Citizendium Blog

Here’s another essay, which I’ve been saving up.

Mark Pesce, in a talk that appeared on Edge.org, appears to argue that the plugged-in world of the future will foster an anti-democratic revolution. Stated briefly and clearly, his argument goes like this:

(1) As more and more people get online and get connected, they join communities, like Wikipedia, that empower (”hyperempower”) them.

(2) Wikipedia and other successful online communities are not democratic; they combine anarchy with mob rule.

(3) Increasingly, these empowered people will turn their collective attention to the problems of politics, as Barack Obama’s online campaign community does.

(4) In embracing politics, they will not become less anarchical, or less apt to be organized by mob rule. Political action will look like Wikipedia’s anarchical, mob-rule community.

(5) So, sooner or later, these mob-like political groups will seize power from democracies.

Apparently, Pesce thinks such an event would be a good thing; as he says in his speech, “representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and rebooting them is not enough.”

This is a transparently poor argument. Why think all online communities are or will be anarchical or mob-like, like Wikipedia? They aren’t. Why think that, just because people become politically mobilized online, groups like Obama’s will eventually try to start a real (bloody) political revolution? Maybe they will, but any strong claim like this requires strong evidence, and Pesce hasn’t given any. Finally, why think it follows that just because online communities are anti-democratic, the meatspace societies such communities favor will also be anti-democratic? Of course, this does not follow. Ignoring the more radical outliers, Obama’s followers are Democrats. I am quite sure that if you were to survey even some of the most radical and annoying of Wikipedians, you would find the number of them who actually oppose democracy to be very small indeed.

I think Pesce, and many other would-be Internet revolutionaries, have forgotten that we are still in the early stages of the Internet. Most people who spend much time in the Wikipedia community find that they dislike its governance; many would prefer something more sensible, with a few clear, established rules and a reasonably reliable way to enforce them. Since I was there, I can assure you that Wikipedia could have been instituted that way. Moreover, Wikipedia has flourished precisely because of certain definite policies. It’s not a stretch to say that the only reason Wikipedia has been as successful as it has been has been its commitment to certain policies (which a certain non-anarchist, yours truly, helped to establish in its first year), such as creating encyclopedia articles (as opposed to personal essays, for example), neutrality, and not signing articles, with discussion about an article happening on a separate (”talk”) page. There was a time — in the project’s first year — when these policies were, each of them, at least somewhat controversial. We easily could have gone farther and added a low-key, bottom-up role for experts. Also, it would have caused a fork, but we could have instituted the use of real names as a policy, at least for administrators. Such policies would have made it possible to enforce rules and approve articles, as the growing Citizendium now does. The point is that Wikipedia’s development has not been wholly anarchical, and indeed its success has depended precisely on its not being so. Moreover, less anarchical projects might well do better in the long run; I hope so, but we’ll see.

Pesce is not the first to suggest that the Internet will result in a massive anarchist revolution. At the risk of banality, let me say that I favor good old-fashioned democracy both on-line and off, and I obviously oppose the anti-democratic, mob-rule society Pesce appears to desire. I do not think that the mere fact that Wikipedia has a dysfunctional anarchical/mob-rule governance system indicates that democracy itself is somehow outmoded — that seems to be Pesce’s inference, and it is as silly as it sounds. In his talk, I should clarify, Pesce does not really say what he’s in favor of. But I can make a reasonable guess. He says that our inevitable destiny is the destruction of democracy and the “hyper-empowerment” of individuals. Well, in politics, democracy is the only way to “hyper-empower” people; anarchy leads to mobocracy, and mobocracy disempowers all but those with the stomach and ability to lead the mob.

However all that is, and as many people have said, I would say instead that the Internet is more likely to strengthen our democracies. Pesce has nothing like a coherent or plausible argument to the contrary — merely a “just so story,” wishful thinking delivered with breathless, barely concealed hopefulness.

UPDATE (July 30): an almost identical version of this appears on the Britannica Blog.

The part of the Britannica Blog “Your Brain Online” debate that I am interested in is this question: does Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, mean the end of the Great Books or of liberal education? And is anybody really saying that it does mean that? I’ve written once before on this question, but I would like to clarify my position.

Let’s get clear on what the problem here is. The problem is not that most people are in danger of becoming “uncultured”; there never was a time or a place in which most people were particularly cultured, i.e., thoroughly familiar with the history, literature, science, religion, and so forth that defines a culture. The problem — if we can believe what some Web 2.0 revolutionaries say — is that those who are cultured are doomed to become uncultured, by the inevitable influence of the Internet on our minds, at least by the standards of liberal education. And our children will never be cultured again, not by the standards of liberal education. Rather, they will be acculturated by the Internet. It seems that Clay Shirky, just for example, believes that the only things of cultural importance in the future will take place in “the crowd” online, a “group mind” or a “collective intelligence” — even if the crowd looks in the future a lot different from how it looks in 2008. Of course, I could easily be misunderstanding Clay, and so I want to make this point very generally, and not as an attack on Clay. My concern is that, if we are on a vector toward the radical collectivization of knowledge in this way, the products of the best individual minds of the past will become less and less valued by anybody. Yet they plainly do have considerable value, on virtually any educated person’s view now. If we did not think so, we would not buy the books of the people who have posted on the Britannica Blog, for instance: no individual mind would be worth spending so much time on.

