Citizendium Blog

[Posted to Citizendium-L, as well as the Forums where you can reply to it if you like.]

Some have said that the Citizendium can’t possibly compete with Wikipedia, that we can never achieve their momentum, and that, therefore, we will always be irrelevant. I think that this sentiment is a bit confused and could stand a bit of perspective.

I remember what caused Wikipedia’s growth, which led directly to its present (qualified) success: we created content; Google spidered the content; people arrived from Google at Wikipedia pages; they created more content; lather, rinse, repeat. It’s called “the Google effect.”

As long as we have a quorum of people creating a growing amount of content, then as soon as we open up to the public and have Google spider CZ, we too will experience the Google effect. This will become particularly pronounced as time goes on since people will be more apt to link to approved CZ articles than WP articles, over the long haul, I think.

I remember what people said when we started Nupedia and Wikipedia. I remember people saying, “How do you think you can ever compete with the big proprietary encyclopedias, which can pay their writers, and which don’t have to rely on amateur volunteers?” How wrong those people were: as we now know, it was merely a matter of time.

So why not think that it is also merely a matter of time for CZ?

We haven’t even launched publicly yet–because, er, we can’t afford it. (Not because we don’t want to.) And yet already we have a definite community and many excellent articles under way. This doesn’t bear comparison to Wikipedia now, but it bears comparison to Wikipedia in its first year, and CZ comes off looking pretty well.

We have seen fireworks this past week, I think. We’ve had a whole series of wonderfully productive days, and I think we’re really hitting our stride with this new self-registration initiative. When we launch publicly, I think we are going to see much more amazing growth. Again, perhaps not amazing by Wikipedia’s standards today, but amazing by any other standards, even perhaps by the standards of Wikipedia in 2001.

I think there is another thing that many skeptics are not taking into account. It is that there will come a time–probably this coming year–when it is clear to everyone that CZ is not going away, that it has been growing, and that there is no reason that it will not continue to grow exponentially just as Wikipedia did.

And then people will really start to pile on. That’s when our technical headaches will really begin–and that’s why we’ve got to be prepared!

John Seigenthaler, Sr., distinguished, long-time editor of The Tennessean and a founding editor of USA Today, made big news (in the wiki world, at least) by taking Wikipedia to task for the outrageously libellous article they had written about him.  Microsoft, being a giant evil corporation, could elicit no similar howls of outrage over Wikipedia’s biased articles about it; so it tried to resort to paying someone to edit articles that they perceive as biased.

Closer to home, I find it frustrating that I am constantly having to go to the Talk pages on the Wikipedia articles about me to correct people, who don’t know anything about me, or about the origin of Wikipedia, who are writing about me or the projects I’ve been involved in.  It’s actually led me to create a handy page on my own Web space that I can link to and tell people, “Just go look at this.”

Similarly, my colleague, the astrophysicist Dr. Bernard Haisch had an editorial published in the LA Times in which he complained, quite justifably, of his treatment at the hands of Wikipedians with an ax to grind.  As he explains, “if there are problems [with the biography Wikipedia has written about you], you should click on the discussion page and politely argue your case there, in the hope that some other self-appointed editor will consider the merits of your case and fix things for you.”

Ironically, Jimmy Wales too had a disagreement with the Wikipedia article about him, although on much thinner grounds.  It seems he didn’t want me to have any credit for the founding of Wikipedia, and he edited his own bio seven times to deny me that credit.  He thus ran afoul a rule of Wikipedia–what I, anyway, would insist is a rule–that the subjects of biographies should not edit articles about themselves.

At root there’s just one problem here.  The people who know most about and who are most affected by articles about themselves (or about their companies, projects, etc.) have no reliable and independent way to get their perspective on the claims made by Wikipedia out there.

We’ve had the idea for an innovative solution to this problem for the Citizendium for several months.  This afternoon, we started making this idea a reality.

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Yep, some unsigned-in person over on Wikipedia went to Wikipedia’s “Biology” article and basically replaced it with the first paragraph of the Citizendium’s “Biology” article (our first approved article), posted here (PDF, 735K).  And they didn’t give us credit, as they are required to do by the GFDL!

Of course, we are still working on the software that will allow contributors to check or uncheck a box to indicate whether any of the content of an article came from Wikipedia, so some of CZ’s articles, copied over by hand, have no automatic link-back to the Wikipedia article.  We feel very very sorry about this.  ;)  So neither project is in total compliance!

