Citizendium Blog

I did an interview with ECT News earlier today, and inter alia they suggested that the Citizendium had more of a command-and-control system than Wikipedia, and asked for my reaction.  It occurred to me, then, that anyone who actually contributes to CZ knows that this is wrong and unfair: as I tell anyone who cares to listen, we’re a robustly bottom-up wiki.  Our authors and editors really do work shoulder-to-shoulder in a friendly atmosphere.  I then considered whether the opposite might be more correct: does Wikipedia have more of a command-and-control system than the Citizendium?

Yes, Virginia.  Wikipedia has more of a command-and-control system than CZ.  You didn’t know that?  Well, it’s true.

Before you scoff, put your prejudices and what you think you know aside, and consider.  How hard is it to get your edits on Wikipedia to “stick”?  If you edit any even slightly popular article, how many self-appointed Defenders of the Wiki will be standing over your shoulder, citing policy at you and telling you you’re doing it all wrong?  If you get into a dispute or encounter some other problem, how quickly will an “administrator” arrive to “lay down the law”?

Yeeeeaaah.  That’s right.  Hmm.

By contrast, on the Citizendium, it’s extremely easy to get your edits to stick.  There are zillions of topics that are still wide open, or that need great expansion.  We genuinely love it when new people get involved; we won’t shoo you off.  And how many self-appointed ”managers” will your work have?  If you’re lucky, a few.  But, at this point, it’s more likely you’ll have one or none.  If you like to work largely free of the typical Wikipedia busybodies and know-it-alls, you’ll find CZ much more congenial.  And how quickly will editors or constables “lay down the law”?  Well, you can get away with a lot on CZ, I’m afraid.  That’s because people behave themselves so well most of the time that we are genuinely surprised when someone needs to be reined in.

Sure I’m a little biased, but I really love the CZ community!  (Group hug!)

I can virtually see you skeptics shaking your heads.  You want to ask: if I go to add to an article, how often will editors show up and undo my work, or tell me that I’m doing it all wrong?  Well, sure, that happens.  But, as far as I can tell, not very often.  Our editors generally go out of their way to treat everyone collegially.  This is one of the great discoveries of CZ: you plop experts down in an open wiki community, and even give them some modest authority, and guess what?  They’re nice.  They do not wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs.  For that matter, our constables don’t wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs.  They’re wonderful!

Now, I know that our wiki is open, bottom-up, and largely free of “command-and-control” in part because we’re still much smaller than Wikipedia.  Yes, that’s obvious.  Yes, I know that growth has a way of making governance harder.  But that doesn’t change the fact that we are for now much freer and less constrained than Wikipedia is.  You know what?  If you sign up, you can still edit our front page.  It’s not protected.  And we at least still have a chance to retain the more open, freer, more congenial nature of our “small town” community as we grow; it’s too late for Wikipedia, which has become largely a “big city” mobocracy, one that I for one find more oppressive than liberating.

Sure — in time, we on CZ will have far more collaborators than we might always want, for our own individual work.  We too will start complaining that too many cooks spoil the broth.  However that is, and however we solve that problem when we are so fortunate as to have it, I also think that we can avoid having this lively community devolve into a rude, controlling mobocracy.  CZ’s differences make all the difference.  We use real names, which makes people more responsible and polite.  We require that people treat each other professionally — and greatly cuts down on rudeness, just as moderating a mailing list often has the same effect.  We separate different kinds of authority, with different groups having only limited powers, and no person being able to serve on more than one of the high-level groups in authority (Executive Committee, Editorial Council, Constabulary).  This means that nobody is in a position to lord it over others with impunity.  We actually require that people agree to our fundamental policies as a condition of their participation, which means that many of the most disruptive people, whose silly antics cause Wikipedia administrators to react like Nazis, aren’t involved.  Maybe, just maybe, we’ve learned something from Wikipedia’s governance mistakes.

If you have been skeptical of CZ, maybe it’s time to give us a second look.

I rewrote our “Why Citizendium?” page.  Here’s the new draft.

“What is the point of the Citizendium,” you might ask, “when Wikipedia is so huge and of reasonably good quality? Is there really a need for it?”

To put it forcefully: there is a better way for humanity to come together to make an encyclopedia. So we make this appeal to you. If we can do better than Wikipedia—or more positively, if we can pioneer a truly effective way to gather knowledge—then shouldn’t we?

