Wither Wikipedia?
Wikipedia was a first draft. I expect that, increasingly, the Citizendium will be regarded as the next draft.
Most readers of this blog have probably seen the recent article about Wikipedia in the Times of London by now (”Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply“). The article reports on Wikipedia’s apparently sharp decline in participation. (Eric Goldman must be crowing.)
First, I’ll say exactly what you’d expect me to say, and which I have said many times before: disaffected Wikipedians are welcome in the Citizendium community. If in fact participation in Wikipedia is declining so severely that the quality of its articles deteriorates significantly, then I hope former Wikipedians will remember (or learn) that they can join us. They can join simply if they are willing to work under their own real names, under the gentle guidance of experts in an open, bottom-up system, and under the Citizendium charter that is even now being drafted.
Second, let me share something with you: I think the Citizendium has an excellent chance to become the dominant reference resource in the long run. I came to this view during CZ’s first year. And yes, it probably still sounds silly. As soon as it had become established that experts and non-experts could work side-by-side in a fully open, bottom-up, largely pleasant system, as CZ’s is — in other words, when I saw that CZ was a going concern — it became clear to me that there would be no reason for CZ to fold over the long term. Therefore, it would probably continue growing its stores of high-quality content. With more high-quality content would come more credibility and more traffic. After a while, we would reach a tipping point. I admit I was off about when we would reach our tipping point, but I still think it’s likely that we will reach one. It’s only a matter of time. The original arguments for the Citizendium model are sound, and our original demonstration that this novel way of organizing a wiki community is also sound. So now it’s just a matter of time and patience. Of course, in today’s hyper-accelerated society, adverting to “time and patience” might sound silly; but it does not to the wiser heads among us, because they know from experience what time and patience can bring. The point is that CZ is a natural home for those who want to create a better encyclopedia and who have been put off from the Wikipedia experiment. Wikipedia was a first draft. I expect that, increasingly, the Citizendium will be regarded as the next draft.
Third, I am not going to prognosticate, unlike Eric Goldman. Of course it’s possible that Wikipedia will find a way to move to an even stronger position. But I will criticize. For now, it is clearly running afoul of exactly the problems I identified in the project early on — and which I encouraged Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia community at large to fix, and which precipitated my own departure. The pigeons are coming home to roost. The Wikipedia experiment has deeply suffered as a result of its radical embrace of the most extreme egalitarian and anarchistic principles — which have made the community, as such principles always will do, descend into mob rule and a failed state, so to speak. As I explained in a recent paper (”The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia“), “Wikipedia’s success is not best explained by its radical egalitarianism, its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management, all of which are consistent with a low-key role for experts.” Because it has rejected constitutional rule, real identities, and any, even modest, official role for subject-matter experts, the project may have finally run afoul of the limits of its own deeply-ingrained, self-imposed, constitutional flaws.
And need I say this? I think I must: CZ’s growth rate has been only modest because most of our potential contributors have instead put their efforts into Wikipedia. But if it is becoming increasingly obnoxious to edit Wikipedia, then there must be an increasingly untapped source of volunteer labor for working on an encyclopedia. I think that, if they look into what we’re doing, ex-Wikipedians will find that they can help make CZ into what they hoped Wikipedia would become. They can pursue the same noble goals — but they’ll have a much better chance of doing it right this time.
So here’s a little message to the Wikipedians: sure, it takes a few minutes to sign up to CZ, and yes, you have to use your own real name. But CZ is still open and bottom-up, and contrary to what you may think you know, there aren’t editors approving your edits or telling you what to do. Our community is also 100% saner than Wikipedia’s. Perhaps it’s time for a second look.
Putting aside all criticism, I do have this bit of advice. The Wikimedia Foundation ought to post a few snapshot copies of Wikipedia from the last few years, warts and all. If Wikipedia’s quality declines, at least the world will still have some “not too bad” Wikipedia articles to view. I have always maintained that Wikipedia is tremendously useful, and it would be a shame if there were not some “canonical” versions of the resource that we could consult.