I’m sure everyone means well and all such problems will be fixed in time.

“Wikipedia-Gegenentwurf Citizendium öffnet seine Pforten,” Heise

“Citizendium: The ‘Better’ Wikipedia Opens Doors,” Monkey Bites, a Wired News blog

“Citizendium Web Encyclopedia Opens Doors,” PC Magazine

“The Citizendium: Citizens and Experts on Wiki-Patrol,” AppScout

“One Small Step for Citizendium,” Wired Campus, a blog from The Chronicle of Higher Education

And some “big” bloggers:

Dvorak: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=9382

open… (Glyn Moody): http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2007/01/shut-out-from-citizendium.html

We have a new logo, which we are now using on the main website and soon on the wiki.

Click below to view/download larger versions.

 900px, grey

 900px, black

150px wide logos, grey:

150px wide logos, black:

Posted here, but here’s a copy for the blog archives:

Media Contact:
Maggie Quale
FortyThree, Inc.
831.621.3773
citizendium@fortythreepr.com            

Citizendium Pilot Project Open For Public Contribution - Project Announces Non-Profit Status

Columbus, Ohio – January 24, 2007 – The Citizendium, a project aimed at creating a new free encyclopedia online, announced today that its pilot project has been a success, and that it is moving rapidly toward a public launch. For the first time, anyone can visit the website (www.citizendium.org), create a user account and get to work within minutes. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

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I’ve just finished a total rewriting of “How to get started with the Citizendium pilot.”  I thought the readers of this blog would be interested to see it; so here it is.

Welcome to the Citizendium pilot project!

This is a general orientation to contributing and becoming part of the community, for new contributors. This is a comprehensive summary, but it is just a summary; there are links to pages with more detail interspersed below (right now, many of these pages haven’t been started).

If you want a general introduction to the project, not just to contributing, see our introduction.

What makes us different?

We’re glad to have you here and hope you’ll join our friendly little (but growing!) community as an active contributor. What makes us different? Well, for one thing, we’re all contributing under our own real names. We take responsibility for our own work, and we like to think we’re a bit more civil than your average Internet community. For another thing, there are editors working right alongside authors. Editors can make decisions about articles in their areas of expertise, but for the most part, we collaborate just as folks do on Wikipedia–only, perhaps, with more collegiality. Editors also have a special task here that doesn’t exist on Wikipedia: they can approve articles in their areas of expertise.

We aren’t Wikipedia. On January 20, we started an experiment. Although we began the pilot project as a fork of Wikipedia, we decided to try “unforking,” i.e., deleting all of the inactive articles, leaving us with only articles that we’ve worked on. We want to develop our own community, with our own rules and guidelines that might, in fact, be quite different from Wikipedia’s. There are already a few differences, apart from the real names requirement and the presence of editors. For example, we do not use “in group” abbreviations like “POV.” We really do take our neutrality policy seriously. We’ll be revisiting all sorts of policies concerning categories, templates, and much else. Also, we don’t permit user boxes on user pages; nor do we permit personal essays linked from user pages. Finally, our project governance, which is still under rapid development, will be quite different. We have a number of non-negotiable policies, and new policies will not be adopted by an impossible “consensus” but by vote of representatives (selected perhaps by “choosing lots”).

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UPDATE: the articles are now deleted! 

After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki.  This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on.  The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.

This is an experiment.  In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all.  If we see more activity on the wiki, which is what I expect, then the Wikipedia articles will stay deleted.

Let me emphasize that we have had good success on the wiki so far, and I am very grateful to all the people, a few dozen of them, who have been regularly working on CZ articles over the past few months.  We merely think that we can do better, and this change might be a way to do better.  In any case, as we ramp up recruitment (still not started…) and after we go public, we will be expanding greatly, no matter what we do!

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That is a question I am posing on the CZ forum.  I think it is a very interesting question, because if the answers come back, “Yes, I would, because repairing mediocre Wikipedia content isn’t nearly as much fun as starting over from scratch would be,” then by golly I’m going to suggest that we jettison the idea of forking Wikipedia, delete all the unchanged Wikipedia articles, and have people start from scratch.

If you want to reply, do it there on the forum rather than here on this blog.

Mainly because I was still on the road (!) at the logo contest deadline, we’ve put off closing the contest until, well, now.

Here is one final entry, from Kay Shearin:

The Executive Committee will now take a vote!  For all the logos, click here.