Citizendium Blog

I have long held that there is something unseemly about a for-profit company earning money by exploiting volunteer participants in an online communities.

The plan with the Nupedia project, for which I was hired in 2000, was to sell ads once we had enough traffic to justify doing so.  This always struck me as, at least, somewhat morally questionable, but the argument we passed around was that for-profit businesses provide a very useful service for which it makes sense that they be compensated.  So I personally had to come to terms with this issue.  One might argue that businesses are justly compensated for the content and software hosting service they provide to the community of volunteers.  But that now sounds ridiculous to me: it is now obvious that it is possible to produce excellent hosting services for a relatively small amount of money, far less than the profit that a successful content community can bring in.  When the idea of selling ads was bruited in early 2002 – to pay my salary — the Spanish Wikipedians forked, and then Wikipedia finally announced that it would never have any ads.  In fairness, however, I should mention that we had long since decided by then to make Wikipedia into a non-profit; the Wikimedia Foundation eventually resulted from those early conversations, though I had nothing to do with its birth.  This is also why Jimmy Wales went on to found Wikia (originally Wikicities) in 2004: so that he could profit from ads placed on community-generated content.

I have finally decided to start arguing that online content-creation communities should be self-governing non-profits, like Wikipedia and the Citizendium, and probably membership organizations at that.  (By the way, I raised this as a topic in my first post to the SharedKnowing mailing list.  The second post is by Ben Kovitz — Ben’s the guy who originally told me about wikis in Pacific Beach over enchiladas back on January 2, 2001.  Ben is great.)

I am finally throwing down the gauntlet.  The business models of YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, craigslist, Yahoo Groups, and up-and-comers like Mahalo and Wikia – to name just a few — are all resting on morally questionable grounds.  Perhaps it is time to stop contributing to them, on moral grounds.

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Nate Anderson has actually done his homework for his recent Ars Technica analysis of us.  He’s evidently read enough about us that he is among a very small group — outside our properly self-critical group of active Citizens – that has produced a contribution to the interesting debate about CZ’s merits and future.  Here’s a reply.

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A new Times Online article mentions CZ glowingly:

A newer, more reliable alternative is Citizendium (en.citizendium.org). It was started by a Wikipedia founder and employs the same idea that anyone can write for the site, but it claims to use a team of vetted experts to make sure articles are accurate, and contributors are all required to use their own names rather than hiding behind aliases. It cannot compete in size: in its first year, only about 4,500 articles have been submitted, compared with 2.1m (in English alone) held by its big sister.

“Big sister”?  Try “crazy old aunt in the attic.”  Yeah, we can’t compete in size, because we are only one-seventh the age of Wikipedia.  Give us time.  But as long as the Times Online is describing us as “a newer, more reliable alternative,” I’ll be happy.

(We really ought to spruce up our press page.  We’ve got huge amounts of coverage but we really don’t have many links to it all, and we haven’t pulled out the juicy quotes like that.  It would help!)

I also found this really interesting story, in which a German MP (Katrina Schubert, deputy leader of the Left Party), braving the laughably obvious irony of the situation, demanded that the German Wikipedia reduce the number of banned Nazi symbols.  She ”encouraged police in Berlin to press charges.”  She has since dropped her charges, but says, “This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”  Yeah, sure.  I’m sure that’s always the case.

For immediate release 

The Citizendium encyclopedia project picks a Creative Commons license

“Our gift to the world: CC-by-sa”

December 21, 2007 – In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

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Just a brief post about a thought that came to me.

Some people might be a little puzzled why I am pushing for higher quality in online content, and why I am not content with “good enough.”  There is actually a fairly simple reason, actually.  It is that collecting quality content increases efficiency.

“It’s the quality, stupid,” or something like that, will soon be on everyone’s lips and fingertips.

