Citizendium Blog

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

A special issue of the highly-regarded journal of social epistemology, Episteme, has just appeared. The journal is edited by one of the most important living epistemologists, Alvin Goldman, but this issue was co-edited by University of Arizona philosophy professor Don Fallis and me (Don more than me). Anyway, here is the issue.

I have an article in the issue, called “The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia.” Here is the abstract:

Wikipedia has challenged traditional notions about the roles of experts in the Internet Age. Section 1 sets up a paradox. Wikipedia is a striking popular success, and yet its success can be attributed to the fact that it is wide open and bottom-up. How can such a successful knowledge project disdain expertise? Section 2 discusses the thesis that if Wikipedia could be shown by an excellent survey of experts to be fantastically reliable, then experts would not need to be granted positions of special authority. But, among other problems, this thesis is self-stultifying. Section 3 explores a couple ways in which egalitarian online communities might challenge the occupational roles or the epistemic leadership roles of experts. There is little support for the notion that the distinctive occupations that require expertise are being undermined. It is also implausible that Wikipedia and its like might take over the epistemic leadership roles of experts. Section 4 argues that a main reason that Wikipedia’s articles are as good as they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily. But some Wikipedia articles suffer because so many aggressive people drive off people more knowledgeable than they are; so there is no reason to think that Wikipedia’s articles will continually improve. Moreover, Wikipedia’s commitment to anonymity further drives off good contributors. Generally, some decisionmaking role for experts is not just consistent with online knowledge communities being open and bottom-up, it is recommended as well.

Here is a direct link to the PDF. Not sure how long this will be up; I’ll post a copy on larrysanger.org eventually.

It’s a work of academic philosophy, but that didn’t stop Slashdot from commenting. (I gotta wonder…what percentage of the commenters bothered to RTFA?)

The other articles are interesting — check them out!

I gave a speech last week at PCST-10 (the 10th conference of the International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology), held at Malmö University, Sweden. The talk was titled “Should science communication be collaborative?” A few items:

Should science communication be collaborative? There are two ways to understand this question, and so also two very different reactions to it. One reaction is that science writing already is very collaborative. Scientific articles are typically co-written by labs or by other collections of colleagues, because most experiments cannot be done by just one person; scientific discoveries are now typically made by several or many people cooperating. So, of course science communication should be collaborative.

The other reaction understands me to be talking about collaboration in the wiki sense, or what I call radical collaboration. And to that question there are typically mixed reactions. On the one hand, what Wikipedia has done is very exciting, and if scientists can tap into the same sort of collaboration, perhaps great things will result. On the other hand, scientists and scholars in general are very suspicious of the notion that anybody can edit our words. Many scholars scoff at Wikipedia’s motto—”you can edit this page”—as incontrovertible evidence that it cannot be very reliable.

…

But first, it will be useful to draw a distinction between two kinds of scientific communication: original and derivative. Original communication is aimed at advancing knowledge in the field with never-before-published findings, discoveries, first-hand accounts, survey data, theories, arguments, proofs, and so forth. Typically, such communication takes the form of papers in peer-reviewed journals and online pre-print services, as well as conference presentations, posters, and some other things. By contrast, derivative communication merely sums up what is already known, and takes the form of news and encyclopedia articles, textbooks, and popular science books and magazines.

…

I draw this distinction because I think that we might actually wish to give different answers to the question, “Should science communication be collaborative?” based on what type of science communication we’re talking about. In particular, I think it is very plausible that derivative science communication, like encyclopedia articles and science news reporting, are much more amenable to collaboration than original science communication.

…

Over the last few years, I have conversed with dozens of scholars and scientists about how to set up wikis or other collaborative knowledge communities. There is a fascinating pattern to these conversations. They go like this. The scientist, impressed by the vast quantities of information in Wikipedia, tells me: “It is amazing what can be accomplished when many people come together, from around the world, to sum up what is known. What would happen if we tried this in our field? The resulting resource could be a central, authoritative clearing-house of information for everyone in the field, as well as for the general public. So, what is the best way to set up ‘a Wikipedia’ in our field?”

This is an interesting question, but it is not the question that they end up answering. Instead, the scientist goes off and consults with his colleagues, and then I hear this: “We have a couple of concerns. First, we are concerned about lack of credit in the Wikipedia system. The careers of scientists depend on names being on their publications. So we want to make sure that authors are properly named and identified on articles. Second, we are a little nervous about the idea that just anybody can edit anybody’s articles. We understand that it’s important to be collaborative, but we think it is reasonable to nominate a lead author or lead reviewer for each article, and restrict participation to experts. So, what do you think of that?”

