with and attracted to the open, yet sensible CZ model. Some of us expect a tipping point to come in the next year or two, in which CZ will be flooded with more and more people who are now firmly persuaded that we are a force to contend with. There is no danger whatsoever of our giving up. Your work here will be well used as part of a resource with tens of thousands, and then probably hundreds of thousands, of articles.

Besides, we’re sure you’ll agree that the world can use more than one “go to” source for free reference information. We are the best hope for a real alternative!

For further reading, see Why Citizendium? and Workgroup Weeks.

Myth: most Citizendium articles are just copied from Wikipedia.

Fact: wrong. While we do allow people to copy Wikipedia articles here, we keep careful track of them, and by far most of our articles are completely original. Besides, many if not most of the articles that are sourced from Wikipedia are not counted in our CZ Live article count (currently 7,000). We strongly encourage people who copy their articles from Wikipedia to work on them here; we generally prefer that people start over, in order to give the public “added value.” If someone copies a Wikipedia article here without changing it, we won’t take credit for it, and we are more than willing to let others start over from scratch on the topic.

For further reading, see How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles and Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians.

Myth: our experts are called “constables.”

Fact: no, our experts are called “editors.” Constables are community moderators, who are mainly tasked with letting people into the system, and (only occasionally) enforcing our Professionalism policy (which says, basically, to be polite). Our constables are, as it turns out, some of the kindest and most welcome people here.

For further reading, see CZ:Constabulary.

Some other interesting facts you might not have known about us [edit]

Here are some more assorted facts that are not common knowledge, but which might put us in a new and exciting light for you:

• Despite being an active and open wiki, we have no vandalism, and little if any “trolling.” What other wiki can say that?
• Our well-developed articles feature subpages (here’s a list), which cover many other kinds of reference information you might want. An encyclopedia article, plus supporting reference material, is called a “cluster.”
• CZ articles are intended to be coherent narratives, not random grab-bags of facts.
• The person who led Wikipedia in its seminal first year, and designed many of its fundamental policies, is also leading CZ. Suffice it to say that he learns from his mistakes.
• It is easy to get a quick start. In our sign-up procedure, we don’t actually ask that much information about you. A human being will review your account request, and let you into the system typically within 24 hours, but often within just a few hours. Once you’ve signed up, it is easy to start a new article.
• We have a neutrality policy, which we have a better chance of living up to than the Other Place.
• Our Citizens are bound by a social contract. It’s not called “the Citizens’ Compendium” for nothing!
• Editorial policy decisions are settled by our Editorial Council, not by some bogus, and impossible, “consensus.”
• Larry Sanger has declared, when he first announced the Citizendium in September 2006, that he would leave his position as editor-in-chief within two to three years, in order to set a positive precedent. He is not “dictator for life.”
• We are not a Silicon Valley for-profit business. We are a non-profit, civic project that uses CC-by-sa as the license for our content, and our Citizens are essentially co-owners of the project.

Why all the errors about CZ? [edit]

So, why have there been so many errors passed around about CZ? And why are so many of our interesting innovations largely unknown? There are probably two reasons.

First, this is a genuinely innovative project. Nothing quite like it has ever existed before. The expert-public hybrid model and several other innovations are quite simply new. But most people are not able to take such novel things on board easily, because they think in terms of prototypes or examples. Therefore, to them, we are like a traditional academic project, like Nupedia, or like Wikipedia. In short, most people naturally think in terms of stereotypes, and so we have been stereotyped. No doubt that’s been the fate of most real innovators. This means only that we need to educate people–which this page attempts to do.

Second, a lot of Web 2.0 advocates, whose online temples are websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, are philosophically opposed to our basic policies. They tend to be radical egalitarians and closet anarchists. Therefore, they hate the idea that we ask people to take responsibility for their contributions and that we make a special role for experts. So it’s easy for our opponents to create straw men which they proceed to knock down. Here, the proper strategy is to answer criticisms quickly and show them to be, indeed, attacks on straw men.