There are tremendous amounts of data online, but the vast quantities make it difficult to find the best: the highest quality data is hidden among mountains of cruft.  Most of us specifically want the highest quality data — we want the most authoritative introduction to a topic, the highest quality video, the most recent and accurate statistics, the least biased and best-informed product ratings, etc.  And some of us spend huge amounts of time looking for the highest quality data; I often do.  Therefore, a website like the Citizendium that aims to aggregate the best information online would — if successful — render that sort of searching unnecessary.  Whatever sort of search-for-quality can be aggregated, we’ll aggregate it.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that merely declaring that you are trying to achieve high quality doesn’t make it so.  I don’t think that the Wikipedia model, without a credible vetting process, will ever do this job.  I very much doubt Knol will, either, given the similarity of its plan to so many other mediocre online content-creation projects.  In short, neither Wikipedia nor Knol is likely to remove the necessity for huge amounts of research for better information.  They’ll simply add more and more cruft that one must wade through in one’s search.

The Citizendium, on the other hand, might be different.  Massively detailed and authoritative articles and clusters might, once and for all, create single go-to locations for every topic, cutting down research to a fraction.  By tapping into the global community of intellectuals, we have a better chance to do this than even Britannica or other reference publishers.  We could achieve this goal this by aggregating, essentially the effort of serious researchers — which can, of course, include students and regular smart folks — but which ultimately must be guided by experts.  Even if we don’t get it right, someone eventually will, because it is possible and because there is such a huge potential demand for it.  I look forward to that day!

If you support this vision, I hope you will help move the Citizendium toward it — and expect improvements in the project in every dimension, beginning, in a few days, with the announcement of our Creative Commons license.

It seems that everyone is talking about Google’s new Knol project — the Citizendium has got a tremendous amount of press as a result.  So I wanted to add another note on the topic.

At the Citizendium we are motivated by one thing only: to become the best knowledge base that Earth has ever seen.  We believe we have, over the long term, a better chance at this than any other project.

If Knol were to reveal a genuine expert contributor that was not already an expert editor on CZ whom CZ would approve as an editor, it would be my pleasure to welcome that person to become part of our new knowledge society.

What our expert editors discover is that the expert-guided collaborative environment on the Citizendium is unprecedented, remarkably productive, and really without parallel.

Delivering one’s expert knowledge with the input from a general knowledge community helps all our editors to assess — and improve — the ways in which their knowledge is stored and communicated.

Only the Citizendium does that.

We are by no means complacent, and we intend fully to watch Google’s new Knol project.  We will utilize constructively any contributor that will genuinely add to the world’s knowledge store by inviting them to join us a CZ contributor.

Creating a new knowledge society is what the Citizendium is doing and every genuine expert should be an editor on CZ.  Moreover, everyone who wants to work as part of an open, public project shoulder-to-shoulder with such experts should join us as well.

What are knols? No, they aren’t Dungeons & Dragons monsters, or small hills, they’re purportedly “units of knowledge,” and they are encyclopedia articles Google is inviting people to write. So Google is entering head-to-head competition with Wikipedia — not so much with the Citizendium (thankfully, we have a different niche: quality) — making things much more interesting. (Of course, philosophers have had a zillion different names for “units of knowledge,” and none of them could be used to describe a Web page.)

A reporter asked me some questions about Google’s announcement, which I answered by e-mail.  Here are my answers.

What is your assessment of the Knol initiative?

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what many others have done. Countless websites already exist that invite signed essays and information (remember h2g2.com?) and other content for public rating. Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract many genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a “knol” and be compared and ranked by “the crowd” — not by expert peers — is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish. Still, other Web companies have had reasonably good success making money with such Web services, and Google might make a lot of money with theirs.

Second, lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. Many of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project, particularly with Google Ads appearing on the articles. It does not appear to be in the spirit of the free culture movement. Still, it is good that Google has decided to make ads optional.

Third, lack of collaboration. (See below under your last question.)

Do you think it addresses your concerns about Wikipedia, namely, that expert opinion should have a larger role in shaping knowledge?