I think that the scientist and his colleagues are confused in a fascinating way. I try to be diplomatic when I say this, of course. But the scientist seems not to realize two facts:

1. If you name authors, you award lead authorship or editorship for articles, and you carefully restrict who may participate, then you are not building a collaborative community in anything like the radical sense. You are merely using a wiki to replicate an older sort of collaboration, common in scientific writing.

2. It is precisely the newer, more radical sort of collaboration that explains Wikipedia’s success. Wikipedia is successful in large part precisely because everyone feels empowered to edit any article. If you disempower people, they won’t show up.

As a result, there is no reason to think that the scientist’s group will enjoy success anything like Wikipedia’s, because they have actually rejected the Wikipedia model.

…

Do those scientists, who have rejected the Wikipedia model, have a legitimate complaint about it? Or have they made a mistake in rejecting it? I think they are partly right in rejecting the Wikipedia model, but also partly mistaken.

…

Given enough time, an article that is written with a large and diverse set of authors—particularly if it is under the gentle guidance of experts—can be expected to be lengthier, broader in its coverage, and fairer in its presentation of issues, than an article written by a single or a few hand-chosen authors. It will be longer, because many collaborators will compete with each other to expand the article. It will be broader in its coverage, because the collaborators often can fill up gaps in exposition that others leave. It will be fairer in its presentation of issues, because self-selecting collaborators in a very open project will tend to have a diversity of views, and they must compromise in order to work together at all.

…

In fact, beyond issues of feasibility or difficulty, I detect an incoherence in the very idea that original research might be radically collaborative. The act of publishing a research paper does more than merely convey some findings; it also stakes a claim, that is, it has the force or effect of attaching some definite name or names to the findings. To make original science communication radically collaborative would be to nullify the act of taking credit. If we were to list as co-authors people who are not responsible for the research, the author list would not longer be honoring those people actually responsible for the finding. It would just be a list of people who happened to work on the paper that summed up the research, even if some of the people listed had none of the thoughts or conclusions contained in the paper.

One might say that open collaboration on communication of original research would help to elaborate the full range of arguments and analysis releated to the research. But that already happens, I suppose, in the give-and-take of scientific and scholarly conversation that happens before and after a paper is published. Indeed, it has often been observed that science and scholarship generally are massively collaborative in the sense that researchers build on each others’ work; it was Newton who pointed this out when he said that he saw farther only because he stood on the shoulders of giants. I have no doubt that new Internet methods can and already do facilitate this very old sort of scientific collaboration. But I see no need, in addition, to permit others, who had nothing to do with some research, to participate in the writing itself of original research findings.

That said, there is at least one way that original science communication might be amenable to radical collaboration: I mean what has been called “open research” and “open science.” As I understand it, this involves inviting others to participate actively in a study—not merely collaborating on the writing, but actually doing the research for, designing, and performing experiments, surveys, and so forth. This is something I know very little about, and I will not embarrass myself by pretending to know more than I do. An example of such research, perhaps, was the lightning-fast investigation in multiple labs that identified the avian flu virus. Such research can be somewhat open and self-selecting. So perhaps that is one sense, and a very interesting sense, in which original science communication can be radically collaborative. I’m afraid I can’t presume to say anything else about that, though.

…

Hope you find it interesting.

–Larry

In an Inside Higher Ed column, “Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia,” Mark A. Wilson claims of Wikipedia, “The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has become reality…”  Wilson calls on college professors to get involved in Wikipedia, using their own real names.  One has to wonder if this is an April Fool’s gag, but it’s a pretty sober-sounding piece.

Here’s is my response, which I added to the IHE comments:

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I’m Larry Sanger, and this is false. Please do not use my name to encourage professors to get involved in Wikipedia. My vision has always been for a maximally reliable information resource—not one that is controlled by faceless, often hostile, often irresponsible people, many of them teenagers and college students.

Over the years there have been repeated calls to professors to get involved and improve Wikipedia. Few have heeded the call, and those who have have come back pretty consistently saying, “This place is nuts.” Indeed, long ago—in 2002—I seriously considered starting up a Wikipedia “Sifter” project (you can still read about this in archives) in which experts would approve Wikipedia articles. At the time I was told by some of the more active Wikipedians, essentially: “Don’t expect those alleged experts to get any special treatment from us. They’re no better than the rest of us, and they shouldn’t get all uppity and act like they are!” It then became clear to me that Wikipedia simply had no place for experts. I could not in good conscience recommend that any serious knowledge professional participate in Wikipedia. I still cannot.

