I’ve written a piece for the Wikipedia Signpost about Citizendium– what’s been going on here, future plans, and why Wikipedians should care about Citizendium. If you’re a Wikipedian or ex-Wikipedian I’d recommend checking it out.
–Mike
Somebody from CZ told me to go look at a Wikipedia “essay” titled “Don’t just do whatever.” (Archived version.) It’s very thought-provoking. I’m going to ruin author Matt Britt’s street cred forever by publicly agreeing with it. But actually, I’m going to disagree with one (apparently) point, and argue for the importance of collaboration.
So here goes:
In reading some recent thoughts on Wikipedia authorship and having some discussions with folks on the Wikipedia IRC channel, I’ve come to realize that there are some flaws in the ideology of the editing process that is held in such high esteem. More specifically, the Wikipedia process as it pertains to individual articles does not, in my experience, produce high quality articles. For the purposes of this discussion, I will talk mostly about featured articles.
Indeed, a lot of Wikipedians are deeply confused in many ways about how and why Wikipedia both works and fails to work. It’s hard understand in all its glorious complexity. But Britt has dismantled one of the confusions rather well. He says that there is an “ideal editing philosophy,” or what I would call the received wisdom or the wikipolitically-correct explanation of how Wikipedia articles improve. According to the received wisdom, a page goes from stub to brilliant featured article because more and more people add their collective wisdom and correct each other’s mistakes. But, Britt argues, it isn’t quite that way:
Leslie Brooks has a short piece up asking “where the hell are the women in the Citizendium project?” I’m not impressed by the tone of the piece itself, but I think it is a good question (we do have more male than female contributors). Really, I think the question should be expanded to women and wikis in general– I would imagine that Wikipedia may be equally or moreso biased toward male contributors, but it’s just easier to tally up contributions by gender when people are editing under their real names. Regardless, engaging both male and female contributors is something we really need to think about.
As you might know, we’re deep in development of an expansion of the Citizendium’s scope. The basic idea is that we’re going to have different kinds of reference material on subpages of encyclopedia article pages.
Link lists are one sort of subpage we’re talking about. Here are some policy guidelines I wrote up today for link pages.
I think that ultimately, a really successful Citizendium collection of Links pages would constitute a very useful Web directory, with three advantages over previous directories: (1) links would have been chosen for quality first and foremost, and ultimately vetted by experts, (2) it will be very easy to prevent “link spam” given the way our community is set up, and (3) the links would be filed under an ever-expanding, very fine-grained category scheme. The result could be used by search engines, via various algorithms, to drive the selection of higher-quality search results. The result, one hopes, is that the highest-quality results would be more likely to float to the top of search results.
This is what I argued in a keynote delivered at the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges Annual Meeting, Reed College, June 13, 2007: What should we do about Internet “cruft”? Toward knowledge-rich websites
Here are some excerpts.
UPDATE (7/23): caught up.
UPDATE (7/21): we’re in the process of catching up, adding dozens of new accounts and recognizing many new editors. We should also be installing a new automatic account approval system, written by programmer and student Aaron Schulz, as soon as early next week.
I am hereby pledging personally and publicly that, beginning now, anyone who applies to become a CZ author or editor will receive a reply within 24 hours. I will do this personally if we cannot find (or motivate!) enough constables and editorial personnel administrators to do it.
If you appreciate this sentiment and want to pitch in, you might become a constable or editorial personnel administrator. Constables approve author applications; EPAs approve author applications. Constables should have a bachelor’s degree (or equivalent training) and be at least 25 years old. Editorial personnel administrators must be CZ editors.
Please e-mail me personnally at sanger /at\ citizendium.org if you are interested.
Let’s take full advantage of the ongoing and very encouraging interest in CZ, by getting people on board and motivated to work as soon as possible.
My essay “Who Says We Know,” which appeared first on Edge, was translated into German [link updated, thanks Gerd-Lothar] and appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung, the newspaper I tried (but failed) to read back when I was living in Munich in 1989-90.
Das Fazit der Debatte ist: Die starke Hinwendung zur Spezialisierung in der heutigen Zeit liegt ständig im Clinch mit unserer heutigen Verpflichtung zur absoluten Gleichbehandlung der Menschen. Doch so viel mir die Gleichheit bedeutet, wenn ich mich zwischen ihr und der Wahrheit entscheiden muss, stehe ich auf der Seite der Wahrheit.
Jawohl!
I wrote a solicited review of The Cult of the Amateur for the magazine New Scientist.
The Blogosphere is up in arms over Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen deliberately set out to tweak the mavens of Web 2.0 - and he is succeeding. This is great fun to witness, because said mavens often have all the self-righteousness of revolutionaries, at least when it comes to the virtues of Web 2.0, and are thus eminently tweakable.
Keen decries everything that he imagines to be wrong with the internet - especially the mediocre work of amateurs. Free but substandard content is apparently destroying whole industries, particularly our culture industries. He hates the fact that so much of today’s internet content is collaborative and distributed. The so-called wisdom of crowds is itself an “extraordinary popular delusion”, he says; the best work comes from the individual, professional mind. Anonymity coupled with anarchy leads to myriad abuses, from the corporate gaming of YouTube to “moral disorder”. …
Maybe I’ll post the full text…
UPDATE: done
Alex Halavais was interviewed about Citizendium for Assignment Zero and among other things said this:
Q: You were quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October of last year as saying that you didn’t think Citizendium was going to work, that “it looks far too restrictive, and it costs too much effort to join and contribute.” Now that it’s firmly on its way, do you still feel that way?
A: I’m not ready to eat my words yet, although that quote really only got at a corner of what I thought on the matter. I still think Citizendium is going to face some of the difficulties that Nupedia did. It’s a little like early aircraft design: there is a clear point at which a collaborative project takes off and gets off the ground. If it makes that point, then it will probably keep flying for a while.
Wikipedia took off by taking out a lot of the checks and balances that we expect to find in an encyclopedia. Citizendium is including those checks from the beginning, and I think that’s an interesting model. I suspect that starting off loose and tightening up the ship as things move forward–much like the cyclical process of most programming projects these days–is probably a good model.
The truth is that Sanger has made clear he doesn’t think of this as an elitist approach, and that there is a role for credentialed expertise in an open encyclopedia. Ironically, Wales seems to be approaching that view from the other side, recognizing the importance of stabilizing the content of Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia remains too loose, and Citizendium is still short on the momentum needed to launch it forward, but they are converging on a similar ideal.
I think it’s good that Citizendium is there, and I think it is a very worthwhile endeavor. I just don’t know that it’s going to be able to gather enough excitement among its users to allow for the kind of mass of articles needed to make it appealing to a large user base.
Incidentally, it’s interesting that I couldn’t tell, without some research, whether this was merely a report of research done for another article, or an article unto itself. That’s one aspect — not necessarily a disadvantage, but it can be in some cases — of the “publish, then filter” model, which Assignment Zero is following. Except that they are really following a model similar to CZ’s: it’s “post, then filter, then publish as approved.”
You MediaWiki coders out there, please tell me: what do you need to be motivated to write this user registration tool? We really need a MediaWiki plug-in that does the following. It’s pretty stripped-down.
(1) User fills out:
Name __________________
E-mail __________________
Bio __________________
URLs __________________
__________________
Other notes __________________
Captcha
(2) The e-mail address is validated.
(3) For application reviewers, all applications are displayed on the same page.
Next to each application are two buttons: approve and reject.
There is also a text box for constable notes to the author.
(4) If an application reviewer presses “approve”:
(5) If a constable presses “reject”:
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