[By the way, I haven't worked directly on the CZ wiki for a while. But I'm still being consulted and helping move things along as needed behind the scenes. CZ is mostly off the ground, in my opinion, and it won't be completely off the ground qua online constitutional republic until I get out of the way. I am a serial non-profit knowledge organizer, and my latest such project is WatchKnow.org. Expect me to start other things, too.]
Larry, I respect CZ’s general thrust, and indeed would contribute could I do so pseudonymously, but what evidence is there yet that CZ won’t (or rather wouldn’t) be affected by the large-scale forces that affect Wikipedia?
It feels like you’re jumping on the bandwagon. No one yet knows conclusively why Wikipedia has the troubles it does (or whether the statistic is even indicative of a serious problem, though that part’s more plausible), so I find it a bit disingenuous for you to make the claim that CZ is beyond similar troubles, especially for what amounts to a sales pitch to Wikipedians. Call me back if CZ ever has >3,000,000 articles as a top-5 site: I expect that CZ will feel forces of scale long before then.
Comment by Nihiltres — November 25, 2009 @ 5:50 pm
You write, “The Wikipedia experiment has deeply suffered as a result of its radical embrace of the most extreme egalitarian and anarchistic principles — which have made the community, as such principles always will do, descend into mob rule and a failed state, so to speak. As I explained in a recent paper (”The Fate of Expertise after Wikipedia“), “Wikipedia’s success is not best explained by its radical egalitarianism, its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management, all of which are consistent with a low-key role for experts.” Because it has rejected constitutional rule, real identities, and any, even modest, official role for subject-matter experts, the project may have finally run afoul of the limits of its own deeply-ingrained, self-imposed, constitutional flaws.”
I agree that Wikipedia is in trouble. But I think we disagree as to the cause.
In my opinion, the reason for the sharp decline in volunteers is the reaction to volunteer contributions from the horde of ‘editors’ - people who have been given special privileges or pwoers. They leave these little notes on articles - “this item should be deleted” - “this item doesn’t cite published sources” - which basically attach contributions rather than improve upon them.
What happened, I think, is that Wikipedia listened to its critics too much, and decided, (for whatever reason) that it needed a set of ‘quality mechanisms’ - including the infamous ‘reliance on published sources’ (how ironic). It therefore (a) no longer collected the collective wisdom, but rather, only repeats that which has been printed somewhere, and (b) no longer trusts the contributions of its members, but rather, overvalues the powers of its editors.
Now the suggestion may be that, were these editors some sort of expert, and were their guiding hand, as you say, “gentle”, it might not be that way. But I don’t think so. I don’t think that, in the main, people want to contribute to someone _else’s_ project. They are willing to work collectively on an article, but when someone else takes control of this article, and vets (or leaves nasty snide little Wikipedia editor tags) people lose their interest.
In other words, what I am saying is that the original conception of Wikipedia was correct, and the efforts that they made to improve on this egalitarian approach, by creating a management structure, are on the verge of destroying it.
Comment by Stephen Downes — November 25, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
Stephen, all of Wikipedia’s much-discussed, much-touted “reforms,” such as the ability to disallow editing of certain articles to all but people with slightly-established accounts on the site, are band-aids at best, as anyone who has spent much time on the site knows. They are not much more than cosmetic.
Those changes have nothing to do with the other problem you cite, i.e., the fact that people are “taking control” of articles. That’s something people have been trying to do practically since the project started, and ”that” problem does not stem from the aforementioned cosmetic editorial “controls.” It stems from a stupid game-playing culture, in which “rules” are constantly mis-used by people who rely not really so much on sound reasoning as clout within the community for their decisions. That clout is established–as is predictable in any situation which is totally anarchic–by people scratching each other’s back, playing to the crowd, and putting in enormous amounts of time on the site. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with actual subject matter expertise, or ability to write, or even anything like a subtle understanding of Wikipedia’s own rules. This is the ”opposite” of the sort of editorial control CZ has.