If you are not convinced by the example of Tolstoy, think of various dense, system-building philosophers. If anyone were to say — and I dare not accuse anyone of actually saying this, as that truly would be damning — that such thinkers are no longer relevant, because they weren’t part of anything like a Blogosphere, that would be to declare your own personal intellectual bankruptcy, your utter failure to benefit from a liberal education. Let’s be serious, here. If you actually think the Internet’s “group mind” somehow renders passé all the difficult, great books, which shaped our civilizations — if that is what you really want to do — then you certainly are not, not in any way, “on the cutting edge.” I don’t concede that one inch. If you say such a thing, then it seems to me you have merely given us embarrassing evidence that you not really fit to be reasoned with.

But I very much doubt that such philistinism — and that might be too good a word for it, because what it is, is just crude, unserious, uneducated, or silly nonsense — is actually the direction we are travelling in. There are far too many people who still actually appreciate all those old books, and the value of the liberal education that only they can impart. Moreover, if we are travelling toward such widespread philistinism, I have not seen the case made convincingly that we are. Merely to point to the power of the Wikipedia model, or the sheer amount of information in the Blogosphere and all the rest of the Internet, does not even come close to making the case. Pointing out that some of us as it were compulsively check for e-mail and other short Internet communications, and have little time or concentration for long reading, also does not prove that we are, all of us, doomed to become philistines.

Do I really need to point out the virtues of liberal education and how they apply in the present case? Sadly, perhaps I do. “How soon we forget.” Liberal education is so called because it liberates the mind from a million prejudices, replacing them with knowledge of history, science, and culture, and above all making it possible to think through new problems. (For those who are not familiar with the phrase, “liberal education” refers to “the liberal arts,” not to a position on the political spectrum.) So far from being irrelevant, nothing could be more useful in the proper evaluation and appreciation of newfangled stuff like Web 2.0 than a liberal education. Is it any wonder that the principals in the debate are all, quite obviously, possessed of a liberal education and so familiar with great artists and thinkers like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Proust?

My concern is not “nostalgic,” of course — why would it be? To say so assumes, first of all, that the Great Books (not just Tolstoy of course) are in fact passé, that we have somehow “moved on” from them. But nobody has established that, not in the slightest way. More importantly, nobody in the Britannica debate ever clarified in what sense the Internet poses any sort of threat to how we value the Great Books — other than that we might have to rouse ourselves a little if we want to read them. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgia or with silly romanticization of a novel-gobbling past. It has to do with a proper valuation of human minds and of what they have produced, both individually and in the aggregate, from around the world and from the dawn of recorded history until the present. If someone really did want to dismiss the power and interest of individual human minds and what they are capable of producing as somehow passé, he would thereby do away with all those great books, and the strange, ever-conflicted, varied culture that resulted from them, and I suppose replace them with the Borg. You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. Right? It’s techno-socially determined. You can’t do anything about it.

Does anybody in this debate really believe that Web 2.0 spells the end of the great books and of liberal education, and its entire replacement by the productions of undifferentiated “crowds”?

Surely nobody really believes that, or even anything like it. I do wonder, of course, what the perceived merits of the Great Books and liberal education will be, once we have gone through the massive societal transformation that, I fully agree, the Internet is bringing us. I would like to point out that if we do give up the foundations of Western civilization, indeed the written records of all civilizations, and if we give up even any pretention to having to become acquainted with those records, we give up a very great deal.

The prospect is nothing short of horrifying. It would be quite literally the death of civilization as we have known it. That means all the good parts as well as the bad. It essentially would herald not a bright new world, cleaned of bad old influences, but very probably a new dark age. After all, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

As an aside, I should also state (apparently, it’s necessary) that I am not opposed to Web 2.0. If you know me, you’ll realize this is just silly. I just have a different idea about what direction we should take, that’s all. (For some clues, see 1, 2, 3, 4.) I am much more optimistic about the prospects of the Internet and what it means for human civilization. I think it will enhance liberal education as never before, and more likely to usher in a new enlightenment than to cause the death of civilization.

Just for your interest, I have put together a “best of this blog” category. I’ve included only stuff written and “published” originally in this blog — not papers or CZ pages.

The following describes an idea I had a few weeks ago while attending an entrepreneur’s conference in Paris.  I have little desire and even less time (between Citizendium and Watchknow) to pursue this myself, so I commend it to anyone who is interested.  I want to kick it out the door and see if it survives on its own.  I will not be working on it myself.  I was informed that this idea resembles the moribund PICS project somewhat.  I view this as an interesting possible alternative to the too-influential search behemoths, Google and Yahoo, as well as their various would-be Web 2.0 competitors: it would make Web search entirely distributed, decentralized, and less subject to the control of any single interest.  By the way, I circulated the idea among a set of very distinguished Internet thinkers and was graced with some interesting replies.  Suffice it to say that quite a few very smart people think this is worth thinking about, at the very least.  “The case for syndicated Web ratings,” below, captures why I am so excited about this idea.

