Citizendium Blog

[The following is a mail I sent to Citizendium-L earlier this evening.  UPDATE: title fixed, thanks Tom. ]

Congratulations, everyone!

I agree that the Charter has been ratified; I hereby ratify it.

This has been a long time in coming, and I am happy it is finished.  I am proud that the Citizendium has continued to grow in the time, now about a year and a half, since I was actively involved.

I apologize for being so uninvolved in this whole process, but frankly, I have felt that it is not my place to get involved much, after pledging at the outset that I would step down after 2-3 years as head of CZ.  Every time I have gotten involved since the spring of 2009, my pledge has lurked in the back of my mind (and frequently in the front of it), which has sapped my motivation for trying to impose my will on anything that might be going on.  To be sure, I’ve made a few of my wishes known, but the project and the charter drafting process has continued on almost entirely independently of me, I’m sincerely happy to say.

Per Article 52 of the charter (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Charter_drafting), this email ends my term of office.  I believe it is now up to persons other than me to put the next relevant articles, 53 and 54, into effect.  I would like to thank the committee for honoring my service in getting CZ started with their Article 52.

CZ is unlike many online communities.  We have adopted a charter that defines the community as a division of power, and with different bodies capable of proposing and making innovations.  Many important terms are limited, as I think they should be, and the most powerful positions are elected.  In short, we now officially have an online constitutional republic, just as I have wanted.  I hope that you all will support the nascent system and help to build it into something self-sustaining and flourishing.  I still believe in this project, and I think that the time may well come when we begin to grow more quickly.  Our traffic has been steadily growing, and I’ve observed new people continuing to get involved.  So, quite contrary to hopeful, mean-spirited reports of our impending demise, we’ve actually shown our resilience, despite my own lack of involvement the last 18 months or so.

I wish you the best of luck.  I will try to assist the transition as I can.  To that end, let me point a few things out and make a few recommendations:

·         I remain a Citizen.  I am still strongly aligned with and in support of our goals, and I will continue to speak out on our behalf if offered a chance.  I will not attempt to speak for CZ, however; any questions from the press that come my way that seem to be questions about the current state of the project, pending decisions, and future strategies, I will refer to CZ’s current management.

·         There are any number of changes that might be made that could really kick things up a notch in this project.  We have many cards we have not played.  When you think about operations and strategy, think creatively first, then critically.  Different design, different branding; new associations; new stated goals; new initiatives, perhaps shared with partners; new sources of content and participants; maybe paring back of needless and not-very-helpful help pages; initiation of important new software projects; etc.  I hope that the new management committee will show leadership in considering and, more importantly, deciding and executing such initiatives.

·         Please bear in mind that the funds available to pay for the Citizendium servers are running low.  I think I can arrange for a significant cash infusion to cover any short-term shortfall, but you should be thinking about how to keep the servers paid for.  I think this could be a prime opportunity to move the hosting to a lower-cost service, as well as developing a relationship with an entity that can receive donations and make payments on our behalf—perhaps a university, academic press, or nonprofit.  Of course, you are free to continue on with the Tides Center.  In any event I would encourage you to make sure to have the relationship with the entity in clear writing, making it perfectly clear that CZ’s decisions will be independent and constrained only by the decisions of Citizens and the Charter, and law.

·         I hope the community will use the opportunity of a new charter to make other needed positive changes.  I believe there needs to be a settled and regular way to identify and resolve disputes.  The Charter describes the outline of a method but I believe it needs to be elaborated.  There are people whose involvement in the project is a significant net negative, for example because they are ideologues who brazenly refuse to write neutrally, because they repeatedly violate standards of professionalism, or because they are cranks who have no respect whatsoever of the proper standards of evidence and scholarship.  The project will bleed able and much-needed contributors if they must deal with people who should not be involved.  Of course, it can be difficult to determine the line between overzealous rules-enforcement and perfect openness to any sort of behavior.  But I think that this needs to be done, and it will help that it’s done independently of me—in the past, when I had to get rid of people, they were frequently able to make it personal.  I hope a process involving several people, following fair rules in an open manner, will not be so easy to attack.  I just hope, of course, that the process also remains relatively efficient (i.e., not too complex and bureaucratic) while also being open and fair.

·         One area in which I am disappointed with the charter—I never expected it to be perfect—is the lack of any requirement that articles be family-friendly (or, choose the term that is least offensive to your political sensibilities).  There is some seriously twisted stuff on Wikipedia that has no business in a resource calling itself an “encyclopedia.”  I hope CZ will never host such stuff—or, to the extent it does, at least properly labels and places it behind appropriate disclaimers.  But generally, I hope that you will maintain standards of appropriateness for school use similar to that used in other resources written for adults and at about the college level, such as Britannica and The New York Times.  School kids are among the those who stand to benefit most from CZ, and I’d like to make sure that they’re well served.

