Citizendium Blog

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.

Nate says I see “the communal aspects of knowledge production as Citizendium’s greatest advantage.”  Perhaps so.  While I am reminded by our Citizens that we must not be complacent (and I agree), this is one main reason that the Citizendium will remain vitally important even if Google makes Knol work well.  “Communal knowledge production” is an advantage the Citizendium shares with Wikipedia, but it is still a huge advantage.  Ever since first seeing Wikipedia in action on its best articles in 2001, and as I’ve been explaining ever since, I’ve thought that strong collaboration – under the right game rules – is capable of producing the most in-depth, nuanced, and indeed accurate reference content.  In fact, the nature of the content is so different that it is, perhaps, best not to describe the Citizendium as a reference work at all, but instead as a “knowledge work.”  Individuals, no matter how brilliant, are hard pressed to do as good a job as can be done in the context of a project like the Citizendium, or even Wikipedia when operating at its least neurotic.  Traditional encyclopedia article-writers and their editors say that selectivity is a great virtue, but I think they just make a virtue of necessity, and strong collaboration actually creates a new expository virtue: completeness.  The point, then, is that, in the long run, Knol is going to have trouble keeping up with the Citizendium simply because it is not strongly collaborative.

(The same is admittedly true of Wikipedia.  I am currently writing an academic debate about the epistemic merits of Wikipedia with plugged-in University of Arizona philosopher Don Fallis.  Don is eloquent in his defense of Wikipedia on similar points, and on those points I agree with him.)

I also have had other criticisms of the Knol project, but I will not bother repeating them.  I will focus on Nate’s points.  He casts a CZ-Knol competition as one between non-profit idealism and the lure of “filthy lucre” (Nate’s phrase from an earlier post):

People are working together on a shared project with Citizendium in a way that they aren’t in Knol (at least as that project has been described so far), and Sanger hopes that the non-commercial, cooperative nature of the venture will attract enough “idealists” to keep the project moving. He stresses that Citizendium has racked up more words in its first year than did Wikipedia.

But can idealism of this kind really attract the kind of talent such a massive project needs, or will the lure of Google’s shiny lucre entice people to write for Knol instead? Sanger admits that there will be “exchanges of contributors” between the two projects, but remains confident that “Citizendium will get more emigrants from Knol than Knol will get from the Citizendium.”

Idealism seems to have served Wikipedia well.  The Citizendium’s growing community is enjoying the rewards of idealism too.  As to the money incentive, I really don’t know why anyone takes that seriously. A small amount of thought will make clear that the amount of money most articles will generate will be minimal at best, and the idea of pennies dribbling to individuals while a mega-corporation, about which people are becoming increasingly nervous, reaps millions through aggregation, will belie the fairness of the arrangement. Competition for the best Britney article might be fierce…but for the very, very long tail, not so much.  I am sure that they’ll get a full complement of good articles on the very most popular topics, though. But that wouldn’t necessarily make for a good encyclopedia.  Obviously, time will tell.  I could be wrong.

See the next post for more.