The idea

Should there be a universal standard, like RSS, that enables people to rate (and otherwise describe) websites — and to syndicate that data? If there were such a standard and such syndicated data, search engines could seed their results in creative ways using the data. That’s the basic idea.

Ultimately, such a standard could greatly decentralize the power of Internet search. How? Well, imagine five kinds of tools.

(1) Tools and data types for the ratings themselves:

(a) “Rating toolbars,” like StumbleUpon’s, allow you to recommend and rate a website you’re looking at. In addition, you can write a description, add tags, and rate it on specific dimensions like length, accuracy, grade level, and “family-friendliness.” The toolbar then publishes a “feed” of your ratings wherever you choose. The only required data for an individual rating are: URL and up-or-down.

(b) Moreover, it could be possible to rate another person’s or entity’s feed (meta-rating), as well as a feed of feeds (meta-meta-rating).

(c) Moreover, a feed could have meta-data about the person doing the rating, listing facts like education level, age, ethnicity, political views, or whatever a person might feel is relevant.

(2) Social bookmarking services, such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, as well as websites like Mahalo and Wikia Search, would be encouraged to publish their data using the standard (or at least allow their users to publish their own work easily). Mapping from existing attributes used by, e.g., del.icio.us to a well-designed standard would seem to be easy.

(3) Various “Web rating registrars” collect many feeds in one central location. Most registrars are absolutely open; a few are carefully edited. Moreover, most registrars, based on internal, statistical analysis of ratings, and/or meta- and meta-meta-ratings, offer a service that labels certain feeds as recommending porn, spam, and virus-infested webpages — a sort of distributed blacklist of both websites and of feeds.

(4) Search engines then use the data aggregated by the registrar(s). Due to the quantity and variety of data published in the aggregated feeds, it becomes possible to weight and filter search results not just on Google-style pagerank algorithms, but also things like:

(a) quality according to generally trusted sources; or quality according to your peer group; or quality according to academic and academic-endorsed sources; etc.

(b) whether the page contains porn, spam, or viruses.

(c) webpage type (e.g., one attribute might allow us to search just those pages that are marked as movie reviews).

(d) education level of resource (i.e., suitability for children; or post-graduate work).

(5) Making distributed rating into a Digg-type game.  As new pages came on the Web, once they had a certain minimum number of ratings, you can easily imagine “fresh meat” websites that enable and encourage people to rate them even more, letting users rate the newest, most popular stuff coming online about their particular interests. This would work a little like Digg or Reddit, except that the inputs would not come from individual users “Digging” a story, but from countless decentralized feeds rating a fresh page for the first time.

The case for syndicated Web ratings

On first glance at least, the case for syndicated Web ratings is surprisingly, even startlingly compelling.

Improves poor search engine results.  Probably the most common complaint about search engine results is that, while often relevant and useful, they do not always place the highest quality material front and center.  The best is often buried deep. The system is not broken, but it could use improvement.  If there were enough syndicated Web rating data, and effective mechanisms were in place to combat gaming the rating system (e.g., using statistical analysis of ratings, meta-ratings, and “certified” rating providers), the result could be used by search engines to deliver far higher-quality results.  This would also subtly encourage people to create higher-quality Web pages, i.e., pages that are more likely to be highly-rated.  (Cf. here this paper.)

Decentralizes search power.  Not only would the system be open, it would be fully distributed and decentralized, like the Blogosphere.  If well-constructed, a syndicated Web rating system would place the most powerful, important dataset for making the Web searchable directly in the hands of Internet users.  This could essentially “level the playing field” and could be profoundly disruptive to Google et al.

Many more people would be involved in vetting the Web.  There are huge numbers of people using Digg, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon, as well as newer services like Mahalo and Wikia Search.  But their users are contributing just to those search/bookmarking services, and are not benefitting the search results used on a daily basis on services like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com.  How many more people would take the time to recommend and rate Web pages if they knew their data would be distributed across the Web, and would help the proper placement of websites they know and love?  It could be an order of magnitude or more: suddenly, we all have a direct vote about search results.

Speeds up recognition of good new websites.  Websites would not have to wait for months or even years for their quality to be recognized, as they do now. Right now, Google dominates search, and Google’s rankings are effectively but still somewhat lamely determined by a somewhat mysterious, proprietary algorithm involving the most-linked-to and most-clicked-on websites. Since it often takes some really excellent pages months or even years to receive the number of links they “deserve” — if they ever do receive them — it takes that long for them to rise up in Google’s search results. By contrast, if we could seed search results in line with massive amounts of data about website ratings, a really excellent new website might be placed at the top of the rankings almost immediately.