I’m willing to offer other advice if asked, but I expect to do so largely behind the scenes, one-on-one, because I do not want to impose improper influence on what should be a democratic process.

On a personal note, I’ve been greatly distracted lately by new developments in new projects (a major new set of WatchKnow features, and an upcoming associated program to teach children to read) as well as baby #2 due in just a few weeks.  I’m also in transition on WatchKnow, which is also gaining a wonderful, able new CEO, freeing me up to develop the reading project full time.  I’m frankly glad to be developing and executing brand new ideas, which is probably my forte.  But this is not an excuse–I am sorry that I have not answered all the emails that people have sent.

Again, congratulations to everyone!

Regards,

Larry Sanger

Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/

Executive Director, WatchKnow | http://www.watchknow.org/

Founding Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/

sanger@citizendium.org | sanger@watchknow.org

This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender. Disseminating, distributing, or copying this e-mail are prohibited without the express authorization of the sender.

Wikipedia was a first draft.  I expect that, increasingly, the Citizendium will be regarded as the next draft.

Most readers of this blog have probably seen the recent article about Wikipedia in the Times of London by now (”Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply“).  The article reports on Wikipedia’s apparently sharp decline in participation.  (Eric Goldman must be crowing.)

First, I’ll say exactly what you’d expect me to say, and which I have said many times before: disaffected Wikipedians are welcome in the Citizendium community.  If in fact participation in Wikipedia is declining so severely that the quality of its articles deteriorates significantly, then I hope former Wikipedians will remember (or learn) that they can join us.  They can join simply if they are willing to work under their own real names, under the gentle guidance of experts in an open, bottom-up system, and under the Citizendium charter that is even now being drafted.

Second, let me share something with you: I think the Citizendium has an excellent chance to become the dominant reference resource in the long run.  I came to this view during CZ’s first year.  And yes, it probably still sounds silly.  As soon as it had become established that experts and non-experts could work side-by-side in a fully open, bottom-up, largely pleasant system, as CZ’s is — in other words, when I saw that CZ was a going concern — it became clear to me that there would be no reason for CZ to fold over the long term.  Therefore, it would probably continue growing its stores of high-quality content.  With more high-quality content would come more credibility and more traffic.  After a while, we would reach a tipping point.  I admit I was off about when we would reach our tipping point, but I still think it’s likely that we will reach one.  It’s only a matter of time.  The original arguments for the Citizendium model are sound, and our original demonstration that this novel way of organizing a wiki community is also sound.  So now it’s just a matter of time and patience.  Of course, in today’s hyper-accelerated society, adverting to “time and patience” might sound silly; but it does not to the wiser heads among us, because they know from experience what time and patience can bring.  The point is that CZ is a natural home for those who want to create a better encyclopedia and who have been put off from the Wikipedia experiment.  Wikipedia was a first draft.  I expect that, increasingly, the Citizendium will be regarded as the next draft.

Third, I am not going to prognosticate, unlike Eric Goldman.  Of course it’s possible that Wikipedia will find a way to move to an even stronger position.  But I will criticize.  For now, it is clearly running afoul of exactly the problems I identified in the project early on — and which I encouraged Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia community at large to fix, and which precipitated my own departure.  The pigeons are coming home to roost.  The Wikipedia experiment has deeply suffered as a result of its radical embrace of the most extreme egalitarian and anarchistic principles — which have made the community, as such principles always will do, descend into mob rule and a failed state, so to speak.  As I explained in a recent paper (”The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia“), “Wikipedia’s success is not best explained by its radical egalitarianism, its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management, all of which are consistent with a low-key role for experts.”  Because it has rejected constitutional rule, real identities, and any, even modest, official role for subject-matter experts, the project may have finally run afoul of the limits of its own deeply-ingrained, self-imposed, constitutional flaws.

And need I say this?  I think I must: CZ’s growth rate has been only modest because most of our potential contributors have instead put their efforts into Wikipedia.  But if it is becoming increasingly obnoxious to edit Wikipedia, then there must be an increasingly untapped source of volunteer labor for working on an encyclopedia.  I think that, if they look into what we’re doing, ex-Wikipedians will find that they can help make CZ into what they hoped Wikipedia would become.  They can pursue the same noble goals — but they’ll have a much better chance of doing it right this time.

So here’s a little message to the Wikipedians: sure, it takes a few minutes to sign up to CZ, and yes, you have to use your own real name.  But CZ is still open and bottom-up, and contrary to what you may think you know, there aren’t editors approving your edits or telling you what to do.  Our community is also 100% saner than Wikipedia’s.  Perhaps it’s time for a second look.

