Citizendium is the spotlight article on Ars Technica.
Story: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/citizendium.ars
Discussion: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/592004363831?r=592004363831
I have revived my old Technica account and contributing actively to discussion there.
-Jason Potkanski
In a case that could have a huge impact on the legal situation of online collaborative communities–including the Citizendium–golf pro Fuzzy Zoeller is suing the company with the IP address that showed up when an anonymous Wikipedia contributor defamed him.
An uncomfortably strong argument can be made that Zoeller deserves legal relief if he has been defamed. Wikipedia’s reach is now enormous, and if indeed it has gained a reputation, whether deserved or not, as a source of reasonably reliable information, and it defames someone for any significant length of time, such defamation can do very real harm to a person’s reputation. Some of Wikipedia’s more irrational defenders will wish to deny this. But no matter how much you love Wikipedia, you cannot credibly deny that Wikipedia is capable of very real and very harmful defamation.
When we did “The Big Delete” in January, we were left with bunches of articles that were from Wikipedia, tagged for example with [[Category:Philosophy Workgroup (Top)]], but otherwise completely untouched. There are also articles that someone made a tiny spelling correction to back in November, and which have never been touched since. There are articles marked “CZ Live” by someone who just happened to think he’d work on it–two months ago–and then never did, and otherwise is just a copy of a Wikipedia article. These articles are diluting the database, so they should be deleted–especially since we can always upload the latest Wikipedia version. There is other “cruft,” e.g., from vandals, that is cluttering the article database. This also needs to be deleted.
The result will be a more honest representation of what we’ve done. Also, if we do a good job with this deletion, we can then remove “CZ Live” tags from our active articles, because all articles that are in our database will be CZ Live!
Want to sign up and start slaying articles? Go to the home page of the Big Speedydelete.
Happy deletion!
Over the last 48 hours, a vandal or group of vandals has been maliciously assaulting the wiki.
I am not sure what the appeal to vandalism is. Perhaps it is like a rock star trashing a hotel room. Either way, gathering enemies achieves a sort of relevance. So to the vandals…thank you for making us relevant.
When this project was created, we foresaw the possibility of attacks and prepared our hosting provider (Steadfast.net) to harden both the box and switch against attacks.
Hardening the wiki is a different matter. Each method used must be carefully chosen to avoid CPU, memory and bandwidth bottlenecks. What is in place now is stop-gap, but I believe it will survive slashdotting. The new software stops all bot/script activity at a cost of logging a lot of data.
Sadly, anti-spam/anti-vandal software solutions are not mature or even in alpha stages. Obvious solutions are lacking, such as throttling. I have not been able to find a CAPTCHA extension for new account creation and may have to write a homegrown one.
Stopping vandalism requires time. Time is money. I hate burning money. Like IRC in the early days, when you could split servers and create spoofs…the code will just get better inevitably.
-Jason Potkanski
Geez, won’t those guys leave our poor little server alone? Apparently not.
I took the opportunity to explain that, by getting just a few more servers, we could launch pretty soon, i.e., on the order of weeks, not months. The number of servers we can afford is not a scalable solution, however. Therefore, we will probably soon be forced to beg shamelessly for funds for more servers. But Yes! We can do that! 
We were Slashdotted two days ago. A lot of the discussion is interesting, but as usual, too much of it is also full of various simpleminded errors.
As expected, the Slashdotting pumped a new crop of recruits into the project. We’re up to 538 authors (i.e., people who have placed “Category:CZ Author” on their own user pages). I’ve noticed that some of the new folks (since self-registration began) are well qualified to be editors, but we haven’t brought them on board in that capacity yet; so the number of editors listed is 167.
We’ve had our most active days since self-registration began, and even more since the Slashdotting. We’re pretty consistently well over 500 lines on Recent Changes per day.
We handled the load pretty well, too. Of course, matters would be different if all those Slashdot people who weren’t logged in were hitting the database all at once–then I suspect we wouldn’t have been able to handle it with our current equipment configuration. But, given how well we’ve withstood the onslaught (thanks especially to server fine-tuning by Jason Potkanski and Greg Sabino Mullane), perhaps we won’t need quite as many servers as we originally thought. If so, then a public launch is moving within reach, because we can get our hands on several more servers. Just not 16 more, without some major funding. On the major funding front, we still have many active leads, but the avenues of “major funding” are necessarily slow-moving.
I’m also happy to report that the vast majority of our new recruits are troopers and are fitting in quite well! So, welcome, Slashdot!
Sometime last night we passed 1,000 “CZ Live” articles!
If people are using the tag correctly–admittedly, a big “if”–that’s the number of articles that people have been working on. I sometimes come across active articles that are not tagged “CZ Live.” I also sometimes come across “CZ Live” articles imported from Wikipedia that no one has really worked on (no doubt they have good intentions).
Nevertheless, this is definitely a milestone and demonstrates quite well that we’re making steady progress.
Thanks, everyone!
I’m off to San Diego for a conference so will be lying low for a bit.
Text of a speech I gave at the Handelsblatt IT Congress: “How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals.”
Here are a few bits.
Powered by WordPress