Citizendium Blog

The Citizendium Monthly Write-a-Thon has started in most of the world (it happens the first Wednesday of every month), and the topic this month is fascinating: Thoughts and Books. With that topic, I’ll be on hand in the morning… In fact, there are already five people who have shown up, including three who are “keen-as-mustard and jumped the gun” and of course Aussie Aleta.

The Independent kindly noticed the Write-a-Thon announcement. OK, so it’s not the most positive press coverage we’ve received. But at this point, some mainstream press attention is welcome. Still, I gotta say…contrary to this journalist, we didn’t expect to eclipse Wikipedia before the two year mark, and we are not “a Nupedia” (for cryin’ out loud, when is that canard going to die?) — we’re a robust and growing community. I’m personally very proud of the work we’ve done, and I am happy and grateful to be able to work daily with such a wonderfully bright and involved group of people.

UPDATE: ouch…Wikipedia has gotten some negative press, too, from the New Scientist. Wikipedians are “closed” and “disagreeable” according to personality tests?

We are gearing up for Biology Week which begins Monday, September 22! Please plan to show up during the week, and especially on Monday. Also, we need your help to spread the word.

If you know any biologists, please pass the word on to them. If you have a biology blog or participate in a biology mailing list, please make an announcement there. Please feel free to use, or link to, our press release: Wiki Encyclopedia Invites Biologists to a Weeklong Open House. Here it is:

For immediate release

Wiki Encyclopedia Invites Biologists to a Weeklong Open House

International Cyberspace — September 19 — Biology Week, an online “open house” for biologists, biology students, and anyone else interested, begins September 22 on Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/), the next-generation wiki encyclopedia started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.

During the week, biologists and anyone interested in the topic are invited test out the Citizendium system. Editors and authors from the project’s Biology Workgroup will be on hand to meet and greet new people on the wiki. “I strongly believe that the Citizendium system will be appealing to many scientists and scholars,” said Sanger. “Many of them just need to give it a try. Biology Week is an excuse for biologists to try out the system together.”

Biology is one of the more active areas in the Citizendium, with nearly 1,000 articles in progress. Unlike the Encyclopedia of Life, the project is a wiki and benefits from strong collaboration; for an example of the success of the system, biologists might want to see the article “Life” (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life).

Dr. Gareth Leng, Professor of Experimental Physiology at the University of Edinburgh, and Citizendium author and editor, described the project: “Our role will not be to tell readers what opinions they should hold, but to give them the means to decide, rationally, for themselves. The role of experts is critical—not to impose opinions, but to support accuracy in reporting and citing information.”

The Citizendium, or “citizens’ compendium,” uses the same software as Wikipedia. It is a successful public-expert hybrid project to produce a general reference resource. The community encourages general public participation, but makes a low-key, guiding role for experts. It also requires real names and asks contributors to sign a “social contract.”

As a result, the project is vandalism-free and, despite its youth (its public launch was just 18 months ago), has steadily added over 8,000 articles, many of them of fine quality.

LINKS:

Citizendium website: http://www.citizendium.org/
Biology Week homepage: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Biology_Week
“Life” (sample article): http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life

PRESS CONTACT INFORMATION:

Prof. Supten Sarbadhikari (Biology Week coordinator)

Founding Chair of Biomedical Informatics
PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research
Coimbatore, India
supten@gmail.com
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Supten_Sarbadhikari

Dr. Daniel Mietchen (Biology Week coordinator)

Structural Brain Mapping Group
Department of Psychiatry
University of Jena
daniel.mietchen@googlemail.com
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen

Dr. Larry Sanger

Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium; co-founder of Wikipedia
Executive Director, WatchKnow (to launch soon)
sanger@citizendium.org
http://www.larrysanger.org/

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

Hey, have you been putting off joining us?  Have you been putting off writing for us?  Tomorrow is Stop the Procrastination Day.  It’s the monthly Write-a-Thon!  Join the party!  The last one, by the way, worked very nicely.

If you’re not a Citizen yet, join us tomorrow, and we will go to superhuman efforts to get you on board as quickly as possible.  Definitely faster than our 24 hour guarantee.  Whatcha waiting for?  An invitation?  (We’re working on that.)

In a blog post, one of our more prominent Web 2.0 supporters, Jason Calacanis, invites people to compare CZ and WP articles side-by-side, citing our “Northwest Passage” article (which is currently our Article of the Week) and Wikipedia’s.

I appreciate the implied compliment, but I think the time for meaningful side-by-side comparisons is still some time off.  There is no question that, in most cases, articles take time to develop to their fullest potential.  This is just as true on CZ as on WP.  We are still a very new project, and many of our articles simply have not benefitted from the time and scale effects that Wikipedia articles have enjoyed (but have not actually been perfected by) over the years.

That said, a lot of our articles are excellent right out of the gate — for instance, our “New Article of the Week,” which was started July 22, ”Edward I.”  And there is no question that the average level of our new articles is far better than Wikipedia’s new articles were.  Jimmy Wales said recently that he remembers the days when one could start the Africa article and write, “Africa is a continent.”  Indeed, I believe that’s exactly how the Wikipedia “Africa” article did read for a while.  Well, such a stub would be deleted fairly quickly on CZ.  Now, I must admit in fairness that we still have no “Africa” article at all – for shame!  Still, this and many other major oversights will be fixed before too long.

The Citizendium is unfinished, but on a vector of improvement that will, over the coming few years, take it head and shoulders over Wikipedia in terms of quality.  And then in terms of quantity, too!

I do have to agree with Jason:

This is going to get very interesting over the next five years.

The Write-a-Thon was regarded as great fun and a success by its participants and ever since I’ve been wanting to blog about the meaning of it.

It worked for a couple of reasons.  First, there was a shared understanding, which solved a coordination problem (or created a coordination opportunity?):

1. Large numbers of people were made aware of “an event” going on on the wiki, explicitly labelled as a relatively rare (monthly) event.
2. The globality of the event was emphasized, if only by necessity (the Write-a-Thon lasted from July 31, 1200 UTC, in New Zealand, until August 2, 1000 UTC, in Hawaii).
3. They knew, also, that large numbers of other people, from around the globe, knew these things; so there was a shared understanding.
4. Given this shared understanding, they could reasonably infer that other people would actually show up.
5. That gave some people a reason to show up themselves, a reason that they did not have at other times: an expectation of more participants on the wiki.
6. So they showed up!

(more…)