Putting aside all criticism, I do have this bit of advice.  The Wikimedia Foundation ought to post a few snapshot copies of Wikipedia from the last few years, warts and all.  If Wikipedia’s quality declines, at least the world will still have some “not too bad” Wikipedia articles to view.  I have always maintained that Wikipedia is tremendously useful, and it would be a shame if there were not some “canonical” versions of the resource that we could consult.

[By the way, I haven't worked directly on the CZ wiki for a while.  But I'm still being consulted and helping move things along as needed behind the scenes.  CZ is mostly off the ground, in my opinion, and it won't be completely off the ground qua online constitutional republic until I get out of the way.  I am a serial non-profit knowledge organizer, and my latest such project is WatchKnow.org.  Expect me to start other things, too.]

This post was linked by the New York Times online business section.

It’s been a pretty big news story: for a few days, editing of Wikipedia was effectively blocked throughout much of the U.K., because Wikipedia had, and still has, an uncensored reproduction of the Scorpions’ album cover for Virgin Killer. This shows a completely naked pre-pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive pose.

Does it bother you that Wikipedia reproduces an image that is, arguably, child pornography? It does me. Now, I think the Internet ought to be safe for porn, but not child porn. It was Jimmy Wales’ Bomis.com, after all, that den of soft-core porn “glamour photography” (the Jimbo-approved euphemism), that paid my paychecks when I was starting Nupedia and Wikipedia. (I often used to say that Wikipedia was built using good fertilizer.) But I don’t think that a general encyclopedia, used by millions of school kids (at least at home) should host sexually suggestive pictures of naked pre-pubescent girls. That ought to be obvious to Wikipedians, and the fact that it’s not is yet more evidence that not all is well in Wikipedia-land.

Perhaps it’s time to remind the world that there is a wonderful new, and growing, alternative: Citizendium (CZ). If you’re reading this on the CZ blog, you no doubt know that we are another free wiki encyclopedia project, but started by a co-founder of Wikipedia, yours truly. (But I’m writing it so you can forward it to family, friends, and colleagues who don’t know about CZ.) A lot of people don’t know what we’re here for and they have bought all sorts of misinformation about us. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Let me sum up the case for CZ. We are still around, we’re still growing, and we’re steadily becoming a viable alternative to Wikipedia. We are small, but vigorous. We have no vandalism. We have grown steadily over the one-and-a-half years since our public launch, and we’ll be breaking 10,000 articles in the next few months. I won’t bore you (again) with the reasons, but I think that there will come a tipping point for us, after which a lot more people will know about us and swell our ranks. And they should! We aren’t going away, and even at the current rate, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of articles in the long run. We’re non-profit, Creative Commons, community-managed, and we’re open to everyone who is willing to use their real names and identities. We’re a remarkably pleasant and well-behaved community, and I think we do great work. We have pioneered a new model, a public-expert hybrid community; we’ve shown that it is not just viable, it is in many ways a clearly superior model for the organization of an open, online knowledge community.

And, of course, the cover of Virgin Killer will never appear on the pages of CZ.

Now, if you are harrumphing (rather ridiculously, I might add, but that’s just me I suppose) that of course the cover of Virgin Killer should not be “censored,” and that Wikipedia is better than CZ insofar as it doesn’t feature such “censorship,” then let me point something out. Let me point out the wonderful, delicious fact that you can stick with Wikipedia. The two projects naturally attract delightfully complementary groups of people. The people who want to hide behind pseudonyms, who want to play governance games in order to push their biases, and who want to prove their maturity and enlightenment by putting up pictures of naked little girls, can stick with Wikipedia. I’ll be delighted if they do. But I think that in the long run, you’ll see that a lot more people will want to contribute under the more sensible CZ system.

Time will tell, but you know, I was right about the viability of the Wikipedia model long before it was popular or even known to almost everyone reading this post. And I have a strong and well-justified belief in the viability of the CZ model, a belief that is well-informed by my experience actually developing the Wikipedia model, many other online projects, and thinking deeply about online knowledge communities.

We’ll be hosting a big Citizendium Open House in January, as a way to boost this great project to the next level and welcome a lot of new people who might be curious about the project. Be on the lookout for announcements here and elsewhere.

…yep, it’s my birthday, so I’m taking the day off, but I thought I’d pop in here long enough to thank the people who have been writing me articles for my birthday.

We’re giving away over $1000 in prizes for educational videos this summer, as part of a WatchKnow “pre-contest.” Here’s a video I just uploaded to YouTube about it:

Here are the contest topics and rules.

Comments on the contest topics and rules still welcome.