This is from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Myths_and_Facts

See: http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/713663956.html

Video programmer/system administrator (Columbus area and telecommute)

Reply to: sanger@citizendium.org
Date: 2008-06-09, 2:33PM EDT

JOB SUMMARY. The Citizendium Foundation (http://www.citizendium.org/), an operationally independent project of the non-profit Tides Center, is looking to hire one full-time contractor to perform two main jobs: (1) primarily, construction of an innovative online video system in something like the YouTube vein, and (2) part-time, on-the-side system administration of the Citizendium servers. The job will last from the project design, coding, and testing through a time-limited beta project, i.e., probably nine months at least, possibly to become permanent. You will be answering to the project director, Larry Sanger (http://www.larrysanger.org/), founder of the Citizendium and co-founder of Wikipedia, and working with a large variety of volunteers. You’ll work from home or from your office, but if you are in the central Ohio area, we’ll meet from time to time.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE WITH:
* Set-up and/or management of online video systems, and the problems of such systems, including traffic and multiple file types. You will be coding up, or adapting, an open source video application virtually single-handedly. This is the top requirement.

* The technical implementation of Web 2.0-type and AJAX-type methods, and of course all languages and standards needed for such methods.

* User management systems/login systems/advanced identity management.

* Significant professional experience doing various Linux system administration tasks, including server configuration, e-mail administration, restarting the wiki server, etc.

* Independent work habits, willingness to work carefully to spec, extremely good ability to analyze English and discuss details of innovative projects. But note that we are very open to good ideas and will ask you to be creative.

Essentially, you must be able to prove that you have already successfully designed and implemented a video system similar to the one we’re asking you to build. If you haven’t, please don’t apply.

A DEFINITE PLUS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH:
* Documentation best practices.

* MediaWiki coding.

* Work (either as volunteer or as paid project manager) with open source and open content communities.

* Creation of videos/videocasting.

* Ed tech and state standards.

* Enough PostgreSQL to do simple commands.

Location in the central Ohio area is a strong plus, but we will seek elsewhere if the advantages are significant. We hope to hire and get started ASAP. In any case, the contractor will be required to give brief daily reports on progress.

WHY IS THIS AN INTERESTING OPPORTUNITY? This is a remarkable opportunity for the right person. This as-yet-unannounced open content video project and expert-led, real-name wiki encyclopedia project are or will be the first two of their kind. They are both currently directed by Larry Sanger. The video project is funded by a retired Memphis millionaire philanthropist, so you need not worry that funds for your work will dry up in the start-up period. This might well become a high-profile project with high name recognition. If the project succeeds and you do well, you will probably be invited into a more permanent (e.g., employee) relationship. Moreover, we will give you an opportunity to stretch as a professional, as the projects do or will make use of several first-time innovations (it’s not just a YouTube clone), and you will be invited to work with Sanger and others in the general design of the system. If the project succeeds, as we believe it will, there is a chance that it will pioneer an unusually compelling new model for online community content creation. It will also be very beneficial to society, as you will discover as you learn more about the project.

TO APPLY. To apply and/or make a bid, please send the resume of the person who will be doing the work, as well as links to samples online of that person’s work, rate/fee requirements, and date when available. Feel free to explain any weird stuff we might encounter when we google you. Since this is contract work, responses from individuals and from technical firms are both acceptable.

* Location: Columbus area and telecommute
* Compensation: commensurate with experience
* Telecommuting is ok.
* This is a contract job.
* This is at a non-profit organization.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

The Craigslist ad: http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/713663956.html

See here and here and here and here.  I’ll have to assess this later; I have some pre-launch materials to prepare myself!  But this looks like a welcome development.  The questions I’ll have in mind as I read through the description are these.  (1) Will this actually increase the number of credible articles EB has on offer?  (2) Will there actually be very much collaboration going on?  (3) Are there any movements toward making EB’s main encyclopedia content free?

