Citizendium Blog

The well-known librarian newsletter, Cites and Insights, has mentioned the Citizendium, as it has several times in the past. It had the following interesting comment:

Why do we love monopolies so?
That’s a question that comes to mind when discussing Wikipedia alternatives and in quite a few other areas. I’ve sometimes asked why librarians seem to love monopolies so much, but it’s not just librarians.

So, for example, when Citizendium started up, it faced a huge amount of fairly vicious commentary,
and you could trace much of the viciousness to it not being Wikipedia. Didn’t matter whether it might offer an interesting alternative: it could potentially threaten The Great Source of All Wisdom.

How many of you vary your default search engine so you look somewhere other than Google? How
many of you would seriously consider an alternative general-purpose web search engine?

The article goes on to quote me discussing Knol and Medpedia, and then has a whole separate article called “Catching Up with Citizendium.” (How refreshing to encounter a writer who is fastidious about how to capitalize article titles!) I’ll have to comment on the article later, if I can get some time. It is very long, interesting, idiosyncratic, and detailed — but, I’m afraid, not entirely fair.

Three major new encyclopedia projects have come on the scene lately. Last month, Britannica Online was announced, then more recently a new expert-led encyclopedia called Medpedia appeared, then finally yesterday Knol launched at http://knol.google.com/.

These are competitors to CZ, or to subjects within CZ, for eyeballs or traffic, and we certainly will not be complacent.

Some people have billed these as “Citizendium-killers,” but they consistently fail to appreciate is that all three of these projects are not primarily collaborative community projects, as CZ is. Both Britannica and Knol say that authors can determine the extent to which other people can collaborate on one’s article. On CZ, all articles are owned and controlled in common, and are unsigned. The designers of those projects seem not to realize just how crucially important that is to building an online community that takes on a life of its own.

In the end, as I have argued on multiple occasions (most recently here), the advantages of radical collaboration could, I think, outweigh even the natural advantages of Google, Britannica, and Medpedia’s distinguished partners.

Besides, the uncollaborative Knol and Britannica Online model has already been tried, a few years ago, by a couple of behemoths: the BBC’s H2G2, and Everything2. And while Medpedia might be billed as collaborative, it won’t be — not if experts-only projects like Encyclopedia of Life, Encyclopedia of Earth, Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, and Scholarpedia are indicators.

All this said, may the best encyclopedia win. The world needs a better encyclopedia than the 800-pound gorilla, Wikipedia.

I just think that, in the fullness of time, that will be the Citizendium!

There’s a rather positive description of the Citizendium, and especially Eduzendium, in an April 28 article in Inside Higher Ed.  Eduzendium co-ordinator Sorin Matei is quoted.  The project is compared to Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Knol.  The question is: which system is best for scholars?  Well — let a thousand flowers bloom and we’ll see in 5-10 years which are prettiest.

CZ is also positively mentioned in a well-reviewed new book by Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

As many people have pointed out and discovered, Encyclopedia Britannica has been made free for bloggers and wiki writers.  (Here’s a take on that from a Citizendium editor — John Dennehy, who is also behind a CUNY experiment with Eduzendium that seems to have gone pretty well.  Do we have microbes?  We’re absolutely disease-ridden.)

The notorious Valleywag blog reported that the Wikimedia Foundation is “gerrymandering” its board, and as my name came up, I appeared on the scene, Voldemort-like (at least to read the post).  It seems that the Wikimedia Foundation has reserved a seat for a “Community Founder.”  Hmm.  As Valleywag says, “Here’s an amusing thought: Why not have Larry Sanger, whom some say has a better claim to founding Wikipedia than Wales, bid for the spot in December, when Wales’s term expires?”

Yeeah.  Well, I’ll be busy.  Very, very busy.  We’re going to announce a major new educational content project in the next month or two, and between that, the encyclopedia project, and other stuff, my plate is full.  Besides, Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years.  Uh,

From a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman, discussing a talk by Andrew Keen of Cult of the Amateur infamy:

[Keen is] a fan of Citizendium, the Larry Sanger project to create a wikipedia by leveraging experts; of Google’s “wikipedia-killer”, Knol; of Jason Calcanis’s hand-rolled search engine Mahalo. These projects seem deeply reactionary to me, like they’re missing the fundamental truth of the projects that they’re copying: that the movements of a mass number of people on the internet can accomplish tasks that it’s very hard for a small group of experts to solve.