In response to this, a critic might argue: but you can’t do better than Wikipedia. It has millions of articles, it is ranked #8 in traffic, it has thousands of very active contributors, and Nature did a report saying the accuracy of its science articles was not far below that of Encyclopedia Britannica. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But to make our case, we don’t have to say that Wikipedia is broken. While different Citizens have different views about Wikipedia’s merits, we agree on one thing: we, humanity, can do better. But why think that the Citizendium, in particular, can do better?

Why think the Citizendium can “catch up”?

The Citizendium actually added about five million words in its first year—more than Wikipedia did in its first year. Our rate of article creation and average number of edits per day have increased—in other words, our growth has been accelerating. Moreover, we have many very active Citizens, including Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and now Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium, who are on making many improvements daily. It is only a matter of time before the Citizendium system is fully “tuned up” and out of beta status. Sanger believes that we might well enjoy explosive growth in 2008, and is working very hard to make it happen. Even if we merely continue to triple our rate of growth every year, we will have millions of articles ourselves after some more years.

In other words, we look to the long term—just as Wikipedia’s founders did in its first years. And the long-term outlook is positive indeed. In five to ten years, we can expect similar growth, similar numbers of active contributors, and a similar traffic ranking. So we need not worry that Wikipedia will “always be larger.”

We can do better

We do not think that Wikipedia is “good enough.” We think humanity can do better: Wikipedia is full of serious problems. Many of the articles are written amateurishly. Too often they are mere disconnected grab-bags of factoids, not made coherent by any sort of narrative. In some fields and some topics, there are groups who “squat” on articles and insist on making them reflect their own specific biases. There is no credible mechanism to approve versions of articles. Vandalism, once a minor annoyance, has become a major headache—made possible because the community allows anonymous contribution. Many experts have been driven away because know-nothings insist on ruining their articles. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales acts as a law unto himself, not subject to a written constitution, with no official position, but wielding considerable authority in the community. Wales and other Wikipedia leaders have either been directly involved in, or have not adequately responded to, a whole string of very public scandals. The community takes its dictum, “Ignore All Rules,” seriously; it is part anarchy, part mob rule. The people with the most influence in the community are the ones who have the most time on their hands—not necessarily the most knowledgable—and who manipulate Wikipedia’s eminently gameable system.

But even if you disagree with much of this indictment, you might still agree that we can do better.

Real names are better

By requiring real names, we give both our articles and our community a kind of real-world credibility that Wikipedia’s articles and community lack: if you look at our recent changes page, you will see nothing but real names. To Wikipedians, this must be a bizarre but refreshing sight. Real names also make it possible to enforce some modest, sensible rules, while Wikipedia’s anonymity policy allows anyone who is slapped on the wrist to come back immediately under a new pseudonym. This happens very frequently on Wikipedia. By contrast, the Citizendium has virtually no vandalism and very little abuse of any kind.

To this, you might say that real names also exclude too many people, so that the Citizendium will grow too slowly. But this is puzzling to say, considering that many thousands of people have signed up to the Citizendium under their own real names. A community that asks its members to use their real names is more pleasant, polite, and productive than one that allows abusive people to disrupt the community under the cloak of anonymity. We believe that in time, more and more people will come to see the merits of the Citizendium’s policy. The people driven away by Wikipedia’s governance nonsense—and there are many—are much more likely to find the Citizendium mature and to their liking.

A modest role for experts is better

We too permit very open contribution; the general public make up the bulk of our contributors, as “authors.” We agree that broad-based contribution is necessary to achieve critical mass as well as the broadest spectrum of interests and knowledge.

But we believe that it is merely good sense to make a special role for experts within the system. A project devoted to knowledge ought to give special inducements to people who make it their life’s work to know things. We believe—and we think our work so far bears this out—that a project gently guided by experts will in time be more credible, and of higher quality, than a project making no special role for experts. So we allow our expert editors to approve articles (creating stable versions, with a “draft” version that can be easily edited). Editors may also take the lead, when necessary, in articulating sensible, well-informed solutions to content disputes—disputes that sometimes go on interminably on Wikipedia.

To this there are a number of typical objections, all of which rest on misunderstandings of our policies. Sometimes critics claim that our editors will inflict their personal biases on authors and our readership; but this is incorrect, as we have a neutrality policy that is, if anything, more robust than Wikipedia’s. We are often asked, “But who will choose the experts?” Our answer is: why is this a problem? The “real world” has been solving that problem for a very long time, and our solution is typical. And sometimes people point to Wikipedia itself as evidence that no special role for experts is needed. We disagree: the amateurish and ever-vacillating quality of Wikipedia’s articles is an excellent reason to establish a system that gives a role to editors.

