Guest blogger: Hayford Peirce, Citizendium Treasurer

I’ve been the Treasurer of Citizendium (CZ) for the last six months or so. As such, I am happy to report that Anthony Sebastian’s recent fund-raising drive was quite successful — we raised enough to ensure our continuing operations at least through January of next year.

And I’m confident that donations will continue to come in, although possibly in much smaller quantities and in more erratic fashion. Personally, I think that the future of CZ’s finances will probably enable us to continue indefinitely, even if occasionally we do get a little near the knuckle on a month to month basis….

More important to me, though, is the lack of authors and Editors. Right now there are only a small number of truly dedicated souls who continue to contribute new material on a regular basis, along with a scattering of others who jump in from time to time. What is lacking, and holding back our growth, I think, is the total lack of the collaboration that we originally had.

Even though we might have argued with some authors, at least they were present — and actively participating!

When I started at Wikipedia years ago, I was able to originate many dozens of articles mostly in the tennis and genre-fiction fields — it was infuriating to have imbeciles come in and destroy a lot of content, but it was also exhilarating to have like-minded people come in and add worthwhile additional material and to constructively rewrite what I had begun. And that sense of collaboration, of course, was what then led me to Citizendium, as I’m sure it was the case with most of the other early Citizens.

Now, however, my energy seems to have flagged. Without the participation of *anyone* else, it is very hard for me to find the strength of character to go to the recent Tony Trabert article that I brought in from Wikipedia, for example, and completely rewrite it as I think it *should* be written. I’ve redone the first paragraph, yes, but as for the rest…. It’s like dropping a feather down a well and waiting to hear a sound….

If I *knew* what could be done to change the situation, I would certainly make it public — as it is, however, I don’t know….

All of the registered members of our Citizendium community undoubtedly have some idea of why they volunteer their time helping each other develop our encyclopedia.  In addition to any rational idea we might have for volunteering our time, we all must also have a feeling that comes with it, an emotional reason, perhaps one we find difficult to articulate.

If you were to ask Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance and Michael Norton, psychological experimental scientists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Yale School of Management and the Harvard Business School, respectively, they might tell you this:

“Many people these days feel a sense of “time famine”—never having enough minutes and hours to do everything. We all know that our objective amount of time can’t be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), but [our] new study suggests that volunteering our limited time—giving it away—may actually increase our sense of unhurried leisure.”

Their thinking is that by giving away time, as in volunteering, you stimulate your feelings of being competent and efficient, accompanying which time seems to stretch out in your mind. You gain time, subjectively, by giving time.

Since we all live in our subjectivity, I’ll go for that kind of “time affluence”.

Get rich in time, join Citizendium, those of you reading this who haven’t already gotten such riches.

See:

PRESS RELEASE: Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science

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

From our new “Quick Start” page

Just arrived?

Want to get started, but don’t know how?

Well, don’t panic!^[1]

If you’re new to Citizendium, we’d love you to dive “write” in, whether you’re an author or an editor. We don’t want you to be discouraged, but you may imagine we have extremely high standards. Certainly we aim for high quality, but we also want participation to be easy and as fun as possible. We know that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What is the first thing you should do after you join? While you can do whatever you like (it’s a wiki!), we recommend two things:

1. Start an article. How? Pick a topic. Then think of a good title for an encyclopedia article about that topic. Then go to Start Article, handily linked on your left–and do it the Easy Way™! Just write a paragraph or two introducing the topic neutrally, beginning with a definition of the concept, or a description of what a thing is notable for. We don’t mind very short articles, as long as they have a couple of sentences. They’ll be expanded later, trust us. Then…
2. Edit someone else’s article. How? Find an article on a topic you are interested in or know a lot about. You can use the search box, or navigate alphabetically, or enter via “top articles” or workgroups. When you’ve found an article you want to edit, press the “edit” tab. Add a few sentences. It’s OK. They just have to be a reasonably helpful addition. They don’t have to be absolutely brilliant. Brilliance happens later.

Are you still worried? Seriously, there is no need for that. Let’s cover some main worries.

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As anyone very familiar with Wikipedia and other wikis knows, no authors are credited on most wiki encyclopedia article pages.  The Citizendium, however, uses real names; they are found in the article histories, though, not on the article pages themselves.  So we are in a position to give people “byline” credit and real-world recognition for their contributions, where Wikipedia and many other typical Web 2.0 projects are not.  As a result, for quite some time, there has been a movement among some Citizens — how many and how representative, I dare not say — to give a full rundown about who has done for each article.

I believe there is serious danger lurking here: to honor people in different amounts based on how much they have worked on an article would have the general tendency to lead to authorship disputes, which would be a huge drain on both time and smooth social relations.  More importantly, however, I think it would tend to make the project less robustly collaborative: it would encourage a culture of credit, where we now have the typical culture of strong collaboration that is associated closely with wikis.  In other words, identifying people as “the lead author” or “the lead authors” of an article would tend to make them guard “their” article more closely, and tend to make others more wary and more likely to ask “permission” to contribute.

I am, however, always game to try new things, as long as they are in a form that I think won’t lead to total disaster.  So I produced a version of the general idea of contributor lists where, among other things, (1) there must be five contributors on the contributor list, if any them is to be credited in the contributor list; (2) they are to be listed in alphabetical order and otherwise not specially singled out for how much work they have done on the article; (3) they are listed under the heading “Contributors” and a message just below their names reads, “CZ is an open collaboration.  Please join these people in developing this article!”; and (4) one may get contributor credit for writing just two substantive sentences.