Inside Higher Ed and this columnist would do better to acquaint themselves with a project that actually gives college professors, and other experts, a modest but real stake in guidance of content decisions and management of content policy: the Citizendium. I can’t fault the author for not mentioning us, as we are new and, with only 5,800 articles, still unproven. But a positive passing mention would help to create a better alternative to Wikipedia. Please spread the word.

Sign up here. It’s a good time to sign up; tomorrow is our monthly Write-a-Thon, which is always very lively!

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Let me temper the above comments with a few additional remarks:

• I have long maintained, and I still do, that Wikipedia is very useful, and that most of the people working on Wikipedia are excellent hands.  I do not mean to dismiss Wikipedia, or the work of most Wikipedians, wholesale.  I simply want to quash any notion that I can be associated with a call to experts to descend on Wikipedia, which I think is a bad idea.
• Perhaps I should also clarify that the significant advantage of the Citizendium is not merely that it makes a place for experts.  That is only one of our differences (and advantages).  But it is the difference that is relevant to any suggestion that experts get involved in Wikipedia.
• I understand that there are certain topics, especially more technical and mathematical topics, where Wikipedians behave themselves rather better and where expert knowledge is accorded an appropriate (not fawning, of course) respect.  I don’t mean to deny this, and well done to all involved for their success with articles on such topics.

It seems that everyone is talking about Google’s new Knol project — the Citizendium has got a tremendous amount of press as a result.  So I wanted to add another note on the topic.

At the Citizendium we are motivated by one thing only: to become the best knowledge base that Earth has ever seen.  We believe we have, over the long term, a better chance at this than any other project.

If Knol were to reveal a genuine expert contributor that was not already an expert editor on CZ whom CZ would approve as an editor, it would be my pleasure to welcome that person to become part of our new knowledge society.

What our expert editors discover is that the expert-guided collaborative environment on the Citizendium is unprecedented, remarkably productive, and really without parallel.

Delivering one’s expert knowledge with the input from a general knowledge community helps all our editors to assess — and improve — the ways in which their knowledge is stored and communicated.

Only the Citizendium does that.

We are by no means complacent, and we intend fully to watch Google’s new Knol project.  We will utilize constructively any contributor that will genuinely add to the world’s knowledge store by inviting them to join us a CZ contributor.

Creating a new knowledge society is what the Citizendium is doing and every genuine expert should be an editor on CZ.  Moreover, everyone who wants to work as part of an open, public project shoulder-to-shoulder with such experts should join us as well.

Speech delivered at the Jefferson Society, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 9, 2007, and at the Institute of European Affairs, Dublin, Ireland, September 28, 2007, as the inaugural talk for the IEA’s “Our Digital Futures” program.

I want to begin by asking a question that might strike you as perhaps a little absurd. The question is, “Why haven’t governments tried to regulate online communities more?” To be sure, there have been instances where governments have stepped in. For instance, in January of last year in Germany, the father of a deceased computer hacker used the German court system to try to have an article about his son removed from the German Wikipedia. As a result, wikipedia.de actually went offline for a brief period. It’s come back online, of course, and in fact the article in question is still up.

Here’s another example. In May of last year, attorneys general from eight U.S. states demanded that MySpace turn over the names of registered sex offenders lurking on the website, which as you probably know is heavily frequented by teenagers. The website deleted pages of some 7,000 registered sex offenders. And the following July, they said that in fact some 29,000 registered sex offenders had accounts, which were subsequently deleted.

Those are just a few examples. But we can make some generalizations. The Internet is famously full of outrageously false, defamatory, and offensive information, and is said to be a haven for criminal activity. This leads back to the question I asked earlier: why haven’t governments tried to regulate online communities even more than they have?

We might well find this question a little absurd, especially if we champion the liberal ideals that form the foundation of Western civil society. Indeed, no doubt one reason is our widespread commitment to freedom of speech. But consider another possible reason—one that, I think, is very interesting.

Read the rest here.

Apparently, someone has done an interesting meta-study of scientific publishing, and titled his paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” (PLoS Medicine).

As a sarcastic philosopher type, it is my duty to observe that Dr. Ioannidis’ claim is self-stultifying.  If most published research findings are false, it follows that, probably, Ioannidis’ research finding is false.  Therefore, probably, most published research findings are true!

Summary by WSJ Online.

My essay “Who Says We Know,” which appeared first on Edge, was translated into German [link updated, thanks Gerd-Lothar] and appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung, the newspaper I tried (but failed) to read back when I was living in Munich in 1989-90.