We’ve installed the “EmbedVideo” MediaWiki extension.  This means we now allow people to embed videos taken from, e.g., YouTube.

Here’s an example in use (which also, incidentally, shows off how we use subpages–this is a “video” subpage), a large assortment of videos, mostly homemade, of various County Donegal-style fiddle players.

Hello, any coders out there!  Today, we spent many hundreds of dollars posting ads for the WatchKnow programmer position.  Can you help get the word out? Can you post this in your networks or send it to friends?

Here’s a copy of the job ad…which I posted to craigslist San Francisco Bay Area, even though I’m located in central Ohio.  The point is that I don’t really care where you live, as long as you can do the job. Being in the U.S. is probably a requirement, but beyond that, hey, telecommute from Alaska!  It’s a 3-4 month contract job, and may work into permanent employment, and it will pay pretty well.

UPDATE (June 20): yay, we now have a good set of candidates to choose from…

We’re now starting to spread the word about a major new Citizendium program. This initial announcement is meant to be low-key (no press release yet). I wanted our “Citizens” to be the first to receive it.

WatchKnow will be a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest. It is currently under planning and development. See http://www.watchknow.org for a long FAQ.

Here’s the basic idea. Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll pay the winner(s) within each topic a small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol. The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education.

We hope to launch the beta project this fall. We will be spreading the word this summer, to attract school teachers and others to help staff the program in various ways. We hope within the next few weeks to hire a technical person to actually build the beta system. See the ad here.

 For future updates, please add yourself to the announcement list.  You can discuss the new program here on the CZ forums.

I have been asked to lead the program. So, you wonder, why have I agreed? First, the aforementioned Memphis philanthropist has been very generous in supporting the Citizendium, as an incentive to us to work on this project. (He doesn’t want to be named, by the way.) He has been very persistent for over a year in recruiting me (and us) to get this project started. Second, it is largely in keeping with our overall mission of bringing online communities together, to create reliable, free, and (broadly) educational content.

I suppose it’s often this way in life–you start out doing one thing, and you find yourself presented with excellent reasons to branch out into something else.

If you are worried that this means I’ll be quitting as Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium soon, please don’t. I’ve in fact been working on both projects for several months now, spending *most* of my work time on CZ rather than WatchKnow. One exciting thing about this project, as an opportunity for us, is that, if it succeeds very well, it might bring large amounts of relatively “permanent” funding from a whole variety of sources. There will be no shortage of funds for a really useful free educational video project. As the parent project of WatchKnow, CZ naturally stands to benefit. Already, we can tap the WatchKnow engineer to serve a System Administration role for CZ as a whole. A successful beta project will no doubt provide us the funds to do something that I have been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to do: actually pay my successor a suitable salary!

Besides, once the system is off the ground, it should largely “run itself” and require relatively little work from me. If it doesn’t–if it requires heavy management–we’ll hire someone to do that.

CZ’s Executive Committee already knows about the project and has given our involvement their blessing. Several members have been rather enthusiastic about it. We have also received advice and help from a number of other people, including two “big names” in the world of free culture–but I will not release their names until the entire new WatchKnow Advisory Committee is constructed. We’ll be looking for interested and suitable members of that Committee–i.e., distinguished educators, ed tech gurus, and free content advocates.

I think WatchKnow will be good for CZ in another way. While we’ve been doing all right so far this year, we have not had a real “shot in the arm” in terms of the sort of announcements, press attention, and active recruitment efforts that punctuated our earlier months. WatchKnow will not only put CZ’s name back in the news, it will demonstrate that we are still very much active, expanding…and funded! Finally, think of this: the video project might end up being very high-profile. There’s reason to think it will; so far, everyone who hears about the idea loves it, and the idea is totally innovative and fills a gaping hole and need. If WatchKnow is very popular, it will help boost CZ, and vice-versa. So, in sum, I’m very comfortable with this as move strategically.

Again, here are the key links:

• FAQ
• Mailing list
• Discussion forum
• Engineer/sysadmin ad

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

The new CZ skin is up! (It is now set to default.) So, when you go to the wiki you’ll see a brand new look. This helps to distinguish us from That Other Website.

You won’t see the new skin, however, if you fiddled with your skin preferences, i.e., with this page.  If so, and you aren’t using the new skin, you can go to the above URL, click on the “skin” tab, and then select “Pinkwich5″ and click Save. Then you should see the default skin, or in other words, what all new (and un-logged in) people are now seeing.

Thanks hugely to Derek Harkness for coding this up and doing a lot of debugging. It might still have a few bugs. If so, we’ve been using this page of Derek’s to report them.  Thanks also to Greg Sabino Mullane for uploading it and doing other techie stuff.