Without plans to increase the total number of articles on offer, robust freedom, and radical collaboration, EB is not, in fact, adopting the Citizendium model.  It would be adopting something more like the BBC’s model: h2g2.  I’ll certainly keep an open mind, however; I know they’ve been talking about how to leverage something like a wiki model since 2005 at the very earliest.

The self-styled “newspaper” in magazine format, The Economist, examines the career of Jimmy Wales and the origin of Wikipedia, with some mention of my role.  As an account it is fairly true to the facts, which is far more than can be said for many such histories.

But for the record, I do have a few quibbles.

• This is really a quibble, I don’t believe I ever really counted Jimmy Wales as a friend; he was a friendly acquaintance.  We never even lived in the same state until I went to work for Bomis, and we never had anything other than a professional relationship at that time.
• It is false to say that Wales “called [me] up to contest every single point.”  I believe he called me up once, or maybe two or three times; I remember only one call distinctly.
• Jimmy Wales didn’t merely invest in Bomis.com; he was its CEO and leading light.
• The article implies (perhaps understandably, given what I might have said in the interview) that I think that Wikipedia as a project somehow embodies relativism, or requires a “postmodernist” interpretation.  I don’t think so; I think that its current policy of making no special role for experts, regardless of their level of knowledge, is sometimes defended on such relativistic grounds.  (In other words, they think that knowledge is actually “constructed” by the Wikipedia contributor base, and so the results are just as legitimate as anything that is vouched for by experts.)  To such a defense, I would have various objections, which I have elaborated in this Edge paper.  I believe the reporter asked me what I thought Ayn Rand would have thought of Stephen Colbert’s notion of wikiality, and that, I think, is what elicited the remark, “Ayn Rand would be turning in her grave.”  It’s not as though I particularly care about the disposition of that particular corpse.
• Finally, there is this interesting quotation from Gene Koo of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society: “Wikipedia resolves the postmodern dilemma of truth by ultimately relying on process.  Its process is both open and transparent. The levers of power are not destroyed—Foucault taught us that this is impossible—but simply visible.”  Allow me to deconstruct this; it is wrong in at least two important ways.  Most Wikipedians are anonymous, and most articles are unsigned.  Whatever you might want to say about traditional media, at least you knew (or could find out) who was behind a particular piece of content.  And while the process of writing is transparent, notwithstanding the anonymity – certainly I’d grant you that — transparency of process does not require the radical epistemic egalitarianism of Wikipedia’s least credible defenders.

Here’s a video of the debate I had with Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur).  Andrew and I found plenty both to agree about and to disagree about.  The debate begins with an opening statement from me, speculating about how our knowledge media will have changed by 2030.

Well, I am now back and “back in the saddle” after a full week away.  First I went to Oxford, to have a public debate with Andrew Keen.  That was fun.  I especially enjoyed walking around the different colleges and meeting different people.  Andrew wrote his Independent column about the event.  Yep, I was honored to be invited to talk to the dons after dinner, but I think that’s just because one or two of the guests wanted to chat — nope, Andrew, it wasn’t to “illuminate the rest of the Balliol community with the secrets of wiki business.”  I did talk with the Master of Balliol who was a disarmingly unpretentious man, exactly the opposite of what some might expect, but which I found very much in keeping with old stories I’d heard or read about Oxford.  I heard from the man himself that Adam Smith, J. M. Keynes, Joseph Raz, and a host of other luminaries were or are at Balliol, and wandered that very quad.  We did not talk about how Balliol or Oxford might get into the collaborative knowledge production business. 

Then from the very old to the very new, I went to Santa Barbara to participate in a very interesting meeting, without presentations per se — but instead the more creative format of a giant group conversation.  S.B. may soon have a Social Computing program.  Liz Losh wrote about the proceedings in her blog.