Citizendium Blog

From our new “Quick Start” page

Just arrived?

Want to get started, but don’t know how?

Well, don’t panic!^[1]

If you’re new to Citizendium, we’d love you to dive “write” in, whether you’re an author or an editor. We don’t want you to be discouraged, but you may imagine we have extremely high standards. Certainly we aim for high quality, but we also want participation to be easy and as fun as possible. We know that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What is the first thing you should do after you join? While you can do whatever you like (it’s a wiki!), we recommend two things:

1. Start an article. How? Pick a topic. Then think of a good title for an encyclopedia article about that topic. Then go to Start Article, handily linked on your left–and do it the Easy Way™! Just write a paragraph or two introducing the topic neutrally, beginning with a definition of the concept, or a description of what a thing is notable for. We don’t mind very short articles, as long as they have a couple of sentences. They’ll be expanded later, trust us. Then…
2. Edit someone else’s article. How? Find an article on a topic you are interested in or know a lot about. You can use the search box, or navigate alphabetically, or enter via “top articles” or workgroups. When you’ve found an article you want to edit, press the “edit” tab. Add a few sentences. It’s OK. They just have to be a reasonably helpful addition. They don’t have to be absolutely brilliant. Brilliance happens later.

Are you still worried? Seriously, there is no need for that. Let’s cover some main worries.

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For immediate release

University Assignments Going Cyber

Citizendium Announces “Eduzendium” Initiative

January 24, 2008 – In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. As with so much else this decade, it is all down to the Internet.

Traditional teaching saw students laboring to produce essays that to them felt onerous and oftentimes pointless. Once read by the lecturer their writing was generally consigned to the dustbin.

For some students, that situation is now radically changing.

In a never-before-seen new initiative, the online reference encyclopedia project Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org), in collaboration with expert teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium. The Eduzendium project allows students to write their assignments online on the Citizendium on a given topic allocated by their teacher.

Read the whole thing.

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.

UPDATE (evening): 500 edits in six hours, well over 50 articles today (it might be more like 75), and I’ve received dozens and dozens of mails from people who said, “Sorry, I’ll start contributing soon.”  It’s really great to have confirmation of so much deep support for what we’re doing here!

A huge number of new people, or newly-active people, arrived following my mailing to thousands of people with Citizendium accounts.  Apparently, they just needed a reminder.  (This isn’t a sort of reminder I’ll send regularly, though, trust me.)  Right now, there are more unfamiliar names than familiar ones on recent changes – that’s just how I like it.

Actually, I separated accounts into five categories:

1. People with bios who had made an edit
2. People with bios who hadn’t made an edit
3. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages who had made an edit (there were some)
4. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages, who hadn’t made any edits
5. People with poorly-formed usernames

(Actually, I’m about to send out #5 — with no small amount of nervousness.  )

Here is the letter I sent to #1:

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This is an early Thanksgiving.  It occurs to me that I have not thanked people enough, especially the hardest-working people.  I thank people all the time, but it is usually for over-and-above stuff, and when people first show up.  So, at the risk of embarrassing them, I’m going to thank a whole bunch of people.  I hope you don’t mind, folks.

But I should add something, because I don’t want this sort of attention to go to anybody’s head, either — I mean, frankly, I think it’s a little ridiculous that praise from me would go to anybody’s head.  Most people aren’t that way and they realize that I’m just this guy, so big deal.  But, you see, I’m worried and I speak from experience.  In listing these people and their useful work, I do not mean, in any way shape or form, to be establishing something like a project aristocracy.  I can imagine that some people might be puffed up by this sort of attention, and think that such recognition gives them rights in the project that others do not have.  That would be very wrongheaded.  In fact, not to malign them unjustly I hope, but certain Wikipedians seem to carry about their titles and achievements and “barnstars” and whatnot as so many bludgeons that they can use to get their way.  Damn me if that ever happens on the Citizendium.  I have sometimes accused Wikipedia of being egalitarian in a bad, utopian way, but in this regard I would like CZ to be *more* egalitarian than WP.  I would like us to settle content disputes by kindly, rational compromise first, by reference to expert knowledge second, and by fair, open, law-governed dispute resolution processes last — but NEVER by a presumption that “I’ve been here
longer, I’m a Big Shot, so you gotta listen to me and my friends, or else!” We should always be a freer, more open, and indeed more equal community than that cliquish, competitive attitude implies.

And if you would never dream of being that way — well, clearly, I’m not talking about *you*.

