A triad of new, non-collaborative encyclopedia projects
Three major new encyclopedia projects have come on the scene lately. Last month, Britannica Online was announced, then more recently a new expert-led encyclopedia called Medpedia appeared, then finally yesterday Knol launched at http://knol.google.com/.
These are competitors to CZ, or to subjects within CZ, for eyeballs or traffic, and we certainly will not be complacent.
Some people have billed these as “Citizendium-killers,” but they consistently fail to appreciate is that all three of these projects are not primarily collaborative community projects, as CZ is. Both Britannica and Knol say that authors can determine the extent to which other people can collaborate on one’s article. On CZ, all articles are owned and controlled in common, and are unsigned. The designers of those projects seem not to realize just how crucially important that is to building an online community that takes on a life of its own.
In the end, as I have argued on multiple occasions (most recently here), the advantages of radical collaboration could, I think, outweigh even the natural advantages of Google, Britannica, and Medpedia’s distinguished partners.
Besides, the uncollaborative Knol and Britannica Online model has already been tried, a few years ago, by a couple of behemoths: the BBC’s H2G2, and Everything2. And while Medpedia might be billed as collaborative, it won’t be — not if experts-only projects like Encyclopedia of Life, Encyclopedia of Earth, Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, and Scholarpedia are indicators.
All this said, may the best encyclopedia win. The world needs a better encyclopedia than the 800-pound gorilla, Wikipedia.
I just think that, in the fullness of time, that will be the Citizendium!
>The designers of those projects seem not to realize just
>how crucially important that is to building an online
>community that takes on a life of its own.
Well, its not the designers that really need convincing but the writers.
And its not really closed. Knol writers, for example, choose from three option.
1. Totally closed.
2. Semi-open. Anyone can comment on the articles and the lead author can invite collaborators.
3. Fully open. If you have a Google account, you can edit the article.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — July 24, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
Right, Knol writers can choose from those options; how many people will choose the “fully open” option, first? And then, even if Steve Ewen has made his article fully open, how many people will choose to edit his article? My guess is that these two constraints will lead to not-much-collaboration. People who want to collaborate will go to Wikipedia–or the Citizendium.
Comment by Larry Sanger — July 24, 2008 @ 12:44 pm
Well, I think it’s all a really interesting experiment, I’m sure you’ll agree.
As I understand how Knol will work together with Google search, the most popular articles will rise to the top. In a lot of cases, those should be the most accurate and well-written articles. Of course, what most remains to be seen is whether those best articles, the ones that get highest page rank and that the most people will see, are the ones that are open and collaborative or not.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — July 24, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
I just created a dummy knol account and tried to collaborate with myself there (I’ve had a regular g-mail account since it first came out). I’m really rather astounded that collaborators with the named person are regulated to “Anonymous”. In other words, articles are apparently ever named to one person; multiple named authorship is not possible. Shakin’ my head here at what seems the stupidity of that…..
Comment by Stephen Ewen — July 24, 2008 @ 8:15 pm
I think that existance of several projects with different rules is a good thing. May be different kinds of topics need different edit rules in order to create best articles.
Comment by Andrey Khalyavin — July 24, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
I don’t think Citizendium isn’t signed. We just need a good Mediawiki editing history analyzer that will check which parts of the text were edited by whom. Actually, I think I remember reading about one that was made for Wikipedia.
Comment by Yuval Langer — July 25, 2008 @ 7:29 am
There were several dozens of them: see Marathon Match 18 powered by TopCoder.
Comment by Andrey Khalyavin — July 28, 2008 @ 10:07 am
Why do these companies want to create their encyclopedias so much? Just give up and give us the money!
Hail Citizendium!
Comment by Chunbum Park — July 28, 2008 @ 11:23 am
I was delighted to see that Steve Ewen, and a few other Citizens, have tried their hand at Knol. The system they have, so far as articles goes, is actually a very good one. The kind of ownership they enable through “Moderated Collaboration” is, for me ideal. If I could have had that kind of “ownership” of my work, I’d probably still be active on Citizendium
Where Knol has problems is at the level of how the site as a whole is indexed/categorized/managed. So far, the choice of mainspace entries has been about as transparent as the election of the Pope; when I found my own first attempt, an entry on Arctic Exploration selected for such blessing, I hardly had time to gear up to delete the deluge of spam that this draining of the Augean Stables sent my way. Given how hard people would probably lobby for such space, though, perhaps secret deliberation is best for now; there are already dozens of blogs hawking Knol as a marketing tool, along with an automated program which will batch-convert almost anything on your hard drive to a “Knol.” Google may need to install some sort of Knol-spam-filters before it ever gets a critical mass of decent articles, and the current opening page with its “who needs a search engine” and entries on dreadful medical maladies is absolutely dreadful.
I have no idea whether Knol will kill other encyclopedia projects — I tend to doubt it! — but I do think that, if you read closely between the lines, you can see that the mysterious “Knol team” actually took quite a number of its cues from Citizendium.
Comment by Russell Potter — August 4, 2008 @ 12:58 pm
p.s. about Steve’s earlier comment on named collaboration — I do think that if you use the “closed collaboration” model and invite other authors, they will show up as credited (indeed they do anyway on the open collaboration pages — but the only way to tell who wrote what is to do a cumbersome version comparison). Hopefully this will be improved at some point!
Comment by Russell Potter — August 4, 2008 @ 1:06 pm
Russell Potter wrote: “The kind of ownership they enable through ‘Moderated Collaboration’ is, for me ideal. If I could have had that kind of ‘ownership’ of my work, I’d probably still be active on Citizendium”
Indeed — if you don’t want not to participate in a radically collaborative project, but instead one in which you control who collaborates, it should have been obvious from the very beginning that CZ is not for you. If you actually wanted “ownership” a la “moderated collaboration” for CZ, you never wanted to use a wiki in the first place.
Knol is not significantly collaborative and never will be. If it succeeds, it will not be because it is collaborative, but in spite of the fact that it isn’t. But then, I doubt it will succeed any more than H2G2 succeeded. Personally, I wouldn’t write for either project, because I have no interest in enriching a big corporation, over which I essentially have no control whatsoever. Cf. this Wikia story.
Comment by Larry Sanger — August 4, 2008 @ 4:25 pm
Hmm, maybe I used the wrong emoticon! What I meant was that CZ helped me discover the level of collaboration I was comfortable with, and in all honesty no, I don’t think I ever want to submit my writing to be freely edited by whoever again, and that’s not a comment on the wisdom of the idea of radical collaboration, just my own personal view. But what Knol does offer is the possibility of limiting/opening collaboration to any level (including “radical” if one wants it), and even of changing one’s mind partway through as to what level one wants. That’s an impressive degree of flexibility in terms of an originating author’s comfort level, and would be more attractive to academics such as myself who aren’t comfortable with being unable to control collaboration or limit collaborators. True, one writes on the site of a large, faceless corporation — but in many ways, that’s a relief — no clash of personalities. All I want to control is my own little knolI(s) …
Comment by Russell Potter — August 4, 2008 @ 8:20 pm