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

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 bottom line: our aim is quality, not quantity.  We already know that “crowds” can produce massive quantities of content.  Big deal.  The Citizendium is about developing our massive quantities of content into works of stunning quality, over the long term.  We have a better shot than anyone at doing this.

Many people have essentially asked me, “Since Wikipedia is ‘good enough,’ what is the point of the Citizendium?” The answer, of course, is that Wikipedia isn’t good enough, and given its policies, it is highly unlikely that it ever will be. More to the point, over the long haul, the Citizendium can do better.

But that’s always my reply. It now occurs to me that the underlying insight has not been emphasized enough. As I look at various encyclopedia articles — and my own writings — I am struck by how much work there is to do, to perfect them. For example, to find exactly the right reference, and place it at exactly the right place, is very difficult and time-consuming. Most people don’t spend the time needed to get it exactly right. A work is hailed as brilliant if it merely doesn’t get anything too badly wrong. Well, the great thing about the Citizendium is that we have the (growing) community and the (developing) policies that is allowing us to grow not just another encyclopedia, but a continuously improving encyclopedia. That is the brilliance of our plan.

The day we look forward to is not the day when we have millions of articles, but the day when serious professionals say, “The Citizendium articles in my area are of such stunning quality that I can’t imagine how they could be improved. They have been worked and reworked by hundreds, or thousands, of specialists, in my field. They contain, of course, no known factual errors. The coverage is complete; the tiniest details are covered in more specialized articles. The writing reflects consistently superb craftsmanship: accessible to the college student on more basic topics (without removing accuracy), and clear on more advanced topics. The citations are brilliantly chosen, always reflecting the best (original, or most authoritative) sources. They do not favor any side in any controversy, but provide full details of the debate, so that the reader can be fully informed so as to make up his or her own mind. The bibliographies and external links, fully annotated, list virtually every credible source on their topics. The other supplementary material, on subpages, is of equally high quality. In short, the only reason to change the articles (and whole clusters) now is that the field itself changes.”

An article is one thing. A magisterial article is quite another. The difference is huge and hugely important.

It’s a long road from here to there. Wikipedia is very, very far from that point, and again I doubt it will ever reach that point; if I thought they could, I wouldn’t have started CZ. We, however, have a chance!

In fact, in view of this, you might well ask yourself: what is the point of Wikipedia? It’s never going to get past a certain level of mediocrity; that’s one of the main reasons I stopped working on it a while ago. I think that, as the years go by, we are going to find more and more people asking themselves that — and coming to CZ. Because it’s not just about quantity. It’s about quality. And we have the nascent community and policies in place that actually have a chance to achieve the sort of high quality a global collaboration of scholars can achieve.

Mind you, I still think it’s all right if we start with stubs; we have to start somewhere. But we should also keep our eyes on the prize, because our substantial promise of achieving that sort of stunning quality is really what makes it all worthwhile.

If you are interested in how Citizendium works and how to make it work better, read on.

This is certainly shaping up to be another successful Write-a-Thon – by new article count, far and away the most successful, as we’re closing in on 100 new articles. I am not sure but I think it’s also the most successful in terms of number of edits per day; we’ve had 500 edits in the last eight hours (as I write this).

Obviously, Stub Week has something to do with this. And this gives me ideas (uh oh, look out). Actually, the conjunction of several purported insights is very suggestive:

1. Write-a-Thon plus Stub Week equals very high activity and record numbers of articles per day. No one is surprised by this, either, I suspect. Hmm…
2. CZ has, after one year (half of which was in a private pilot project), amassed more words than Wikipedia did in its first year (some 5 million). I estimate that our average (mean, not median) length article is six times longer than Wikipedia’s was in early 2002. I recall that, as I touted Wikipedia’s success in our first press release and in the project’s first public speech (to a Stanford class), I was embarrassed by the preponderance of very short, low-quality articles. But I also knew that incrementalism (doing a task in bits and pieces, rather than all at once) is what got people involved…
3. Like it or not, number of articles is what people pay attention to, more than length or quality of articles. We are supposed to have done not so well because we have “only” 3,400 articles…
4. We’ve got something like 2,200 “CZ Authors,” but only about 10% edit the wiki every month. I know that this is par for the course for projects like ours (the long tail and all that), but I can’t shake the feeling that we could be getting a lot more of these people involved. Why go to the trouble of creating an account (it is some trouble, after all) if you don’t intend to edit the wiki at all?
5. As is well known, people get involved in a project (or any activity) if they experience easy and satisfying success early on.

These thoughts together suggest a certain line of argument in favor of stub articles and incrementalism.

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Dear All,

I’d like to invite you to join an old-fashioned discussion list, SharedKnowing:

http://mail.citizendium.org/mailman/listinfo/sharedknowing

This unmoderated (or semi-moderated) list will be devoted to well-reasoned, polite discussion and announcements about the nature of online knowledge production communities. It is open to everyone. I hope it might become a central clearing-house of general information and free, open, yet polite discussion about a cluster of issues that are of great interest to many people, and of growing importance to society at large.

