Citizendium Blog

…soon to be hundreds. That’s because this evening we decided to go ahead and invite everyone with complete applications to join the project, the total number being well over 300.

Last Saturday we started by inviting 50 people, and 50 more Sunday morning. We started activating accounts at 11 AM Pacific on Sunday, but by mid-afternoon, the wiki was down. Ugh. My fault, too, double ugh. It was because I asked our tech guys to delete some test accounts, one of which (I thought it was a test account!) was “Anonymous.” Well, it turns out that “Anonymous” is required for MediaWiki to work (ironically enough), and a database table got wiped as a result. It took our guys 16 hours to fix it all. Thanks particularly to Greg Sabino Mullane and Jason Potkanski for heroic efforts. Let that be a lesson to us: don’t delete “Anonymous”.

Finally, this afternoon, they got it all “vacuumed” (don’t ask), and we re-invited folks. Obviously, we couldn’t expect to have loads of these people showing up after they had no joy with the website the previous day. Nevertheless, even with the long (16 hour) downtime, in the first 24 hours or so we have had twenty or so people actually editing the wiki, mostly new people, and around 75 accounts have been made.

It is pretty clear to us that we can handle many times this amount of traffic, so we’ve decided to go ahead and send invitations to all people with complete applications. It might take us more than 24 hours to get through the applications, but hopefully not much longer. The editor applications in particular take longer to go through, and there are more of them (2/3 of the applications are quite plausible editor applications–it just turned out that way for whatever reason).

This is our opportunity to show the world that a new and really vibrant general encyclopedia project can get started, one where everyone is named in Recent Changes (it really is an unusual sight, to see nothing but real names on the Recent Changes page!), and in which expert editors may take the lead. If we can make this work, it could be world-changing–it’s that important, potentially anyway. So I’m going to do my best to get us aloft, and it looks like we’re well on our way.

There are no fewer than four important pieces of news about Citizendium management.

According to plan, the Ad Hoc Steering Committee will disband in a few days, because its mission has been fulfilled–i.e., help get the Citizendium pilot project off the ground. I want to thank this really fine group of people for stepping in to do stuff I simply didn’t have time to do, and for acting as an excellent sounding board. The best sounding boards, however, are still Citizendium-L and the Citizendium Forums.

I’m sorry to report that David Marshall has resigned as Managing Editor, citing family issues. As I’ve told him, I’m grateful that he spent the large amounts of time that he did on the project. He did, of course, move the ball toward the goal, and I’ll always be grateful for that. Several members of the Ad Hoc Steering Committee have complained that they feel under the spotlight and are actually quite nervous as a result of all of the press coverage CZ has gotten. The pressure’s on! But personally I think we have many excellent reasons to be optimistic at this point.

To help fill the gap left by both the Ad Hoc Steering Committee and David Marshall, I am going to convene an Executive Committee. I need a responsible group of clear thinkers to help me steer through some tricky waters ahead. I have been approached by well over a dozen prominent foundations, companies, government representatives, and individuals, who are offering a variety of opportunities we would be foolish not to think hard about. The problem, of course, is that it is hard to think about those opportunities and also get the project off the ground. Similarly, there are various initiatives, such as a recruitment drive, that require someone saying “OK, let’s get this started.” Basically, I’m going to ask the smartest, ablest, and (last but definitely not least) the most motivated people to join me on this Executive Committee so that I’m not the only one actually initiating things.

Finally, Citizendium-Editors is going to launch this week–probably tomorrow. First on this list’s docket will be two crucial issues: (1) what the canonical list of editorial workgroups should be, and (2) how workgroups are run. The result will be a much tightened-up and fleshed-out Citizendium Policy Outline–the sections about editors and editorial workgroups anyway. CZ-Editors will not be responsible for setting policy that does not exclusively affect editors.

Well, I’ve taken far too long to post this draft, and it’s still not finished. It does not reflect the excellent feedback I’ve received on it from some people, simply because I haven’t had time. (Apologies to the people who have commented, you know who you are.)

Citizendium Policy Outline

This is a work in progress. Therefore, I hope the Wikipedia article about the Citizendium will not say tomorrow that CZ will have features X, Y, and Z. These are in most cases negotiable policy ideas, a place for the invitees to the policy project to work from.

We will be working through this set of proposals on Citizendium-L and the Citizendium Forums.

The most current version will be available on the pilot project wiki. To see that, you’ll have to be a member of the pilot project. If I get a chance I’ll post a copy (or someone else will, if I can get someone to take me up on my offer to become CZ webmaster!) of the latest policy outline-in-progress from time to time.

I’ve posted two essays to citizendium.org that help explain the thinking behind and plans for the Citizendium.

Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0? (text of keynote at SDForum from last October 24) You can watch a video of the Q&A.

There’s a bit of conventional wisdom about Web 2.0 that is wrong. According to this conventional wisdom, Web 2.0 involves bringing the power of publishing to the masses. It’s all about harnessing the “wisdom of crowds” and not the wisdom of experts. So, a project that gives experts a special role couldn’t be a Web 2.0 project–even if the expert’s role were part of an online, open, dynamic, collaborative community.

This conventional wisdom is wrong. Experts can have a special and positive role in Web 2.0 projects, or so I’ll argue. As we’ll see, it’s quite understandable why so many people dislike the idea of special experts in open, online collaboration. But, as it turns out, there is no good reason that Web 2.0 projects cannot make room for experts.

So this talk will be argumentative. I’m a philosopher, so it’s probably going to sound a little like a philosophy paper. Sorry about that. Anyway, I’ll begin with an explanation of what Web 2.0 is, as I understand it, and I’ll explain what makes it work. Then I’ll elaborate my claim that experts can and should be given special roles in Web 2.0 projects. Then I’ll spend a lot of time replying to objections.

The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content (articulates the Citizendium Foundation’s concept for funding free content)

So here’s the proposal: the public presents an offer for a specific sum to go to someone who will write authoritatively on such-and-such a subject; the broker selects the content creator, who creates the content; and then the broker releases the content to the public, free for all (under, for example, a Creative Commons license). The buyers are still the general public, but are expanded to include groups of people, clubs, schools, universities, organizations, governments, and other entities that pay for the work on behalf of the general public. The sellers are still communicators and artists. The brokers can still include editors, designers, and other publishing industry professionals.

This is the concept referred to mysteriously in the FAQ as a “funding model (we think it is exciting and innovative) that will be revealed in good time.”

We hope this blog will be the central source of news about the Citizendium project.
The purposes of the “Citizendium Blog” will be:

1. to impart news about the Citizendium project
2. to track related events

We hope to have several different people from the Citizendium project posting here. We’re starting, anyway, with Larry Sanger and Jason Potkanski.