Could be used to tailor search to the individual user. With data about education level, a search engine could, on request, return only those pages appropriate for a 5-7 year old — or for post-doctoral researchers.  Moreover, with data included in the feed about the rater, we would be enabled to see, for any given search, what the top rated websites were for our peer group. How teenage girls rate a news article might differ greatly from how 40-year-old men rate them — and this would be useful data for both groups to have.  With data about pornography contributed by trusted sources, the user could opt to have a search guaranteed to omit pornography.  In general, the adoption of the standard could improve the flexibility and power of Internet search.  And because it would be an open standard, it would become possible to use the standard (and later versions of the standard) to organize all manner of distributed Internet rating, description, organization projects, possibly more effectively than proprietary products have done.  For example, the system could foster an open project to create a free, more powerful search alternative to proprietary “walled garden” services for children and education.  (See item (4) under “The idea” above.)

Could be a way to combat Web abuse.  In particular, a syndicated Web rating system could be used as a neutral, universally distributed protocol for publishing and sharing data about what websites are considered sources of viruses, spam, porn, and criminal activity.  These problems — long considered the most serious of Internet problems — might be best attacked by widely distributing, decentralizing, and only then organizing the means to attack them.

If this analysis is correct, the idea could be deeply disruptive — but positively so.

How gaming the system could be combatted

What stops people from posting multiple feeds, all of them favorable to their own websites?  Indeed, won’t gaming the system be far worse in this case than under the present system?  At least under the present system, if you want to game the system, you must go to the trouble of creating interlinking “dummy” websites and spamming blogs with links, and so forth — that makes gaming the system relatively difficult.  But this system makes it possible to influence search results directly.  This might be why no such system has been created yet.  That, anyway, is what a critic might say.

The solution is that most search engines will not be so silly as to aggregate the ratings in any simple way, or treat all feeds (or individual ratings) equally.  First, it will be possible to “certify” and rate feeds; second, there will be internal indicators of abuse that search engine coders will be able to analyze and exploit.

It is entirely possible that a search engine will not use a feed if it is not in some way adequately “endorsed.”  Endorsement might be via networks of certified feeds, which have a distributed protocol allowing network members to vet other feeds.

The internal indicators of abuse might prove to be more powerful, however.  If a certain website is often described as “porn,” for example, and if it is recommended by a feed as non-porn, the feed registrar might discard that particular feed.  More generally, ratings and descriptions will be mutually reinforcing in a variety of ways, so that it will be possible to devise algorithms to detect abuse automatically.

But probably the most effective way to combat system-gaming will be a combination of certifying feeds and internal data analysis.  While it might be easier to post a feed in bad faith than to create a web of supporting websites, the data in the system itself will be far richer and thus capable of creating more powerful, creative solutions to the gaming problem.

Indeed, it seems entirely possible that we could, using syndicated Web ratings, engineer systems that are virtually perfect in their elimination of virus-ridden websites, porn, really bad blogs, and other stuff.  At bottom, the combination of transparent, rich data and the fact that most Internet users act in good faith might mean the disappearance of cruft from our search results.

What if the system succeeds?

“But wait,” you might say, “I don’t like the idea that cruft will disappear from search results.  There is something comforting about cruft being in our search results.  That means that any schlub like me can get the ear of the whole world.  Even if this Web rating system is distributed and decentralized, it is not really egalitarian.  Wouldn’t it mean the effective silencing of people who are unjustly regarded as ‘not good enough,’ or not mainstream enough, to be rated highly?”

The short answer is: no, and in fact the effect might be precisely the opposite: it would probably empower the regular folks even more the current search system.  Since meta-tagging would enable us to label our feeds in various ways, we could search for results that are important and relevant for our peers.  Moreover, a syndicated Web rating system would allow us to pluck undiscovered talents out of the obscurity that Google’s popularity-based algorithm places them in.

Besides — if the new system has undesirable results, no doubt Google or a Google-like system, that does not use syndicated ratings, will still exist and still be heavily used.

This project should be developed openly

This effort should be developed openly in the free-for-all way that characterizes much open source development.  This is absolutely required, in fact, because otherwise there will likely not be adequate adoption of the standard.  The standard should be propagated by an open, neutral consortium, not any single entity, and certainly not any for-profit business.  No single interest should have control over a standard that could be so consequential.

I have no interest in leading the effort, or even participating very much in it, except as a user.  I am merely putting the idea out there and hoping that others, who have more experience writing standards and working with syndication, will be motivated to create the components of the system.  My main concern is that the standard itself be adopted according to an open, democratic process, and not be unduly influenced by any single interest.

Questions and answers

Shouldn’t we discuss this idea and make sure it really is a good one before we rush off headlong to implement it?

Yes.  Hopefully the discussion will happen on the Blogosphere, Slashdot, and elsewhere as well.  I asked for comments on SharedKnowing, for what it’s worth.  It’s a Big Idea and it would affect everyone online deeply, and so it needs a huge amount of vetting and exploration.

How would I create a Web ratings feed?  I wouldn’t want to write XML by hand.

