Citizendium Blog

I got an interview request out of the blue from a Frankfurter Rundschau reporter last week.  He wanted to know what I thought about various Web 2.0 topics like Second Life and MySpace.  I gave him some off-the-cuff answers.  This was turned into a story: “MySpace wird bald uncool” or “MySpace will soon be uncool.”  I am now the arbiter of coolness!!!

I didn’t quite say that; I just made the off-the-cuff observation, “More and more people will come to agree with me that MySpace-type social networking websites are annoying. Well, I don’t really know that, I’m just hoping.”  Believe me, I’m the last person you want to ask what will become cool or uncool to teenagers.  It is laughable to suppose I know anything, or care, about that.  I was just expressing my hopes, my dreams, not actually making a prediction.  (Actually, I’m on FaceBook myself.)  I also don’t (or didn’t, until last week) know that boomers now have their own MySpace-clone social networks.  “Ehrlich gesagt, wusste ich gar nicht, dass so etwas schon existiert,” I said, but not in German.  But somehow, this seems plausible for the aging Aquarians I know.

CZ got a plug anyway!

The Times of London is unjustifiably impressed by Wikipedia’s latest promise to make good on an old plan.  (It’s also unjustifiably impressed by Jimmy Wales’ claims to be the sole founder of Wikipedia, but never mind.)

As anybody who has followed Wikipedia at all closely knows, they have been talking about having a new review-before-publish system — for well over a year — to be piloted by the German Wikipedia.  The system would identify people called “trusted editors,” by which they mean people who have made 200 edits or who have been in the system for 30 days.  In other words, your average Wikipedians are now “trusted editors,” and the hope is that, by having them approve every edit made by newer people, they will become more “reliable.”

Let’s be clear.

This tool will probably solve one of Wikipedia’s more minor problems, namely, simple vandalism.  You know, the kid-writing-dirty-words-on-clean-walls problem — which was never a big problem, though it is the one that people are most impressed by, at first.  I’ve always said this was a facile criticism, against which I’ve always defended Wikipedia (even recently).  It has always been easy for Wikipedia to fix obvious vandalism quickly.

But it was never vandalism, per se, that led thoughtful critics to say that Wikipedia has a credibility, or reliability, problem.

(more…)

Apparently, someone has done an interesting meta-study of scientific publishing, and titled his paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” (PLoS Medicine).

As a sarcastic philosopher type, it is my duty to observe that Dr. Ioannidis’ claim is self-stultifying.  If most published research findings are false, it follows that, probably, Ioannidis’ research finding is false.  Therefore, probably, most published research findings are true!

Summary by WSJ Online.

I am hereby calling for formal (or semi-formal), well-reasoned position statements, from anyone – including people outside the Citizendium community — about what licensing scheme the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) should use. The issues are covered in an incomplete and semi-systematic way on three separate pages here (under “License”):

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Summaries_of_policy_arguments

There are many interesting issues involved, but it boils down to one: under what license should we release articles that we have created ourselves? (Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are now available under the GFDL.)

I am giving us a deadline: we will have made the final decision on the license by November 15, two months from now. So the essays should be received by, let’s say, October 20 — if you want the decisionmakers to be able to absorb them.

Citizens may post links to their essays here:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:License_Essays

If you like, you can make your essay a subpage of that page. Please don’t make your essay a subpage of your user page (that’s actually contrary to user page rules).

Non-Citizens can host the essay yourself, or send it to us and we will host it, in HTML, PDF, or MediaWiki form. Send links to me (or another Citizen) to post.

Because this is an issue that deeply affects the future and vitality of the project as a whole, I will be taking a strong personal interest in it. I myself will be writing an essay summing up my own views, but I would like to have the benefit of your essays, first!

Please forward this important call for essays to potentially interested parties. I personally will be putting it only on Citizendium-L, Citizendium-Editors, and the blog.

The U.K.-based Daily Mail has an interesting take on CZ; for them, the story is that we are “on course to match the online encyclopedia’s [Wikipedia's] success just six months after it was launched, according to its founder.”  I think I might have said something like that, but surely with considerably more qualification and uncertainty.  I hope no one will hold us to this extremely ambitious notion.  We’re on track of Wikipedia’s early growth, in terms of activity and word count (and within an order of magnitude, in terms of article count).  But I wouldn’t wish to imply that this means we certainly will match Wikipedia’s longer-term growth.  Just that we still might.

JP Rangaswami, aka the blogger “confused of calcutta,” has written an entertaining evaluation of the Citizendium. Though I know he says it in humility, I must ungraciously agree with him: he really is confused.

But let me address him directly.  JP, you say:

I must be Confused. …

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re going to solve your spam problem for you. What we’re going to do, we’re going to set up this small committee that looks into every e-mail you get, and we’re only going to send you the ones we think are OK. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about who’s going to be on this committee and how they get there. After all, we know best.”

…

I know one thing. I’m a lot more worried about The Cult of The Expert than I am about The Cult Of The Amateur.

