Citizendium Blog

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.”

“What are the results of the Citizendium authority-driven model? Not much. There are 4,000-plus articles in Citizendium, but this number is misleading. Many articles are one paragraph or one page ’starters’ with little content.”

We have 5,400 articles now, and we have added our most recent 2,000 articles in the last three months or so. The number is hardly “misleading.” In fact, the average length of the articles we created was six times as long as the average length of the articles Wikipedia had in its first year. We actually added more words in our first year than Wikipedia did in its first year, and now have about six million words.

“Citizendium’s articles don’t differ greatly from their Wikipedia counterparts; often, there are only minor editorial changes.”

This is, again, provably false. In fact, we have more articles in the database than the 5,400 we take credit for; we do not include in that number the articles copied from Wikipedia to which we did not make significant changes. Moreover, we delete Wikipedia-sourced articles that do not undergo significant change. Most of our articles (I don’t have the percentage ready to hand, but I think it’s something like 60-70%) are original to us. By policy we discourage people from copying from Wikipedia.

Not only are we growing, our growth has been accelerating very nicely on multiple measures–number of active contributors, number of articles started per day, and so forth. Acceleration is the opposite of “stumbling.”

“First, their models of contributor/expert collaboration are cumbersome and laborious, which makes it hard to get anything done.”

This claim does not describe the Citizendium community at all. The model of collaboration is the same as that used by Wikipedia: again, just look at our recent changes page. When we say that editors and authors typically work shoulder-to-shoulder in a bottom-up collaborative process, we mean it! That’s how it works, and it does work quite well. That’s why the project has grown as well as it has in its first year. That’s why our growth is accelerating.

“Second, their models, which merge old- and new-paradigm encyclopedia publishing, are uncomfortable marriages. They insist upon old-paradigm authority and stability, yet they are trying to work within a new paradigm, which discounts old school authority and dismisses stability.”

This represents a deep confusion on Mr. O’Leary’s part: he has not even made an effort to try to understand how the marriage might actually be taking place. He did not observe that only 50 of our articles are approved so far (mind you, that’s a statistic we will soon be making changes to improve). Even those articles are not “stable” in the sense that no one can improve them; in fact, our approved articles are often improved in the attached “draft” pages, which anyone can contribute to.

It is extremely misleading to lump Citizendium in with Veropedia. The Citizendium is more active by about two orders of magnitude. We now 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 does not use named, verified experts, as Mr. O’Leary would have discovered if he had done minimal research. Moreover, it features only a dozen of log entries per day, and these are not “edits” but simply someone copying an article over from Wikipedia. The Citizendium is another whole kettle of fish.

I believe Mr. O’Leary and this publication owe the many fine contributors to the Citizendium an apology for this hatchet job. Frankly, due to its many damaging, ill-informed misrepresentations, it verges on libel.