If the idea has legs, people will create free software that will write the XML for you, as well as post it automatically (i.e., syndicate it for anyone’s use).  It is easy to imagine people writing toolbars like the StumbleUpon toolbar, which allow you to rate websites and provide other information about them, which info is then syndicated automatically.

Where would the feeds be posted?

Think of this on analogy with blog feeds.  One could post one’s ratings feed anywhere online, where they could be found by webcrawlers.  But one could also register the feed with various feed registrars (in the same way you register a blog feed with Technorati), or post directly to the registrars.

What might the markup for a rating feed look like?

 We define a markup schema that allows people to declare whether they think a Web page, or a whole domain or subdomain, is high quality, or garbage; and to describe and evaluate it on any number of features. Just for example — we need not use these exact tags or features — we might write something like this:

<webrating>
<url>http://en.citizendium.org/</url>
<url-equiv>http://www.citizendium.org/</url-equiv>
<domain-or-page>domain</domain-or-page>
<overall-rating>7</overall-rating>
<overall-rating-yes-or-no>yes</overall-rating-yes-or-no>
<content-quantity>4</content-quantity>
<content-quality>9</content-quality>
<education-level>college</education-level>
<website-type>reference</website-type>
<pornography>no</pornography>
<keywords>encyclopedia reference wiki free open content collaboration</keywords>
<description>A new wiki encyclopedia project inviting everyone to participate under their own real names, and making a special, low-key role for experts.</description>
</webrating>

What elements should be required by the standard?

It seems that search engines could be improved with just two officially “required” elements: the URL and a “yes or no” overall rating.  This would allow, e.g., digg.com users to publish their ratings.  It is possible that after further discussion we will decide that certain other elements might be needed.  Of course, feed aggregators and registrars, and search engines, might require various additional pieces of information.

There is a difference between “high quality” and usefulness.  Some academic papers, for instance, might be very high quality, but useful for only a very small number of people.  How can this be taken into account in the ratings standard?

It could be approached in many ways, no doubt.  For example, we might adopt “usefulness” as an element.  One might then rate a page with an academic paper on it highly (or not!) in terms of reliability, but low in terms of usefulness-for-me.  The default “yes-or-no” rating would then be interpreted as usefulness-for-me, not as high quality.  Another idea would be simply to make use of an education level element, or even a special attribute for academic papers.  In any event, this is the sort of question of detail that those developing the standard should think long and hard about.

How could the system get started?

You might say this is an interesting idea, but how can it get started?  Probably, if it happens at all, entrepreneurs will make it happen.  The system would involve, in fact, at least four different new business types, namely (1), (3), (4), and (5) under “The idea” above, and existing social bookmarking websites might be persuaded to drive it forward as well.

Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet indicates that something like this is the natural next step.  There is a natural progression of search “generativity”:

1. The Yahoo! directory — proprietary, centralized directory
2. Google — proprietary, centralized search
3. Mahalo and Wikia Search — free, centralized search enhanced by human input
4. Syndicated Web ratings — free, decentralized search enhanced by human input (with data support for dynamically created tagging and directory systems)

In short, this may the prototypical “idea whose time has come.”  If enough people are interested, the support for a truly distributed project like this will quickly appear.  But if people aren’t that excited about it, it will die a perhaps well-deserved death.

But another reason to be optimistic that the standard, once published, will be rapidly adopted and used, is the simple fact that there are so many people already engaged in rating and recommending websites, even though the ratings benefit only the other users of the websites. But how many more of us would actually take the time to rate and describe websites, if we knew the work would positively affect the results of all competitive Web search services? In other words, what if we knew that our vote would count? We’d vote!

Shouldn’t we simply pressure social bookmarking websites to work on a standard and use it to publish their data?

It couldn’t hurt.  If we should target any websites for such pressuring, it should be those that are already sympathetic to the ideals of the open source community.  Go to work on them.  Of course, many will prefer to ignore this idea, because it is profoundly disruptive.

I support this idea and I want to make it happen.  What should I do?

Here are some things you could do:

1. Write about it.  Debate about it.  Help build the critical mass of people interested in the idea.
2. Join forums that are discussing the idea, and work toward a shared understanding of what the standard should look like.
3. If there is support for the idea, eventually someone will set up a wiki to work on the standard.  Then you could help work on the standard.
4. Start writing software, or adapting your current software — preferably, free software — to do the things listed under “The idea” above.  Then announce your software and get other people working on it.  Standards are often developed alongside applications that use them.

The idea is loose…and it’s up to you and the innovation commons in general to make it happen, if it’s going to happen.

The Citizendium is different. Well, you already knew that. It’s not quite like anything out there. But what you might not realize is how it is different. You might have thought that it is different mainly because it makes a special role for experts, or because we require real names and identities. Yes, it is different for those reasons, but in those respects, it is very similar to academic projects.

The way in which our little (but growing!) project is different from almost everything out there is that it is, arguably, the first truly self-governing content community.