That said in preface, here’s the rogue’s gallery from the Citizendium’s first year, in alphabetical order, and what I honor them for.  And I’m very sorry if I left anyone out, or if I failed to mention some shining achievement of yours — I’m just going based on what I remember and what I had personal experience with, and the project is already bigger than I can always personally track.  But yes, I do actually know all these people and am at least somewhat acquainted with their work for the project!  I am sure I must have left out some hard-working people, some may have slipped through the cracks, and I’m sorry that I did…

Click through to the list.

UPDATE (7/23): caught up. 

UPDATE (7/21): we’re in the process of catching up, adding dozens of new accounts and recognizing many new editors.  We should also be installing a new automatic account approval system, written by programmer and student Aaron Schulz, as soon as early next week.

I am hereby pledging personally and publicly that, beginning now, anyone who applies to become a CZ author or editor will receive a reply within 24 hours. I will do this personally if we cannot find (or motivate!) enough constables and editorial personnel administrators to do it.

If you appreciate this sentiment and want to pitch in, you might become a constable or editorial personnel administrator. Constables approve author applications; EPAs approve author applications.  Constables should have a bachelor’s degree (or equivalent training) and be at least 25 years old. Editorial personnel administrators must be CZ editors.

Please e-mail me personnally at sanger /at\ citizendium.org if you are interested.

Let’s take full advantage of the ongoing and very encouraging interest in CZ, by getting people on board and motivated to work as soon as possible.

What follows is a mail I posted to the Citizendium Editorial Council, in hopes of kicking off a discussion of parliamentary procedure — something essential to the fair operation of a genuinely democratic body.  Does anyone know of precedents in which wikis, mailing lists, and/or Web forums were used to replicate something like Robert’s Rules of Order?

More generally, does anyone have any comments about this?  Please give us your thoughts — either on the Forum, if you’re a Citizen, or else here, if not.

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Our launch, which happened about a month ago, was a tremendous success. It generated well over 200 mentions of CZ in the press (by the Google News count), but more importantly, we ballooned from 820 authors just prior to launch to 1504 as I write this – almost doubling our numbers. For this we have our wonderful constables, such as Robert Tito, David Tribe, and Sarah Tuttle, to thank. Our editor pool has grown from 180 to 228 (and, as usual I’m afraid, a long backlog waiting to get in). The number of “CZ Live” articles has grown from 1100 to 1550 — a respectable rate of about 15 articles per day, and certainly a higher rate than we had a few months ago. Actually, the number of articles we’ve created is higher than that, because while doing the Big Cleanup, we have removed many “CZ Live” tags from articles that were mistagged.

Speaking of that, the Big Cleanup continues apace. Whereas we had checklisted 721 articles on April 4, we now have 1400.  That’s well over half of all the article pages on the wiki. With 23%, or 327, of these articles “Advanced” (either Approved or Developed), and another 32%, or 442, “Developing,” well over half of the articles in our database are beyond stub stage and have been significantly changed, if they were taken from Wikipedia (and many haven’t been).  More detail, albeit a week old, can be found in this very useful stats post from mathematician Aleksander Stos.

I can assure you that, after only five months, that’s excellent work. After five months, the average level of quality of articles on Wikipedia was far below this. We’re even doing respectably compared to where Wikipedia was at this time in terms of sheer numbers of articles — despite our first four months being a private pilot project, requiring sign-up, and requiring the use of real names. Also, I suspect we have more sheer content than Wikipedia did at the time, but actually confirming this suspicion would take a lot of work.

We want to cut the response time to editor applications. So we are getting more Editorial Personnel Administrators started, including Richard Jensen, a retired history professor who has done a lot of work on the wiki lately (I recommend the Abraham Lincoln article he started); Gareth Leng, U. of Edinburgh physiologist; Nancy Sculerati, NYU medical school professor; and Anthony Sebastian, UCSF medical school professor. That’s in addition to Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist, and me. This is currently very science-heavy, I know…something we’ll remedy as we go along.

Yesterday, we finally started the Editorial Council with 39 members. On the mailing list, which is members-only but which has open archives, we’ve just been introducing ourselves; we’ll actually start business next week.

After a post calling for applications from people to fill self-designed leadership positions, we’ve had a number of submissions, most of which are still under review. Nancy Sculerati will be joining us in an additional editorial role, such as article approval director, but the details have yet to be settled. Sorin Matei, Purdue U. Communications Dept. professor, has proposed that he lead “Eduzendium,” a project that would invite student groups, under the guidance of professors, to contribute to us for academic credit. This one is low-hanging fruit so it’s likely we’ll take him up on his offer. Sorin has also proposed some more technical projects, including one that involves geocoding wiki data. There are others people and proposals, as well, but the Executive Committee, like myself, has been extremely busy. We’ll get replies out sooner or later.