Sensible governance is better

New Citizendium members, called “Citizens,” must agree to our Statement of Fundamental Policies. Moreover, we have a group of mature, generally good-natured “constables” who rein in bad behavior on the wiki, and these community managers are limited in their authority. We moderate comments on the wiki in much the same way mailing lists and forums are moderated. If a Citizen is abusive, his comment is removed; if he shows as pattern of abuse, he is removed. Since we use real names, it is difficult for such abusive people to return under another name. The upshot is that the Citizendium features the rule of law, not anarchy and not mob rule. Indeed, our Citizens get along pretty well, despite being very free to do or say almost anything—as long as it is respectful toward others. To Wikipedians, the experience of seeing such a peaceful community must be, again, bizarre but refreshing.

In the long run, again, we expect that the Citizendium will be recognizing as having the gold standard of sensible governance systems.

The potential of the Citizendium is stunning

We have spent so much time comparing the Citizendium with Wikipedia largely because we know that the comparison will loom large in many potential contributors’ minds; we know that many people ask themselves, “Why work on the Citizendium instead of Wikipedia?” We hope we have answered that question adequately.

But the most important reason to get behind the Citizendium is not a comparative point at all: it is that a fully-developed Citizendium would be stunning. Not only would it have millions of articles, but it would have, at least, hundreds of thousands of expert-approved articles, all available for free, all being instantly updatable with the latest research and events, and all wonderfully well written. Imagine enormous quantities of content combined with the highest quality and exhaustiveness of scope, all achievable only by radical collaboration. Imagine, as well, a whole raft of supplementary reference materials.

The world has never seen anything like this. But we can create it. Our best chance to do so is by throwing our support behind the Citizendium.

Some personal motivations to support the Citizendium

But what about you—why should you get involved?

It’s mainly because it is fun and rewarding to share your knowledge with the world. Your contributions to the Citizendium are less likely to be degraded by poor edits later on: others will move your contributions forward, not backward. In time (we can’t say when—but eventually), the article you contribute to will be approved by an expert editor, and so represented to the world as containing a credible, reliable introduction to your topic. And all for free. We are accomplishing something truly worthwhile.

Many people, especially academics, are concerned that in a strongly collaborative project like this, they cannot get the individual credit they need. Well, you can already point people to the article history, where your real name will appear, crediting you with the specific edits you make. Also, we will soon probably start a pilot project that will allow people to be credited with their contributions on a “byline,” under certain circumstances. And we hope to start a program soon where we will prepare an official report about your contributions to, and roles in, the Citizendium that you can submit to decisionmakers. Already, you can have the Editor-in-Chief or an active editor in your area attest to your activity and the quality of your work.

Fun, rewarding, and worthwhile—what more could you want?

Google’s “Comments by People in the News” posted a tightened-up version of my blog post in response to Mick O’Leary’s badly-researched and intemperate attack on the Citizendium:

Mick O’Leary, writing for Information Today/ECT in the article “Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble,” gets the Citizendium very badly wrong. Mr. O’Leary could easily have interviewed me to check his facts, but he didn’t. Indeed I wonder whether he even looked at the website at all.

First, are we “stumbling”?

We are not. Mr. O’Leary’s remarks are shot through with errors — even in the title. So far from “stumbling,” we are growing, and indeed accelerating by all measures, including the number of active contributors and the number of articles started per day. I get the impression that he would like us to stumble, but we are not accommodating him.

In this respect it is extremely misleading to lump Citizendium in with Veropedia. The Citizendium is more active by about two orders of magnitude. We average well over 500 edits per day, have 40-50 different editors and authors working on the website each day, and over 200 different contributors each month. By contrast, Veropedia features only a dozen of log entries per day, which amount to someone copying an article over from Wikipedia. And, in fact, it does not use named, verified experts.

…

Read the whole thing.

Observing this exchange, Deep Jive Interests points out that I was able to make a quick rebuttal by using Google’s “Comments by People in the News,” which is a good new thing under the sun:

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The Citizendium Makes it Easier for Authors to Submit Articles

You Can Now Mail in Your Articles

The Citizendium now offers authors the opportunity to submit articles written in their word processor. A Citizendium human Wiki-Converter will convert the document in the MediaWiki mark up code so that the article can appear in the Citizendium as a regular encyclopedia article, complete with images, tables, notes and citation-sources (references).

For the present, the Citizendium will accept articles written in Microsoft ‘.doc’ format, and will accept also ‘.rtf’ files, which most word processors can generate.