We’ve had the Cult Of The Expert for centuries now. And we’ve seen how and why it breaks down, why it fails. Small groups of experts can be “gamed”, often without realising it. Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.

JP, you take a very simplistic assumption — that the Citizendium is just another top-down, elitist project — and you dress it up to sound hip. I wouldn’t know about the hipness, that’s something I’ve obviously never aspired to, but as to the assumption, well, it’s just completely wrong.

“Citizendium,” the name, is formed from “Citizens’ Compendium.” That’s our identity. We ain’t elitist. At present, we have around 2000 authors drawn from the general public, and some 200 expert editors. Editors are not infrequently challenged on their views. It is, after all, a wiki. We are soon going to set up a dispute resolution body; it will be staffed in part by non-expert authors. Editors are the village elders wandering the bazaar; they aren’t attempting to redesign their cathedral to look a little more like a bazaar.

So, basically, you, and not a few other people, have got the Citizendium all wrong. But I have a sneaking suspicion that this is intentional, actually. You, and others with your reaction to CZ, see that we have made a role for experts.  This, of course, is completely outrageous.  It’s so wrong, in fact, that it really doesn’t matter that we are a wiki; it doesn’t matter that it’s an open, public project; it doesn’t matter that editors and authors really do work shoulder-to-shoulder.  If we deviate from the party line — radical epistemic egalitarianism — then we are Elitists, pure and simple.  And therefore the enemy.

I’m asking you to stretch your world of possibilities a little.  If your mind is not completely closed to the possibility, you will see that it is not simply contradictory to have a merely guiding role for experts in Web 2.0 projects.  There is a middle way; it’s not necessarily old-fashioned elitism vs. radical egalitarianism.  Unlike Andrew Keen, I am an advocate for that middle way.  If you’re interested, I’ve written something of a manifesto for this view.

And by the way: I agree with you that diagnosing the exact problem about search is hard.  Simply having experts choose the winners and losers isn’t the answer.  But ignoring expert opinion entirely is silly, too.

Someone recently applied and asked for a pseudonym, because he advocates for X, which is a very unpopular thing to do.  If it were known that he were an X advocate, then his career, helping people with Y, would be threatened.  Therefore, we should give him a pseudonym.

Is this an adequate reason to give him a pseudonym?  Suppose that X is white supremacy, holocaust denial, pedophilia, terrorism, or hardcore repressive Stalinism.  If we give an X advocate a pseudonym just because he is an X advocate, we are enabling him to continue his X advocacy secretly.

I can imagine situation in which we might want to give an X advocate a pseudonym–for example, a national of any repressive regime who will write about that regime.  So matters are not so clear, perhaps.  Does the situation force us to decide which kinds of advocacy we shall support with pseudonyms?  That sounds very difficult to justify, given our neutrality policy.  Should we conclude that no pseudonyms may be given out on grounds that someone is an advocate of a particular view?

What do you think?

It’s been awhile since we had major press coverage — mercifully, because when it hits, I tend to be completely co-opted and I can’t get any work done.  Well, the London Times has, rather out of the blue, done an article about the Citizendium.  It’s a nice one!  But really: are we merely a backlash?  We are a forward lash.  A version of the article will appear in the print version as well.  The article is apparently based on some old information, but I was given the chance to update them.  The e-mail comment you see in the article was sent in just a few hours ago!

As this was appearing, I was interviewed by the Washington Post for an article in their weekend magazine.  I think the article is about Wikipedia, but we should get a mention anyway.

Also, Sept. 15 is fast approaching.  That’s one year since I first announced the idea for the Citizendium–but 10.5 months since the launch of the pilot project, and about 5.5 months since public launch of CZ Beta.  Chances are, we will just have to do a press release, and sooner rather than later.  So I’ll be preparing a general update sometime soon.  I am preparing one anyway–partly for a grant application, partly for two different major foundations that, very gratifyingly, contacted me, following up on previous conversations.

The First Post has an interesting take on the Citizendium:  we are the solution to Wikipedia’s well-publicized WikiScanner woes.  I suppose if I had been less busy, I would have taken advantage of the WikiScanner situation to help publicize CZ; we could have done a press release.  But the suggestion seemed, well, unseemly at the time.  CZ can and should succeed on its own merits, not on the much-heralded but highly implausible downfall of Wikipedia.  Besides, as several people in our project have pointed out, we really should avoid defining ourselves in terms of Wikipedia.

On the publicity front, I do hope to have a press release out within the next few months.  I can’t say exactly when, for obvious reasons, but it’s in the works.

Hey, have you been putting off joining us?  Have you been putting off writing for us?  Tomorrow is Stop the Procrastination Day.  It’s the monthly Write-a-Thon!  Join the party!  The last one, by the way, worked very nicely.

If you’re not a Citizen yet, join us tomorrow, and we will go to superhuman efforts to get you on board as quickly as possible.  Definitely faster than our 24 hour guarantee.  Whatcha waiting for?  An invitation?  (We’re working on that.)