This might be an apt criticism of Knol and Mahalo (maybe — it’s a very simplistic criticism, in any case), but it represents a total misunderstanding of the Citizendium.  It is very sad that some people still think that we are an experts-only project; we aren’t, as anyone who has investigated us the slightest bit knows.

What Ethan and, sadly, too many outside of the CZ fold do not realize is that CZ represents a step forward, not a step backward.  I as much as anyone helped pioneer the very practice Ethan praises, of mass online movements accomplishing distributed content tasks.  I’m not about to give up on that (for chrissakes).  And CZ doesn’t.  In fact, we invite everyone to participate, as long as they are willing to follow our modest, sensible rules.  We know (indeed, we illustrate) that distributing work in a bottom-up way among an open community is the best way to run the sort of project we’re pursuing.  But we are a step forward in that we have actually set up a more sensible governance framework to pursue this project.  Part of this involves giving experts a role — not a top-down command-and-control role, of course — in the project.  But another part involves requiring people to take real-world responsibility for their contributions.  Another part involves having contributors commit to a set of principles that the community runs by.

The result is that we are approaching 5,200 entries (with an average article length several times what Wikipedia’s was in its first year) and we continue to accelerate.  Expect not just solid growth this year (that much is a given), but great things.  I’m serious; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

And, please.  By now, CZ is obviously no longer a “Larry Sanger project,” any more than Wikipedia can be described as a “Larry Sanger project.”  It is a CZ community project.  Did I write all those articles?  Of course not.  It bothers me when people describe the project that way, because it gives me credit for their work.  I don’t deserve that.

But people will always insist on shoehorning facts to fit their own cynical and simplistic analyses…

I have long held that there is something unseemly about a for-profit company earning money by exploiting volunteer participants in an online communities.

The plan with the Nupedia project, for which I was hired in 2000, was to sell ads once we had enough traffic to justify doing so.  This always struck me as, at least, somewhat morally questionable, but the argument we passed around was that for-profit businesses provide a very useful service for which it makes sense that they be compensated.  So I personally had to come to terms with this issue.  One might argue that businesses are justly compensated for the content and software hosting service they provide to the community of volunteers.  But that now sounds ridiculous to me: it is now obvious that it is possible to produce excellent hosting services for a relatively small amount of money, far less than the profit that a successful content community can bring in.  When the idea of selling ads was bruited in early 2002 – to pay my salary — the Spanish Wikipedians forked, and then Wikipedia finally announced that it would never have any ads.  In fairness, however, I should mention that we had long since decided by then to make Wikipedia into a non-profit; the Wikimedia Foundation eventually resulted from those early conversations, though I had nothing to do with its birth.  This is also why Jimmy Wales went on to found Wikia (originally Wikicities) in 2004: so that he could profit from ads placed on community-generated content.

I have finally decided to start arguing that online content-creation communities should be self-governing non-profits, like Wikipedia and the Citizendium, and probably membership organizations at that.  (By the way, I raised this as a topic in my first post to the SharedKnowing mailing list.  The second post is by Ben Kovitz — Ben’s the guy who originally told me about wikis in Pacific Beach over enchiladas back on January 2, 2001.  Ben is great.)

I am finally throwing down the gauntlet.  The business models of YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, craigslist, Yahoo Groups, and up-and-comers like Mahalo and Wikia – to name just a few — are all resting on morally questionable grounds.  Perhaps it is time to stop contributing to them, on moral grounds.

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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.

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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.

It seems that everyone is talking about Google’s new Knol project — the Citizendium has got a tremendous amount of press as a result.  So I wanted to add another note on the topic.

At the Citizendium we are motivated by one thing only: to become the best knowledge base that Earth has ever seen.  We believe we have, over the long term, a better chance at this than any other project.

If Knol were to reveal a genuine expert contributor that was not already an expert editor on CZ whom CZ would approve as an editor, it would be my pleasure to welcome that person to become part of our new knowledge society.

What our expert editors discover is that the expert-guided collaborative environment on the Citizendium is unprecedented, remarkably productive, and really without parallel.

Delivering one’s expert knowledge with the input from a general knowledge community helps all our editors to assess — and improve — the ways in which their knowledge is stored and communicated.

Only the Citizendium does that.