Nope.

On the one hand, Knol would be a very different project from Wikipedia, first and foremost because it is not strongly collaborative. For that reason, the governance problems will be different and probably less difficult. (Google is wrong to think, however, that they can avoid making any editorial decisions. Such decisions will be forced upon them by people who try to abuse the system.)

On the other hand, Knol is apt to produce precisely the same sort of uneven content, with many of the same abuses, that Wikipedia has. Without actual editors, the same sort of problems about misleading and damaging information are apt to plague Knol. While I know that many people do not think that such problems are serious, we at the Citizendium do. And a growing part of the general public is coming to agree with us. In fact, producing a more mature, responsible source of information is one of our main motivations for working so hard under our new model.

How will Knol affect your own efforts with Citizendium?

The problem with the Internet is not the lack of information; it is the lack of findable high-quality information.  Knol does not appear to be a serious attempt to solve this problem, but the Citizendium is.

So Knol is unlikely to change our efforts with the Citizendium at all. In fact, we are soon going to announce a new Creative Commons license, and in January we will turn toward a strong, concerted push toward “CZ 2.0.” This will involve adding a adding a Board of Directors and, generally, expanding our governance so as to empower many different people and groups to develop the project more proactively. We expect to grow strongly — and quite possibly explosively — in 2008. It is worth pointing out that the Citizendium actually produced slightly more words (about five million) in its first year than Wikipedia did in its first year. And our words were, needless to say, of much higher quality than Wikipedia’s were then.

Is this a project Citizendium might collaborate with? Or is Google’s project at cross purposes with your own?

A kind of collaboration seems possible. Obviously, the Citizendium provides two important things that the Knol model is missing: expert guidance and strong collaboration. I’ve already discussed Knol’s likely weakness in attracting experts. Another reason I am not particularly worried about Knol is that the quality and depth of encyclopedia articles written collaboratively by a huge global community, especially under expert guidance, will eventually beat out anything produced by individuals, regardless of their ability. Frankly, Knol is reinventing the wheel; the Citizendium is the future.

If Google allows Knol’s contributors to retain their copyright — something they would do well to comment on — then those writers could always bring their content to the Citizendium to be developed further, collaboratively. Maybe the only way Knol might collaborate with Citizendium is this: Knol allows their contributors to link prominently to a Citizendium article, as a locale where those articles could be developed collaboratively. If Knol removed the Google Ads from all articles that were being developed further in collaboration with the Citizendium, we might be interested in developing such a relationship. Of course, I’d have to check with the Citizendium community, for which I cannot speak definitively on such an important matter (it isn’t a dictatorship).

Thanks for asking my opinion.

P.S. It’s not lost on me that this is similar to http://www.whatsyourarticle.org/

Multiple sources are now saying that Wikipedia is more “on the ropes” than ever, burdened by multiple fresh scandals.  Here’s a review of the sad yet fascinating situation, as I understand it.

Slashdot first highlighted a Register article, which pointed out that a “secret” mailing list was used by a “cabal” of Wikipedia insiders essentially uses to deliberate about sockpuppets — something I’ve repeatedly warned is the Achilles’ heel of any collaborative system that permits pseudonymity and anonymity.  This news caused a furor among Wikipedians (as I think it should have).  I actually invited the disaffected people to join the Citizendium — the first time I had ever gone to WikiEN-L Wikipedians to join us.

Then Slashdot highlighted another Register article (mind you, The Register has never been a big fan of Wikipedia’s).  This is a very long one that goes into considerable depth about a particular case.  It is hard to say who is telling the truth, but certainly some hard questions are being raised which go to the way that Wikipedia is being governed.

Problems with Wikipedia’s governance were pointed out by other recent sources, as well.  Seth Finklestein had an interesting article in The Guardian following up on the mailing list story, and the lawyer who set up the Wikimedia Foundation has been dishing dirt on his new blog, and also criticizing the governance of the project.  I’ve also heard from two ex-employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, who both have fascinating stories to tell, but I’m not about to “out” them.  They both strongly insist that something is rotten in Wikipedia-land, and they insist that the rot starts at the top.

