Citizendium Blog

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.