Or to put it more pithily: Citizendium is different because it is yours. It is owned and controlled by you, Citizens, and it always will be. That is how we have designed it and that is what our still-developing governance system will guarantee. I do not mean only that your content has a Creative Commons license. Instead, when we get the funds and size to enable our breaking free of the Tides Center, we will become a membership organization: our Citizens will be the literal legal owners and controllers of the project, the servers, the domain names, everything. We are developing an online polity.

This isn’t true of, say, YouTube. YouTube is owned and controlled by Google. It isn’t true of MySpace, which is owned and controlled by NewsCorp, or FaceBook, which has private owners.

But it also isn’t true of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is owned and controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation, management of which is largely cut off from Wikipedia contributors. This is not surprising, since Wikipedia contributors are largely anonymous and for that reason simply cannot be organized into a coherent polity. This is why most online content projects cannot become true self-governing polities: to be self-governing, we have to know who we are.

It also isn’t true of most open source software projects. Many of them are controlled by “benevolent dictators” or by what would be called “oligarchies” in the political world.

I’m not saying that these other projects (or companies) are evil or wrong because they are not pure self-governing polities. But I do think that the Citizendium is showing the world a better way, one that is more in keeping with our common democratic principles of governance, and one that, in the long run, will prove to be more robust and responsible.

I’m also not saying we are absolutely unique. But can you think of a single reasonably successful online content project that is not only open content, but also governed and owned directly by the contributors? Can you think of one the founder of which has pledged to step down as chief organizer in order to begin an orderly, rule-governed transfer of power? Can you think of one that cares about things like constitutional rule of law and separation of powers? I don’t pretend to track everything going on online, but I am hard pressed to think of one.

If you can think of any politico-philosophical allies of ours, let me know below!

(By the way, see also “No membership without ownership!“)

One thing Andrew Keen said near the end of that video gave me pause.  He said something similar in his book, and it is something I have been thinking about, idly, for years.  It is that the Internet is making us more selfish, or more self-centered.  I have thought for a long time that we don’t talk together face-to-face so much anymore — or, I am honest enough to admit that I don’t.  I don’t see my friends as much.  Partly I’m sure that’s because I’ve gotten busier, and now we have a baby.  But I think we are becoming more self-centered as a society.  While I am an individualist in many ways, I also believe we are social and political animals, and as another gentleman said in the video, we are not fully human if we are cut off from others.

And I have to say that my talking to you on this blog does not count as full-blooded social relations!  Should I be telling this to a friend?  Well, I can speak to more people this way, and have a bigger impact.  But in doing so am I ignoring a subtle negative impact that the medium has on me?

Our lives would be very sad and weak indeed if all of our social relations were mediated by the Internet.  I think perhaps we are already seeing what this might look like among young people, whose social lives are mediated by FaceBook (or the social networking website du jour) and texting, who complain that there isn’t dating any longer, who more often “hook up” rather than develop serious relationships.

In our radical new digital world, who or what will teach us again how to spend and enjoy time together face to face –especially those of us who do not go to church, or are not in school, and otherwise have few opportunities for truly meaningful social interaction?

I have absolutely loved the PBS Jane Austen series.  (Anybody agree?  I’m so disappointed that it’s over.  That Pride and Prejudice miniseries, from the 1990s, is absolutely magnificent.)  While I have little romantic nostalgia for early 19th century manners and society — well, it would be nice if some of that politeness were back in style – I was struck by how people would pass the time, hours of it, in conversation with friends and family.  That is charming.  I suspect that serious face-to-face conversation makes us better and more human.  It seems to me that we are now much more perfunctory in our communication.

Of course, there is an old complaint that television is ruining the arts of conversation and friendship.  But the participatory Internet makes the problem worse, because it gives us an outlet for social relations, but it is by its nature a self-centered and self-directed outlet, and it is not fully embodied.  This is a problem.

Now, I love self-determination and self-actualization as much as anyone.  I come from nonconformist Protestant stock, but I’m a free-thinking philosopher; I’m also a Reedie, an Alaskan, and an American.  I remember my old 11th grade chemistry teacher telling me the platitude, “Be true to yourself for you are your own best friend.”  I was already taking that seriously.  This is why it is easy for me to work online for small, risky companies, buck prevailing Internet trends, not use my Ph.D. in philosophy to get an academic job, leave trendy Silicon Valley for a small Ohio town, etc.  I am so far off the beaten track, I don’t even know where the track is anymore.  I say all that to establish my credentials as a nonconformist and iconoclast.  My life has been extremely self-directed, and perhaps that is why I am drawn to the Internet: you can do what you want, when you want.  Freedom and independence are prized online.

I don’t pretend to be terribly unusual in my independence.  There are many other people, especially online, who are equally independent, in all sorts of ways.  They too are very self-directed.  The problem for us is that in being so self-directed, when we converse online, we choose the topics we’re interested in, we choose who to listen to, we often choose who hears us — and this all happens without the many benefits of being there in real time, situated and embodied with other people.

Can we still have friendships, real friendships, if we spend so much of our free time this way?

Especially those of us who work online (and increasingly, I suspect, all of us will, one way or another), and who want to keep conversation and face-to-face, full-bodied friendship alive, will have to choose to maintain friendships offline.