Meanwhile, Slashdot pointed out that Jimmy Wales, illustrating once again his tone-deafness on publicity matters, was now saying that Wikipedia is now suitable for use, and even citation, by students.  I am not making this up.  I only wonder where this downward spiral is going to end.

As much as I would enjoy diving into the fray, I’ll just leave it at this.  My respect for both Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia organization plummeted following the Essjay affair (all blog comments here) and their completely underwhelming response to the scandal.  None of these more recent developments, however disappointing, is particularly surprising to me.  Wikipedia’s caretakers have shown themselves, essentially, to be amoral and ultimately unaccountable.

I am happy to be able to learn from their mistakes, however.  Here are the lessons that I draw.  I hope the Citizendium will do better in each of these respects:

• Governance in the form of a constitutional, democratic republic is necessary for large collaborative projects like Wikipedia (and the Citizendium).
• Governance procedures must, of course, be as open as possible, and those in authority must of course be accountable to the community.  There must not be a “cabal” nor a “dictator,” benevolent or otherwise.
• The rule of law is crucial to a healthy community.  This is something that many Wikipedians have rejected outright, and it’s astonishing to me that they have done so.  (They certainly wouldn’t agree to any such thing in their offline communities.  Why should it be different for their online community?)  If you do not have reliable mechanisms to enforce the rules, you’re going to end up with vague and inconsistent patterns of governance, and the persons in authority will ultimately be unaccountable to anyone.  This is obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of understanding of the philosophy of law.
• Individuals in position of authority should be escorted out on a regular basis.  If they stay on board for too long, they will set up groups and mechanisms that will expand their authority and make it more unaccountable.
• Censorship of criticism of persons in power is always a terrible idea.  (While the Citizendium has a Professionalism policy which requires that people not be abusive, you can abuse me, the Editor-in-Chief, to a much greater extent, and I’ll take it — I have to.)
• The community must also be devoted to reasonably high standards of morality and fair dealing.  If you allow people in authority to get away with corruption or just plain poor judgment, with no significant consequences, you’re going to end up with a never-ending stream of scandals.
• The ability to delete edits from the page history, called “oversight” authority, needs, well, oversight.  Real oversight.  That needs to be built into the MediaWiki software.  The idea that you can cover up your edits, and make it appear as if they didn’t happen, even after they caused harm to others, is a complete nonstarter.  Even if certain edits can be masked from the general public, they should still be visible to independent, responsible oversight bodies within the organization.

As I’ve said many times before, Wikipedia has a woefully dysfunctional governance system.  It is time that they did something about it.  This is going to take leadership.  I wonder, however, if there are any real leaders left in Wikipedia-land.  The fact that they do not require real names is going to prove to make such matters difficult – it implies conundrums I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  What I suspect they will end up doing is creating official (real name) registration for members of the community who wish to become full voting Wikipedia “citizens.”  I simply don’t see how else they can do it, without continuing to suffer the problems of the present system.  I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.  Jimmy Wales — who enjoys playing the CEO and celebrity rather than a real leader – clearly doesn’t acknowledge any problem, and without Wales’ concurrence, nothing will happen.

Perhaps the nascent Citizendium governance system, which has started coming online and should be fully operational in the next few months, will prove to be a model for Wikipedia.

As was announced at an awards ceremony this evening (I unfortunately couldn’t attend), the Citizendium received an “Award of Excellence” from the Society for New Communications Research.  We are grateful to the Society for the recognition.

I suppose I should feel grateful for this mention in Wired Magazine, in spite of the terminally idiotic concept and silly comparison. 

I should also be grateful for that outdated statistic.  2,300 articles?  Anyone curious enough to look at the website will see that we’ve nearly doubled that by now…