If you think that the “editors” (and admins) of Wikipedia have deliberately created a “management structure,” and that in doing this they have flouted Wikipedia’s original egalitarian ideals, I think you don’t understand the history of Wikipedia or how it works now. Wikipedia did not begin life with any very specific, let alone radical, egalitarian ideals. But the people who worked on it most vigorously, and attempted to dominate early discussions, pushed it in that direction. It did not have to go in that direction.
Anyway, the reason that Wikipedia’s governance is so screwed up is not that it has been formalized in a structure. It is more accurate (but still not quite) to say that it has developed something like a high school mob mentality — would you call that formalized? — because, not in spite of, the power vacuum that occurs when silly half-witted anarchists think they can create a community without rules.
Comment by Larry Sanger — November 25, 2009 @ 8:50 pm
Personally, I don’t have much trouble with the self-appointed Wikipedia police. It’s a bit like dealing with copy-editors - they can be a pain in the backside but taken as a whole they do more good than harm. No, my problem is with (a) the vandals, who are just a total waste of everyone’s time, and (b) the people with a little knowledge, the kids who think they know about a subject because they have been taught about it at school. So, in principle I think Citizendium is a better model. I say “in principle”, because what should work in theory isn’t always what works in practice.
Comment by Michael Kay — November 26, 2009 @ 9:13 am
@4 Michael, I agree completely with your point: “(b) the people with a little knowledge, the kids who think they know about a subject because they have been taught about it at school.” Those kids made me leave WP after 9 months of contributing heavily. For more than two years now I’ve been contributing to CZ and (a)I haven’t seen any vandals yet (b)I did not have to fight even once with a person who thought (s)he knew better.
Apparently, you don’t have a problem with using your own name, therefore I say to you: register and give CZ a try.
Comment by Paul Wormer — November 27, 2009 @ 1:12 pm
[...] Wither Wikipedia? Putting aside all criticism, I do have this bit of advice. The Wikimedia Foundation ought to post a few snapshot copies of Wikipedia from the last few years, warts and all. If Wikipedia’s quality declines, at least the world will still have some “not too bad” Wikipedia articles to view. I have always maintained that Wikipedia is tremendously useful, and it would be a shame if there were not some “canonical” versions of the resource that we could consult. [...]
Pingback by Links 27/11/2009: New GNU/Linux Releases, Wikipedia Hit by FUD | Boycott Novell — November 27, 2009 @ 2:08 pm
See http://gentraso.blogspot.com/2009/08/wikiecology.html for another take on WP’s slowdown.
Comment by Anthony Sebastian — November 28, 2009 @ 11:47 pm
“The Wikimedia Foundation ought to post a few snapshot copies of Wikipedia from the last few years, warts and all.”
This is already done. On a regular basis. Has been for the past several years.
Comment by Danny — December 10, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
Danny, the whole contents of Wikipedia has been available for free download not for “the past several years” but basically since the beginning of the project. Obviously, though, I don’t mean putting up machine-readable copies, I mean human-readable copies. Has that been done on a regular basis? I’ve never heard of such a thing. If it is, what’s the URL?
Comment by Larry Sanger — December 10, 2009 @ 11:59 pm
There’s a human-readable snapshot at static.wikipedia.org, but it states “The current dump is the June 2008 edition. This dump has no image snapshot, it’s just HTML.”
The size and bandwidth for a snapshot probably mean it’s not worthwhile to have them active on the web.
And Wikipedia’s success is best explained by the fact that Google’s algorithm has been supporting it, an aspect I have tried and mostly failed to get into the pundit-stream. I suspect you’d have to somehow acquire competitive Google algorithmic patronage for Citizendium - which is possible, but would require some deal-making (not with Google, but with link-sources).
Comment by Seth Finkelstein — December 11, 2009 @ 3:24 pm
yeah I have never heard of or seen this human edited snapshot as well, any more information on this?
Comment by Study in Australia — January 26, 2010 @ 6:06 pm
Too many words saying too little of worth.
CZ the next draft of WP? Meh. Like, in who’s lifetime?
CZ has *121* approved articles. Not *one single approval in over 6 months*.
Comment by Dreamland — April 19, 2010 @ 5:53 pm