Citizendium Blog

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!).