Authors send their articles as attachments to the following mailing list; authors submitting articles may submit to the mailing list without ‘subscribing’ to it:

cz-wikiformat@mail.citizendium.org 

In the body of the email, authors may add any comments regarding their article. A member of the wiki-converting team will contact you confirming that your article has been accepted for conversion, and will keep you posted on the conversion progress. Expect some queries from time-to-time, for example for clarification.

After your article has been converted and posted to the Citizendium, you may want to make edits. You can do that yourself, for minor edits, using the Citizendium’s editor. Go to the article page, click the edit tab. The editor box will be in MediaWiki code, but you can easily make edits by following the code format you will see already there. If you have extensive edits, as in the case of a re-write of a section of the article, submit the section to the mailing list and indicate the title of the article it belongs to, and the name of the Wiki-Converter.

To submit articles, you must sign-up as an author in the Citizendium, if you have not already done so. You do that by filling in a simple web form. If you wish to learn more about the author role, see The Author Role.Also check out the Citizendium ‘Main Page’ for more information.

If you have questions, post them to the mailing list. Someone will get back to you with an answer. The Citizendium aims at credibility and quality, not just quantity, in its articles. Both the general public and credentialed experts are encouraged to get involved. We use our real names, not pseudonyms. We’re both collegial and congenial.

ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES:

• cz-wikiformat@mail.citizendium.org

LINKS:

• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:The_Author_Role
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Wiki-converting (home page for the Wiki-Converter project)

PRESS CONTACT INFORMATION:

Prof. Anthony Sebastian (leader of the Wiki-Converter project)

Professor of Medicine

University of California San Francisco

Anthony_Sebastian@msn.com

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Anthony.Sebastian

Dr. Larry Sanger

Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium; co-founder of Wikipedia

sanger@citizendium.org

http://www.larrysanger.org/

One of the worst “news analysis” articles ever written about the Citizendium, going under the title “Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble,” was posted this morning to ECT News Network sites, including LinuxInsider, TechNewsWorld, E-Commerce Times, and MacNewsWorld.  Here is a reply that I submitted to the columnist’s editors, to the LinuxInsider talk page (where it hasn’t appeared yet), as well as Google’s “Comments by People in the News” service.

To the editors:

The characterizations of the Citizendium in the article “Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble” by Mick O’Leary, writing for Information Today/ECT, are either false or deeply misleading, and in any case journalistically irresponsible. This article does a huge disservice to the hundreds of people who contribute to the Citizendium each month, as I will demonstrate. Mr. O’Leary should have actually interviewed me–which he easily could have done. But I was never contacted. It appears that he had already made up his mind and the facts were not going to stand in his way.

To comment on a few of his poorly-researched remarks:

“This occurs through a highly convoluted process for submitting, reviewing and approving changes, in which editors and authors collaborate in an intricate hierarchical relationship.”

This is simply and proveably untrue, and belies any understanding whatsoever on Mr. O’Leary’s part about how the Citizendium actually works. The process of making changes to Citizendium articles is virtually identical to that of making changes on Wikipedia: it is a wiki. You can see this by a casual glance at our recent changes page. As Wikipedia’s main architect, I am not about to change parts of the Wikipedia model that work. The ease of contribution is the same in the Citizendium and Wikipedia.

Furthermore, it is highly misleading to say that there is “an intricate hierarchical relationship” between Citizendium editors and authors. In fact, they work side-by-side on the wiki, editing each other’s prose; editor authority is rarely exercised. Mostly, editors “lead by example.”

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…by a blogging librarian.

I’ve uploaded two recent essays — speeches, really, but written out.  The first is “Citizendium: A New Vision for Online Knowledge Communities,” which I delivered at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, Feb. 7, 2008, as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Lecture Series, “Wikipedia - Democratization of Knowledge or Triumph of Amateurs,” hosted by Marshall Poe.  Here’s a bit that sets up the problem to solve:

… It would be boring and banal for me to point out that collaboration on free content represents an interesting opportunity. Of course it does. The Internet has been exploiting that opportunity for almost ten years, at least ever since the Open Directory Project got started in 1998. The real question is whether there are any interesting new free content opportunities. And there is, I think. The most interesting unexploited opportunity before the Internet today is high quality and high relevance. In short, if developing sheer quantity of content was the big exciting problem ten years ago, we’ve licked that one. The big exciting problem now is quality: how to create enormous amounts of high-quality and highly-relevant content. And this is–I guarantee it–a much more difficult problem, and one that not nearly as many online projects will be able to solve. …

I go on to argue for three fundamental principles underlying the Citizendium:

… Clearly, something really important has been left out of the Web 2.0 equation. What? What needs to be added so that our communities produce content that is not merely abundant, useful, and interesting, but also reliable and relevant?

