Citizendium Blog

I had never seen ProCon.org until a few hours ago. Having looked over it, I’m surprised that I didn’t know about it before.

ProCon.org is a cluster of issues-oriented websites written and maintained by a staff of hired writers (bright young researchers fresh out of college, from the looks of it), all under the management of a non-profit group with a $700,000 yearly budget. For example, here is their Euthanasia homepage. There are homepages about many other hot-button issues, including “Should marijuana be a medical option?” and “Should prostitution be legal?” and “Is sexual orientation determined at birth?”

The general concept seems, on my first glance, to be very interesting and solid, and the results have the earmarks of being well-executed. There are several standard resources, such as a “1-minute overview,” “Top 10 Pros and Cons,” etc. These would appear to be very valuable resources for students and researchers, although I would suspend judgment on that until I had read through a few of these in great detail, and gotten some expert opinions, which I haven’t done. In addition, there is a wonderfully refreshing full (and well-organized!) disclosure of information about the organization itself (and see this and this and this).

But the most interesting aspect of the site may be its voluminous collection of pro-and-con issues pages. They are organized around groups of topics, and within each topic there are one or more questions. There is a separate page about each question. On the question page, there are two columns, listing “pro” and “con,” and in the columns, quotations from various named sources. Each source is exhaustively described.

The whole project looks wonderful, from the point of view both of a researcher and of someone who loves neutrality in educational resources. My compliments also to whoever designed the site and its software. It is remarkably well-laid-out.

I’m writing about ProCon because I think it is fascinating in several ways. In one way, it represents a wholesale rejection of the idea of community editing, which in this day and age is fascinating. I am impressed by what happened when somebody decided simply to pay a dozen researchers to create free, reliable (apparently), open (in the sense of “full disclosure”), and neutral content. Could Wikipedia have assembled this website? I’m laughing. How about CZ? Well, maybe! But probably not, because this sort of highly organized content, with specific, agreed-upon rules (such as the five-tier “credibility ranking” system) would be rather hard to execute by the herded cats of CZ (much less Wikipedia). Why do I say that? Because I have tried to organize complex content types and complex projects within my various online projects. I’ve occasionally succeeded (as with subpages, sort of), but it is very hit-or-miss (again…as with subpages). Besides, I can also tell you from similar experience that a lot of the work that has gone into ProCon.org is “gruntwork,” and not the sort of work that people sign up to do as an online volunteer.

I am also impressed by the apparent care and thought that went into making the resource as a whole both neutral and open. They seem to have really thought out just what you would have to do in order to create a neutral debate site, and have gone far above and beyond the approach that most newspapers or encyclopedias take. Among other things, I am glad that they both let partisans state their own views as forcefully as possible, and give amazingly full information about the partisans and their affiliations. In short, I am heartened that — it seems — there might be somebody out there who believes as much as I do in the possibility and beneficiality of neutrality. Of course, I am aware that there might be some people who are not convinced on this point. I know that a lot of people detest all attempts at neutrality and insist that it is in principle impossible. (But I think they are confused.) So I open the question up to you: is ProCon.org neutral? Does it illustrate ideals that the likes of CZ and Wikipedia should be following?

(By the way, I have no connections at all, that I know of, with ProCon.org.)

Not exactly CZ related, but this might be of interest to some people. Over on Edge, I was invited to respond to an essay that asked, “Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?” My answer: no, or at least not if the scientific help takes the form of an allegedly ideology-free “economic Manhattan project” that attempts to make economics scientifically rigorous.

This post was linked by the New York Times online business section.

It’s been a pretty big news story: for a few days, editing of Wikipedia was effectively blocked throughout much of the U.K., because Wikipedia had, and still has, an uncensored reproduction of the Scorpions’ album cover for Virgin Killer. This shows a completely naked pre-pubescent girl in a sexually suggestive pose.

Does it bother you that Wikipedia reproduces an image that is, arguably, child pornography? It does me. Now, I think the Internet ought to be safe for porn, but not child porn. It was Jimmy Wales’ Bomis.com, after all, that den of soft-core porn “glamour photography” (the Jimbo-approved euphemism), that paid my paychecks when I was starting Nupedia and Wikipedia. (I often used to say that Wikipedia was built using good fertilizer.) But I don’t think that a general encyclopedia, used by millions of school kids (at least at home) should host sexually suggestive pictures of naked pre-pubescent girls. That ought to be obvious to Wikipedians, and the fact that it’s not is yet more evidence that not all is well in Wikipedia-land.

Perhaps it’s time to remind the world that there is a wonderful new, and growing, alternative: Citizendium (CZ). If you’re reading this on the CZ blog, you no doubt know that we are another free wiki encyclopedia project, but started by a co-founder of Wikipedia, yours truly. (But I’m writing it so you can forward it to family, friends, and colleagues who don’t know about CZ.) A lot of people don’t know what we’re here for and they have bought all sorts of misinformation about us. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Let me sum up the case for CZ. We are still around, we’re still growing, and we’re steadily becoming a viable alternative to Wikipedia. We are small, but vigorous. We have no vandalism. We have grown steadily over the one-and-a-half years since our public launch, and we’ll be breaking 10,000 articles in the next few months. I won’t bore you (again) with the reasons, but I think that there will come a tipping point for us, after which a lot more people will know about us and swell our ranks. And they should! We aren’t going away, and even at the current rate, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of articles in the long run. We’re non-profit, Creative Commons, community-managed, and we’re open to everyone who is willing to use their real names and identities. We’re a remarkably pleasant and well-behaved community, and I think we do great work. We have pioneered a new model, a public-expert hybrid community; we’ve shown that it is not just viable, it is in many ways a clearly superior model for the organization of an open, online knowledge community.

And, of course, the cover of Virgin Killer will never appear on the pages of CZ.

Now, if you are harrumphing (rather ridiculously, I might add, but that’s just me I suppose) that of course the cover of Virgin Killer should not be “censored,” and that Wikipedia is better than CZ insofar as it doesn’t feature such “censorship,” then let me point something out. Let me point out the wonderful, delicious fact that you can stick with Wikipedia. The two projects naturally attract delightfully complementary groups of people. The people who want to hide behind pseudonyms, who want to play governance games in order to push their biases, and who want to prove their maturity and enlightenment by putting up pictures of naked little girls, can stick with Wikipedia. I’ll be delighted if they do. But I think that in the long run, you’ll see that a lot more people will want to contribute under the more sensible CZ system.

Time will tell, but you know, I was right about the viability of the Wikipedia model long before it was popular or even known to almost everyone reading this post. And I have a strong and well-justified belief in the viability of the CZ model, a belief that is well-informed by my experience actually developing the Wikipedia model, many other online projects, and thinking deeply about online knowledge communities.

We’ll be hosting a big Citizendium Open House in January, as a way to boost this great project to the next level and welcome a lot of new people who might be curious about the project. Be on the lookout for announcements here and elsewhere.

A friend told me that my name came up on a Prairie Home Companion (a famous U.S. public radio show), but he didn’t tell me it was in a poem. Well, thanks, Garrison Keillor, for the recognition.