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The Citizendium Makes it Easier for Authors to Submit Articles

You Can Now Mail in Your Articles

The Citizendium now offers authors the opportunity to submit articles written in their word processor. A Citizendium human Wiki-Converter will convert the document in the MediaWiki mark up code so that the article can appear in the Citizendium as a regular encyclopedia article, complete with images, tables, notes and citation-sources (references).

For the present, the Citizendium will accept articles written in Microsoft ‘.doc’ format, and will accept also ‘.rtf’ files, which most word processors can generate.

Authors send their articles as attachments to the following mailing list; authors submitting articles may submit to the mailing list without ‘subscribing’ to it:

cz-wikiformat@mail.citizendium.org 

In the body of the email, authors may add any comments regarding their article. A member of the wiki-converting team will contact you confirming that your article has been accepted for conversion, and will keep you posted on the conversion progress. Expect some queries from time-to-time, for example for clarification.

After your article has been converted and posted to the Citizendium, you may want to make edits. You can do that yourself, for minor edits, using the Citizendium’s editor. Go to the article page, click the edit tab. The editor box will be in MediaWiki code, but you can easily make edits by following the code format you will see already there. If you have extensive edits, as in the case of a re-write of a section of the article, submit the section to the mailing list and indicate the title of the article it belongs to, and the name of the Wiki-Converter.

To submit articles, you must sign-up as an author in the Citizendium, if you have not already done so. You do that by filling in a simple web form. If you wish to learn more about the author role, see The Author Role.Also check out the Citizendium ‘Main Page’ for more information.

If you have questions, post them to the mailing list. Someone will get back to you with an answer. The Citizendium aims at credibility and quality, not just quantity, in its articles. Both the general public and credentialed experts are encouraged to get involved. We use our real names, not pseudonyms. We’re both collegial and congenial.

ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES:

• cz-wikiformat@mail.citizendium.org

LINKS:

• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:The_Author_Role
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Wiki-converting (home page for the Wiki-Converter project)

PRESS CONTACT INFORMATION:

Prof. Anthony Sebastian (leader of the Wiki-Converter project)

Professor of Medicine

University of California San Francisco

Anthony_Sebastian@msn.com

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Anthony.Sebastian

Dr. Larry Sanger

Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium; co-founder of Wikipedia

sanger@citizendium.org

http://www.larrysanger.org/

For immediate release

University Assignments Going Cyber

Citizendium Announces “Eduzendium” Initiative

January 24, 2008 – In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. As with so much else this decade, it is all down to the Internet.

Traditional teaching saw students laboring to produce essays that to them felt onerous and oftentimes pointless. Once read by the lecturer their writing was generally consigned to the dustbin.

For some students, that situation is now radically changing.

In a never-before-seen new initiative, the online reference encyclopedia project Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org), in collaboration with expert teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium. The Eduzendium project allows students to write their assignments online on the Citizendium on a given topic allocated by their teacher.

Read the whole thing.

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:

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This is an early Thanksgiving.  It occurs to me that I have not thanked people enough, especially the hardest-working people.  I thank people all the time, but it is usually for over-and-above stuff, and when people first show up.  So, at the risk of embarrassing them, I’m going to thank a whole bunch of people.  I hope you don’t mind, folks.

But I should add something, because I don’t want this sort of attention to go to anybody’s head, either — I mean, frankly, I think it’s a little ridiculous that praise from me would go to anybody’s head.  Most people aren’t that way and they realize that I’m just this guy, so big deal.  But, you see, I’m worried and I speak from experience.  In listing these people and their useful work, I do not mean, in any way shape or form, to be establishing something like a project aristocracy.  I can imagine that some people might be puffed up by this sort of attention, and think that such recognition gives them rights in the project that others do not have.  That would be very wrongheaded.  In fact, not to malign them unjustly I hope, but certain Wikipedians seem to carry about their titles and achievements and “barnstars” and whatnot as so many bludgeons that they can use to get their way.  Damn me if that ever happens on the Citizendium.  I have sometimes accused Wikipedia of being egalitarian in a bad, utopian way, but in this regard I would like CZ to be *more* egalitarian than WP.  I would like us to settle content disputes by kindly, rational compromise first, by reference to expert knowledge second, and by fair, open, law-governed dispute resolution processes last — but NEVER by a presumption that “I’ve been here
longer, I’m a Big Shot, so you gotta listen to me and my friends, or else!” We should always be a freer, more open, and indeed more equal community than that cliquish, competitive attitude implies.

And if you would never dream of being that way — well, clearly, I’m not talking about *you*.

That said in preface, here’s the rogue’s gallery from the Citizendium’s first year, in alphabetical order, and what I honor them for.  And I’m very sorry if I left anyone out, or if I failed to mention some shining achievement of yours — I’m just going based on what I remember and what I had personal experience with, and the project is already bigger than I can always personally track.  But yes, I do actually know all these people and am at least somewhat acquainted with their work for the project!  I am sure I must have left out some hard-working people, some may have slipped through the cracks, and I’m sorry that I did…

Click through to the list.

The Internet and vanity are no strangers.  The eminently mockable vanity inherent in the self-revealing ”personal home pages” of the 1990s — I admit it, I had one on Geocities – can be found once again on MySpace, FaceBook, and personal blogs.  But unlike in the 1990s, our vanity is really getting in the way of a really lively, intelligent discourse.  Too many people would rather pretend to be broadcasters, which they’ll never be interesting enough to be, than find a neutral ground in which to exchange ideas and engage in a good old-fashioned dialogue.  Let’s bring back the discussion list!

I would go on, but I’ll save it for a post on SharedKnowing, the new, but old-fashioned, mailing list discussion about online knowledge communities.  Join here.

UPDATE: Digg this!