We are by no means complacent, and we intend fully to watch Google’s new Knol project.  We will utilize constructively any contributor that will genuinely add to the world’s knowledge store by inviting them to join us a CZ contributor.

Creating a new knowledge society is what the Citizendium is doing and every genuine expert should be an editor on CZ.  Moreover, everyone who wants to work as part of an open, public project shoulder-to-shoulder with such experts should join us as well.

What are knols? No, they aren’t Dungeons & Dragons monsters, or small hills, they’re purportedly “units of knowledge,” and they are encyclopedia articles Google is inviting people to write. So Google is entering head-to-head competition with Wikipedia — not so much with the Citizendium (thankfully, we have a different niche: quality) — making things much more interesting. (Of course, philosophers have had a zillion different names for “units of knowledge,” and none of them could be used to describe a Web page.)

A reporter asked me some questions about Google’s announcement, which I answered by e-mail.  Here are my answers.

What is your assessment of the Knol initiative?

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what many others have done. Countless websites already exist that invite signed essays and information (remember h2g2.com?) and other content for public rating. Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract many genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a “knol” and be compared and ranked by “the crowd” — not by expert peers — is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish. Still, other Web companies have had reasonably good success making money with such Web services, and Google might make a lot of money with theirs.

Second, lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. Many of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project, particularly with Google Ads appearing on the articles. It does not appear to be in the spirit of the free culture movement. Still, it is good that Google has decided to make ads optional.

Third, lack of collaboration. (See below under your last question.)

Do you think it addresses your concerns about Wikipedia, namely, that expert opinion should have a larger role in shaping knowledge?

Nope.

On the one hand, Knol would be a very different project from Wikipedia, first and foremost because it is not strongly collaborative. For that reason, the governance problems will be different and probably less difficult. (Google is wrong to think, however, that they can avoid making any editorial decisions. Such decisions will be forced upon them by people who try to abuse the system.)

On the other hand, Knol is apt to produce precisely the same sort of uneven content, with many of the same abuses, that Wikipedia has. Without actual editors, the same sort of problems about misleading and damaging information are apt to plague Knol. While I know that many people do not think that such problems are serious, we at the Citizendium do. And a growing part of the general public is coming to agree with us. In fact, producing a more mature, responsible source of information is one of our main motivations for working so hard under our new model.

How will Knol affect your own efforts with Citizendium?

The problem with the Internet is not the lack of information; it is the lack of findable high-quality information.  Knol does not appear to be a serious attempt to solve this problem, but the Citizendium is.

So Knol is unlikely to change our efforts with the Citizendium at all. In fact, we are soon going to announce a new Creative Commons license, and in January we will turn toward a strong, concerted push toward “CZ 2.0.” This will involve adding a adding a Board of Directors and, generally, expanding our governance so as to empower many different people and groups to develop the project more proactively. We expect to grow strongly — and quite possibly explosively — in 2008. It is worth pointing out that the Citizendium actually produced slightly more words (about five million) in its first year than Wikipedia did in its first year. And our words were, needless to say, of much higher quality than Wikipedia’s were then.

Is this a project Citizendium might collaborate with? Or is Google’s project at cross purposes with your own?

A kind of collaboration seems possible. Obviously, the Citizendium provides two important things that the Knol model is missing: expert guidance and strong collaboration. I’ve already discussed Knol’s likely weakness in attracting experts. Another reason I am not particularly worried about Knol is that the quality and depth of encyclopedia articles written collaboratively by a huge global community, especially under expert guidance, will eventually beat out anything produced by individuals, regardless of their ability. Frankly, Knol is reinventing the wheel; the Citizendium is the future.

If Google allows Knol’s contributors to retain their copyright — something they would do well to comment on — then those writers could always bring their content to the Citizendium to be developed further, collaboratively. Maybe the only way Knol might collaborate with Citizendium is this: Knol allows their contributors to link prominently to a Citizendium article, as a locale where those articles could be developed collaboratively. If Knol removed the Google Ads from all articles that were being developed further in collaboration with the Citizendium, we might be interested in developing such a relationship. Of course, I’d have to check with the Citizendium community, for which I cannot speak definitively on such an important matter (it isn’t a dictatorship).

Thanks for asking my opinion.

P.S. It’s not lost on me that this is similar to http://www.whatsyourarticle.org/