Comments on: Why collaborate? A response to Matt Britt

By: Naruwan

Naruwan — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:00:32 +0000

There’s an interesting article on the BBC news site about a wiki-comedy project. One particular sentence, if you substitute “Comedy” for “Encyclopedias”, nicely encapsulates one of the central philosophies of CZ.

“Comedy cannot be written by committee, and it needs ruthless editors at the centre to pull it all together, but the internet offers the opportunity to harvest a richness of ideas and input that has never been available before now.”

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | The world of wiki-comedy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7003243.stm

By: Stephen Ewen

Stephen Ewen — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 04:13:15 +0000

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Articles_distinct.png

By: Matt Britt

Matt Britt — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:55:33 +0000

I’m happy to see that my ramblings finally sparked some interesting discussion. I find that the people behind Citizendium have accurately identified many of the issues that traditionally held Wikipedia back, and some of the new crop of issues that have emerged as WP matures. More importantly, the culture of CZ seems to be one that seeks to embrace serious dialog about these issues rather than marginalizing them and assuming everything is great simply because there exist a million plus articles which collectively dominate the top search hits on Google.

When I wrote that essay I still had a good measure of enthusiasm for Wikipedia despite mounting frustrations. I was disturbed by what seemed to be a pervading attitude that high quality articles would just “happen” on their own and that the mere existence of featured articles demonstrated the triumph of the “Wiki process”. I was even further disheartened when I at several points realized that actively attempting to collaborate on articles was nearly impossible unless there was an argument to be had. There was no structure for seeking real help in article creation and improvement, leaving the realization that any improvement on the article of interest would be solely your own doing until someone disagreed with you.

I always felt (as I touched on towards the end of my essay) that more involvement from the highest levels was needed to provide infrastructure to the article creation and improvement process. It struck me as exceedingly ironic that many editors, even icons of the Wikipedia community, were keenly interested in seeing the development of so-called “core articles” yet did practically nothing towards this end. Making a “list of articles that are important” and relying on the haphazard efforts of a handful of skilled but isolated editors accomplishes nothing. It seemed obvious to me that more structure and direction from the top was needed to nurture the development of these crucial topics. However, I never saw that kind of involvement, nor any motivation to take affirmative steps towards stated goals. Most everybody was content to just “do whatever” and hope that an encyclopedia would appear. Some would argue that this is exactly what has happened, but I have not come to consider as an encyclopedia a collection of documents with uneven topical coverage judged by constantly-changing quality standards which often follow the flux of an entirely confusing and non-binding “style guide” whose text results from whichever party has shouted loudest, longest, and most recently.

Even though I’ve personally decided to take an indefinite hiatus from wiki-style writing, I have high hopes that CZ’s ideology can come several steps closer to that noble “encyclopedia” goal that seems more and more distant from WP as time marches on. I finally came to realize that Wikipedia’s attitude is not set on creating an encyclopedia by means of a freely editable wiki, but on creating a freely editable wiki and calling it an encyclopedia. I did not intend to (and still do not) dismiss the great potential of collaborative editing, but I did wish to identify an attitude and methodology which is broken in my opinion. Some of CZ’s practices address exactly the administrative and community shortcomings that led me to pen that essay.

By: Robert H. Stockman

Robert H. Stockman — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:47:15 +0000

My experience is with the results of the articles more than the collaborative experience itself, but I see similar types of problems. My expertise is religious studies and I have looked at a lot of the Wikipedia articles in that field, and helped write and edit Citizendium articles as well. What I see in the Mormonism, Scientology, and Elijah Muhmmad articles on Wikipedia is the tendency for every article to deal with just about every major controversy that has ever come along relating to that topic. Someone adds the controversy as a caveat to the article, and to be “neutral” someone else feels they can’t remove it, so they deal with the controversy by balancing it with the other side. I will admit that the result sometimes is quite interesting reading. But a well-written article on the same subjects in a published encyclopedia probably wouldn’t deal with any of the controversies at all, or would do so only briefly. An article is not neutral if it deals with both sides of every controversy; it is just overly detailed, and sometimes it will come off as negative simply because too much discussion of controversy, however even-handed, comes off that way.

It also can be hard to resolve controversies in a Wikipedia-style editing environment. Both sides can footnote their positions, so the requirement that positions be footnoted does not help. An expert may be aware that only 10% or even 1% hold to a particular opposing view, but that judgment can be hard to footnote, so it is hard to add to a wikipedia type article. The reader is then left with an article that appears neutral, but is not balanced.

— Robert Stockman

By: Joe Quick

Joe Quick — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:02:32 +0000

I certainly agree with your points here. Social dynamics in a mature environment, especially when authors write under their own names, will tend to motivate people toward constructive participation. And bullshit detectors are invaluable, but you skipped right over the heart of the issue from my point of view.

The problem isn’t with bullshit detectors but with bullshit injectors. We don’t want to dump the benefits of collaboration but we also don’t want well-intentioned but ill-informed or misled authors to be running amok “screwing everything up.” Approved articles are a major step in the right direction because they prevent good work from rotting away but we’re still going to end up with a lot of articles that are already a mess before Russel Potter or Anthony Sebastian comes along to lead the charge.

There is obviously nothing stopping a dedicated expert from blanking a jumbled page and starting anew, but those same social dynamics that are so beneficial in some ways will generally prevent this. I think this is a big part of why we dumped the Wikipedia content in January: we didn’t want people to be scared off by existing material that was more or less good enough.

So what do we do about it? I’m not really sure. Maybe we’ll need our editors to mark content for occasional purges. Maybe we just need to remind our experts that they should feel free to start over if an article is mired down and unfixable. There’s probably some elegantly simple solution that I haven’t thought of.