See the list info page. There, I have explained:

• Purpose of the list 
• How to subscribe and unsubscribe
• How to post
• When will the discussion start?
• Who should join
• Core and example questions
• Relevant and irrelevant Internet communities/websites
• Other encouraged posts
• Subjects that will be deemed off-topic
• List rules
• List management

To give people time to arrive, discussion will start in a few weeks.

I’m starting this list for several reasons. First, as a scholar (of sorts) and project organizer, I have an active, practical interest in these topics. Second, as I write and prepare speeches (something I’m doing a lot these days), I would like to have a big group of knowledgeable, like-minded friends to bounce ideas off of. Finally, quite honestly, I miss good old-fashioned discussion lists. Back in the 90s, I ran several, and one of them, ASP-Disc, was really great. I’d like to replicate that sort of lively community.

Please post this message as widely as possible!

Regards

Larry Sanger

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I am hereby calling for formal (or semi-formal), well-reasoned position statements, from anyone – including people outside the Citizendium community — about what licensing scheme the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) should use. The issues are covered in an incomplete and semi-systematic way on three separate pages here (under “License”):

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Summaries_of_policy_arguments

There are many interesting issues involved, but it boils down to one: under what license should we release articles that we have created ourselves? (Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are now available under the GFDL.)

I am giving us a deadline: we will have made the final decision on the license by November 15, two months from now. So the essays should be received by, let’s say, October 20 — if you want the decisionmakers to be able to absorb them.

Citizens may post links to their essays here:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:License_Essays

If you like, you can make your essay a subpage of that page. Please don’t make your essay a subpage of your user page (that’s actually contrary to user page rules).

Non-Citizens can host the essay yourself, or send it to us and we will host it, in HTML, PDF, or MediaWiki form. Send links to me (or another Citizen) to post.

Because this is an issue that deeply affects the future and vitality of the project as a whole, I will be taking a strong personal interest in it. I myself will be writing an essay summing up my own views, but I would like to have the benefit of your essays, first!

Please forward this important call for essays to potentially interested parties. I personally will be putting it only on Citizendium-L, Citizendium-Editors, and the blog.

Leslie Brooks has a short piece up asking “where the hell are the women in the Citizendium project?” I’m not impressed by the tone of the piece itself, but I think it is a good question (we do have more male than female contributors). Really, I think the question should be expanded to women and wikis in general– I would imagine that Wikipedia may be equally or moreso biased toward male contributors, but it’s just easier to tally up contributions by gender when people are editing under their real names. Regardless, engaging both male and female contributors is something we really need to think about.

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Five announcements here.

(1) Big Cleanup complete

I’m very happy to announce that as of yesterday, the Big Cleanup is complete! It took a little over two months. Not too bad, I think. Thanks again to the people who went through literally thousands of articles systematically and cleaned them up. This has arguably changed the nature of CZ–decidedly for the better. The advantages are listed on CZ:The_Big_Cleanup.

(2) Unchecklisted articles remain

There are still some unchecklisted articles, however–these are articles that were created since we started the Big Cleanup. See: CZ:Unchecklisted_Articles Please feel free to sign up on that page to “checklist” the rest of the articles.

(3) New guideline: always add the checklist to new articles

We can now install a new guideline, which I assume no one will have a problem with. Here it is. NEW GUIDELINE: whenever you create a new article, or you notice that someone else has created a new article, add the article checklist to the talk page. Note that the checklist can now be found conveniently in the sidebar, under “project pages.” I’ve added this guideline to a few different pages in the appropriate places on the wiki.

(4) Next steps?

Now that the Big Cleanup is done and most of our articles are checklisted, we can now use the results for all sorts of new Big Initiatives. So what’s the next Big Thing? Citizens, please look at this Board and make suggestions, or state your opinions about what our top priorities should be next.

(5) Lots of statistics graphs

I just wanted to point out the fine work of Aleksander Stos in creating this helpful statistics page. Thanks, Alex. There’s much else to announce, but it will have to wait until later.

I posted recently on the mailing lists — it’s important enough to put here, too.

All,

Please read this — this is a potentially project-changing mail.

I had a bit of a brainstorm recently. The bottom line is: if you’re interested in taking charge of some new workgroup, issue, or project, write up a plan for yourself, and send it to the Executive Committee (via me). We want to hear from you. Details below.

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Retrieved from “http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren%27t_Wikipedia“

How is the Citizendium similar to Wikipedia? In quite a few ways. In enough ways that you might make you wonder why we’ve started another project. Consider:

1. We aim to create a giant free general encyclopedia.
2. We’re managed by a nonprofit.
3. We use MediaWiki software.
4. We use wiki methods of strong collaboration. We don’t sign articles or even have lead authors; we strongly encourage everybody to “be bold” and mix it up.
5. No credentials are needed to participate (as an author).
6. We still rely on “soft security” to a great extent. We mostly trust people and solve what few behavioral problems we’ve seen as they arise.
7. We are committed to a neutral, unbiased presentation of information.
8. We have similar naming conventions, and some other similar conventions.
9. Quite a few of our articles came from Wikipedia.
10. The community and project has been organized by the same person who organized Wikipedia.

Quite similar, it seems. But…

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