I have three principles, which I will state briefly first but then elaborate, because it is very easy to misunderstand in all three cases. They are:

1. Find a meaningful role for experts within the project.
2. Require contributors to use their real-world identities.
3. Establish the rule of law by committing contributors to a social contract that makes them full partners in the project.

Adopting these three principles will help transform Web 2.0 into Web 3.0. Leveraged intelligently, these principles will allow an online community to produce high quality and relevance, without necessarily compromising high productivity. They will, in short, help the Internet to grow up.

Let’s consider these principles each briefly in turn. …

I also give a report about the latest CZ progress.  Here’s the whole thing.

The second is “How the Internet Is Changing What We (Think We) Know,” a speech I gave when kindly invited by a local Columbus-area library.  This is not so much project propaganda as the examination of a socio-philosophical problem:

… Before the Internet, we were already awash in information. Wading through all that information in search of some hard knowledge was very difficult indeed.

The Internet is making this old and difficult problem even worse. If we had an abundance of information in, say, the 1970s, the Internet has created a superabundance of information today. Out of curiosity, I looked up some numbers. According to one estimate, there are now over 1.2 billion people online; Netcraft estimated that there are over 100 million websites, and about half of those are active. And those estimates come from over a year ago.

With that many people, and that many active websites, clearly there is, as I say, a superabundance of information. Nielsen ratings of Internet search showed that there were some six billion searches performed in December, 2007, in one month—that’s about 72 billion in a year! Google, by the way, was responsible for two thirds of those searches. Now, you might have heard these numbers before; I don’t mean to be telling you news. But I want to worry out loud about a consequence of this situation.

My worry is that the superabundance of information is devaluing knowledge. The more that information piles up on Internet servers around the world, and the easier it is for that information to be found, the less distinctive and attractive that knowledge will appear by comparison. I fear that the Internet has already greatly weakened our sense of what is distinctive about knowledge, and why it is worth seeking. …

I then go on to explain all that in some detail, but for a popular audience.  Here’s the whole thing (complete with pictures!).

From a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman, discussing a talk by Andrew Keen of Cult of the Amateur infamy:

[Keen is] a fan of Citizendium, the Larry Sanger project to create a wikipedia by leveraging experts; of Google’s “wikipedia-killer”, Knol; of Jason Calcanis’s hand-rolled search engine Mahalo. These projects seem deeply reactionary to me, like they’re missing the fundamental truth of the projects that they’re copying: that the movements of a mass number of people on the internet can accomplish tasks that it’s very hard for a small group of experts to solve.

This might be an apt criticism of Knol and Mahalo (maybe — it’s a very simplistic criticism, in any case), but it represents a total misunderstanding of the Citizendium.  It is very sad that some people still think that we are an experts-only project; we aren’t, as anyone who has investigated us the slightest bit knows.

What Ethan and, sadly, too many outside of the CZ fold do not realize is that CZ represents a step forward, not a step backward.  I as much as anyone helped pioneer the very practice Ethan praises, of mass online movements accomplishing distributed content tasks.  I’m not about to give up on that (for chrissakes).  And CZ doesn’t.  In fact, we invite everyone to participate, as long as they are willing to follow our modest, sensible rules.  We know (indeed, we illustrate) that distributing work in a bottom-up way among an open community is the best way to run the sort of project we’re pursuing.  But we are a step forward in that we have actually set up a more sensible governance framework to pursue this project.  Part of this involves giving experts a role — not a top-down command-and-control role, of course — in the project.  But another part involves requiring people to take real-world responsibility for their contributions.  Another part involves having contributors commit to a set of principles that the community runs by.

The result is that we are approaching 5,200 entries (with an average article length several times what Wikipedia’s was in its first year) and we continue to accelerate.  Expect not just solid growth this year (that much is a given), but great things.  I’m serious; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

And, please.  By now, CZ is obviously no longer a “Larry Sanger project,” any more than Wikipedia can be described as a “Larry Sanger project.”  It is a CZ community project.  Did I write all those articles?  Of course not.  It bothers me when people describe the project that way, because it gives me credit for their work.  I don’t deserve that.

But people will always insist on shoehorning facts to fit their own cynical and simplistic analyses…