Perhaps we should start 21st century salons, offline, where many different people come together, physically, to talk, with our mouths, where we do not all necessarily agree, but where we practice the virtues of civility that make it possible for people who disagree to remain friends.

In an Inside Higher Ed column, “Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia,” Mark A. Wilson claims of Wikipedia, “The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has become reality…”  Wilson calls on college professors to get involved in Wikipedia, using their own real names.  One has to wonder if this is an April Fool’s gag, but it’s a pretty sober-sounding piece.

Here’s is my response, which I added to the IHE comments:

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I’m Larry Sanger, and this is false. Please do not use my name to encourage professors to get involved in Wikipedia. My vision has always been for a maximally reliable information resource—not one that is controlled by faceless, often hostile, often irresponsible people, many of them teenagers and college students.

Over the years there have been repeated calls to professors to get involved and improve Wikipedia. Few have heeded the call, and those who have have come back pretty consistently saying, “This place is nuts.” Indeed, long ago—in 2002—I seriously considered starting up a Wikipedia “Sifter” project (you can still read about this in archives) in which experts would approve Wikipedia articles. At the time I was told by some of the more active Wikipedians, essentially: “Don’t expect those alleged experts to get any special treatment from us. They’re no better than the rest of us, and they shouldn’t get all uppity and act like they are!” It then became clear to me that Wikipedia simply had no place for experts. I could not in good conscience recommend that any serious knowledge professional participate in Wikipedia. I still cannot.

Inside Higher Ed and this columnist would do better to acquaint themselves with a project that actually gives college professors, and other experts, a modest but real stake in guidance of content decisions and management of content policy: the Citizendium. I can’t fault the author for not mentioning us, as we are new and, with only 5,800 articles, still unproven. But a positive passing mention would help to create a better alternative to Wikipedia. Please spread the word.

Sign up here. It’s a good time to sign up; tomorrow is our monthly Write-a-Thon, which is always very lively!

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Let me temper the above comments with a few additional remarks:

• I have long maintained, and I still do, that Wikipedia is very useful, and that most of the people working on Wikipedia are excellent hands.  I do not mean to dismiss Wikipedia, or the work of most Wikipedians, wholesale.  I simply want to quash any notion that I can be associated with a call to experts to descend on Wikipedia, which I think is a bad idea.
• Perhaps I should also clarify that the significant advantage of the Citizendium is not merely that it makes a place for experts.  That is only one of our differences (and advantages).  But it is the difference that is relevant to any suggestion that experts get involved in Wikipedia.
• I understand that there are certain topics, especially more technical and mathematical topics, where Wikipedians behave themselves rather better and where expert knowledge is accorded an appropriate (not fawning, of course) respect.  I don’t mean to deny this, and well done to all involved for their success with articles on such topics.

If you agree with this appeal, please sign this petition of support!

This is a public appeal to philanthropists who are supporting the education of children.  The author (Dr. Larry Sanger) is co-founder of Wikipedia and editor-in-chief of the new Citizendium.  Originally posted March 22, rewritten March 24.  This petition was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog, and elsewhere.

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Dear Philanthropist,We (the undersigned) have a simple, deeply powerful suggestion: “liberate” the best educational content.  Buy or commission truly excellent content, aimed at school children (K-12).  Then post it online for free.  Let children reap the rewards of your generosity forever.  Just think:

• Free, top-grade textbooks about everything, free to everyone online
• Free, in-depth, expert-designed educational software
• Free, high-quality educational videos

Just imagine the possibilities of good this would do for the whole world.

Isn’t this already happening?  No.  Most educational content you find for free online lacks either detail or high quality.  But we want the best for our children: for that, we still must and do pay.  There is not much truly excellent free educational content online.

Why not?  We do not know.  Perhaps because those who create and support educational content generally view the Internet either as a dangerous competitor or as an adolescent free-for-all.  Perhaps.  But also think of the Internet as an amazingly efficient and cheap distribution mechanism.  You (philanthropists) can single-handedly use it to provide curricula to the entire world, for free.  You choose the type of content, the subject, the grade level, the authors, everything.  You need not ask anyone’s permission.  If you spend the money, content will appear online — and millions of children will benefit.  It is up to you!

Let us put this in perspective.  Back in 1960, if a billionaire wanted to give the best possible textbook to every child in the world, that would have been too costly even for the richest billionaire.  But no longer.  Even those with small fortunes can provide a textbook (etc.) to everyone with Internet access–hundreds of millions of children.  Philanthropists, you could do this.

You have been spending millions of dollars annually to improve education, but we believe you have largely ignored this key opportunity.  Sometimes the simplest ways are the best.  If you want to answer, “But the problems with U.S. schools do not have to do with our textbooks or content,” we might agree with you.  Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else.  We do not offer an answer to that.

But this opportunity is “low-hanging fruit.”  High-quality, free content undeniably and directly benefits the world, the entire world, through the magic of the Internet.  Educational content gives knowledge to children.  Why not pay for it?  What is stopping you?  After all, it is not only collective “Web 2.0″ efforts that can liberate content.  You have a fantastic mechanism for distributing free curricula to virtually every school child in the U.S., and the whole world can benefit, to boot.  Why not use it?