Das Fazit der Debatte ist: Die starke Hinwendung zur Spezialisierung in der heutigen Zeit liegt ständig im Clinch mit unserer heutigen Verpflichtung zur absoluten Gleichbehandlung der Menschen. Doch so viel mir die Gleichheit bedeutet, wenn ich mich zwischen ihr und der Wahrheit entscheiden muss, stehe ich auf der Seite der Wahrheit.

Jawohl!

I gave the keynote last Thursday at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, “Imagining the Future: Scholarly Communication 2.0,” in San Francisco.  The speech was called “What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly Publishing.”  I had a great time there, met Brewster Kahle and various other interesting people.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

When I was asked to speak to you, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, I have to admit that I found this puzzling, because I don’t know anything about scholarly publishing. Why should someone who knows so little about scholarly publishing be asked to give a speech to the Society for Scholarly Publishing? That’s a paradox.

I found a similar paradox in an article by John Thompson in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2005. Thompson wrote: “academic publishers can survive today only if they become something other than academic publishers” (June 17, 2005).

The quote actually explains why I’m here. I’m here because I can tell you about a way to become something other than academic publishers. I suppose this is a little absurd, but as a philosopher, I am trained to take joy in life’s little absurdities.

So I’m going to try to make the case that scholarly publishers should start expert Web 2.0 projects. Here’s my plan for the talk.

•  I’m going to begin by painting a picture, a vision of what information online could look like in ten or twenty years. In short, I’m going to build a castle in the air. But then I will try to put a foundation underneath it.
• I’ll go over a number of examples of free encyclopedia projects from which we can learn.
• Then I’ll draw out some general principles.
• I’ll consider various business models for projects started by scholarly publishers.
• Finally, I’ll give you some ideas for projects you might start.

More here.

Wednesday I’ll be at my alma mater, Reed College, giving another speech, this time for the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges.

A new Encyclopedia of Life, which will attempt to catalog all 1.8 million named species, “available everywhere by single access on command” — I think that means free to read, at least – has been announced.  Its two supporting foundations are going to be funding it to the tune of — wait for it — $100 million, over a period of 10 years, this Reuters article reports.

This is stunning news.  With that amount of money, and the partners involved, it seems that chances are good that they’ll do excellent work.  I can easily imagine the Citizendium Biology Workgroup — perhaps our most active — saying to themselves, “Well, what’s the point of our writing articles about species now?”  It’s possible indeed that the EOL will do such a fantastic job that it will render all future of compendia of species useless.  But this is, you have to admit, not very likely.  Perhaps the first thing to notice is that we like to have multiple references, even if we have a truly excellent one in hand.  We have not yet seen the perfect encyclopedia; there will always be room for other approaches.  So to Citizendium’s biologists, I say: there will be a point, because there’s always an interest in and desire for alternative approaches.

Moreover, those of us with experience with business and publishing ventures of various kinds know that it is all too possible, even with a $100 million commitment, to fail to achieve the full vision — indeed, it is probable, since most business ventures fail.  The EOL looks quite a bit like the Digital Universe, which has had an impressive vision, but little else, for quite some time now.  It was Joe Firmage’s vision that attracted me to that project in the first place, and they have had something like over $14 million in funding in the last few years.  But, sadly, there is relatively little to show for the time and money; just what you see on digitaluniverse.net and earthportal.net, and some more stuff going on behind the scenes.  Nothing to sneeze at, perhaps — but not the vision.

But with the EOL, well, the bloom is still on the Rosa, and it looks much better thought-out than the Digital Universe, and also much better focused.  The idea of an encyclopedia focused on all species is an excellent one if for no other reason than that it is both clear and appealing.  The general look and feel of it is excellent as well, and the planned standard sections, such as images, charts, maps, videos, etc., are exciting to contemplate.  The question is whether they will, with their impressive funding and personnel, actually be able to come together and create a new expert content production model that will actually populate those templates with data.  I certainly hope so.

What the Citizendium has going for it is that we are following a model that is — well, I dare not say proven, but at least well supported and not particularly mysterious.  How we might end up with millions of meaty, excellent articles, starting with (ahem) much less money than EOL is starting with, is not hard to understand.  It’s not a foregone conclusion that we’ll achieve that success, but we’re on our way.

If EOL achieves its own great success by borrowing the best of Wikipedia’s processes and attracting a lot of the world’s biologists to the table, they will have pioneered a method that can be used in every field.  That is exciting and something to hope for, regardless of what it might mean for the Citizendium.