Regards and deep thanks in advance,

The Undersigned

P.S. Follow-ups to the petition will be posted both on this blog and the mailing list SharedKnowing.  Sign up to that mailing list if you want to be sure to receive info about how this petition fares.

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I did an interview with ECT News earlier today, and inter alia they suggested that the Citizendium had more of a command-and-control system than Wikipedia, and asked for my reaction.  It occurred to me, then, that anyone who actually contributes to CZ knows that this is wrong and unfair: as I tell anyone who cares to listen, we’re a robustly bottom-up wiki.  Our authors and editors really do work shoulder-to-shoulder in a friendly atmosphere.  I then considered whether the opposite might be more correct: does Wikipedia have more of a command-and-control system than the Citizendium?

Yes, Virginia.  Wikipedia has more of a command-and-control system than CZ.  You didn’t know that?  Well, it’s true.

Before you scoff, put your prejudices and what you think you know aside, and consider.  How hard is it to get your edits on Wikipedia to “stick”?  If you edit any even slightly popular article, how many self-appointed Defenders of the Wiki will be standing over your shoulder, citing policy at you and telling you you’re doing it all wrong?  If you get into a dispute or encounter some other problem, how quickly will an “administrator” arrive to “lay down the law”?

Yeeeeaaah.  That’s right.  Hmm.

By contrast, on the Citizendium, it’s extremely easy to get your edits to stick.  There are zillions of topics that are still wide open, or that need great expansion.  We genuinely love it when new people get involved; we won’t shoo you off.  And how many self-appointed ”managers” will your work have?  If you’re lucky, a few.  But, at this point, it’s more likely you’ll have one or none.  If you like to work largely free of the typical Wikipedia busybodies and know-it-alls, you’ll find CZ much more congenial.  And how quickly will editors or constables “lay down the law”?  Well, you can get away with a lot on CZ, I’m afraid.  That’s because people behave themselves so well most of the time that we are genuinely surprised when someone needs to be reined in.

Sure I’m a little biased, but I really love the CZ community!  (Group hug!)

I can virtually see you skeptics shaking your heads.  You want to ask: if I go to add to an article, how often will editors show up and undo my work, or tell me that I’m doing it all wrong?  Well, sure, that happens.  But, as far as I can tell, not very often.  Our editors generally go out of their way to treat everyone collegially.  This is one of the great discoveries of CZ: you plop experts down in an open wiki community, and even give them some modest authority, and guess what?  They’re nice.  They do not wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs.  For that matter, our constables don’t wield their authority the way Wikipedia administrators wield theirs.  They’re wonderful!

Now, I know that our wiki is open, bottom-up, and largely free of “command-and-control” in part because we’re still much smaller than Wikipedia.  Yes, that’s obvious.  Yes, I know that growth has a way of making governance harder.  But that doesn’t change the fact that we are for now much freer and less constrained than Wikipedia is.  You know what?  If you sign up, you can still edit our front page.  It’s not protected.  And we at least still have a chance to retain the more open, freer, more congenial nature of our “small town” community as we grow; it’s too late for Wikipedia, which has become largely a “big city” mobocracy, one that I for one find more oppressive than liberating.

Sure — in time, we on CZ will have far more collaborators than we might always want, for our own individual work.  We too will start complaining that too many cooks spoil the broth.  However that is, and however we solve that problem when we are so fortunate as to have it, I also think that we can avoid having this lively community devolve into a rude, controlling mobocracy.  CZ’s differences make all the difference.  We use real names, which makes people more responsible and polite.  We require that people treat each other professionally — and greatly cuts down on rudeness, just as moderating a mailing list often has the same effect.  We separate different kinds of authority, with different groups having only limited powers, and no person being able to serve on more than one of the high-level groups in authority (Executive Committee, Editorial Council, Constabulary).  This means that nobody is in a position to lord it over others with impunity.  We actually require that people agree to our fundamental policies as a condition of their participation, which means that many of the most disruptive people, whose silly antics cause Wikipedia administrators to react like Nazis, aren’t involved.  Maybe, just maybe, we’ve learned something from Wikipedia’s governance mistakes.

If you have been skeptical of CZ, maybe it’s time to give us a second look.

A “column.”

We now speak incuriously of the many “revolutions” and “paradigm shifts” we are undergoing.  Yet few people have grasped this fully or taken it very seriously.  The world is being remade from top to bottom in the space of a generation.

In the middle of the most dramatic historical changes, people often fail entirely to understand exactly how momentous the events around them are–or, as with many of us at present, they understand that dramatic changes are taking place, but they don’t quite grasp their nature.  Sometimes we comment casually, reducing radical mutations of society to mere slogans and acronyms, as if they were normal events at which it would be naive to evince shock or wonder.  To try to gain a wider perspective, it might help for us to list a number of dramatic, existential changes to the nature of our society.

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