Another sort of project: there is an entrepreneur who is very interested in supporting the work of CZ tech lead, Jason Potkanski, and I on a partnered Citizendium project that would make a significant new enhancement to MediaWiki — and which would use Citizendium as the test bed for this enhancement. Any such enhancements, of course, will be open to community discussion; the great thing is that basically he wants us to give him the software requirements. This is a “classic win-win,” since Jason and I need the support, CZ will be greatly improved by this software (it’s a feature I’ve wanted for a long time), and the entrepreneur wants to market the servicing of the (free/GPL) software. Details anon, pending a signed agreement.

The Executive Committee and other governing bodies are now named on a new Personnel page.  There you will notice three new additions: Stephen Ewen, one of our many hard-working constables, has agreed to act as Assistant to the Chief Constable, relieving some of Ruth Ifcher’s workload; Kelly Patterson has joined us as Fundraising Assistant; and Louise Valmoria has been busy setting up mailing lists for individual workgroups.

Speaking of mailing lists, Louise has created many lists and is putting finishing touches on them. I believe we can expect in the next week or two the announcement of a few dozen new mailing lists, focused on announcing to editors and authors new developments and policy questions that need deciding, and directing them to specific wiki pages and forum boards for further action & interaction.

I think and hope that this will prove instrumental in bringing editors and editors in particular workgroups together and focused on getting articles approved and, we hope, recruitment. The existence of the Editorial Council may help here, too. One question we will be addressing is how to improve the methods and categories of approved articles. One proposal being discussed on the forums would create a “Proof” page for copyediting. Another proposal would have us simply link to approved versions in page histories and forego a “Draft” page altogether. Another would have us designate a stricter category of “Certified” articles, which can be approved only by people with relatively narrowly-focused expertise on the topic of the articles, and open up the category of “Approved” articles in various ways (e.g., to a long-anticipated category of “assistant editors” or “specialist editors” that would give some approval authority to graduate students). Yet another proposal would have us make more prominent use of the category of Developed articles (now linked from the front page).

These are, however, just proposals at this stage. It’s pretty likely that we’ll make some such changes. As I’ve said, I’m committed to our finally adopting an approval process that allows and inspires people to approve large numbers of articles. Consider our current stock of 12 very fine approved articles evidence merely of our first baby steps in working out what the process should be. I’m going to see to it that the pace picks up.

Speaking of approved articles, we have finally approved our first Computers article, about the Linux mascot Tux. Congratulations to all involved, and especially to the 18-year-old Josh Williams who did a lot of the authoring, and the three Computers editors who stepped up to the plate. Hope you fellows can approve a bunch more now!

One Citizen has been in communication with the subject of a biography, Gilad Atzmon, which inspired us to create a new namespace, TI: (for “topic informant“). We’re going to use this namespace to place (with permission!) communications, interviews, and relevant essays from persons who can act as informants (i.e., interviewees) about topics. It seems to me the “Tux” writers also had an e-mail exchange…that would be the namespace to put it.

We have finally allowed everyone permission, once again, to move pages & their histories, a function previously restricted to constables, simply because vandals were abusing it. Now that there aren’t any vandals left (although we did have a visit a few weeks ago from a vandal who had made an account during the self-registration period), there’s no reason not to let everyone move pages themselves. Note that we haven’t even protected the main page of the wiki.

I finished an essay for online journal Edge called “Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge.”

I’m probably forgetting some mentionables…but anyway, that’s long enough. As you can see, we’re making excellent progress, and you can expect even more in the coming months.

The Editorial Council has just been kicked off. See CZ Editorial Council Members for a list of members; its wiki home will be at Editorial Council; the section of the Policy Outline that gives its (current!) governing rules is right here; and its mailing list archives are available (little there right now).

…well, “Life” approved, anyway.  This is an absolutely amazing article.

What is life? Biologists use the word ‘life’ for both the processes of living, and for the things that carry out those processes. Life, too, connotes the relationships among living things, past and present: it includes the entire living world — the biosphere — and the whole history of “life on earth”. In theory, life might include entities, now unknown, that exist on other planets. Just what qualities would such beings have to possess for scientists to acknowledge them as alive? Could non-living things ever acquire those same qualities? What features separated the first living cells from the inanimate materials that formed them? The answers to such questions form part of the larger answer to that most basic of all questions in Biology: “what is life?” This article focuses not on ‘life’, the noun, but on ‘living’, the verb: what activities do living entities perform, and what processes enable them to perform them?^[1] It takes, as its theme, “Life is what is common to all living beings” (Christian De Duve).^[2]

That another article has been approved no big deal.  What is a big deal is what this particular article demonstrates.  I encourage you to click through and read it.  It’s remarkably well-written and readable, but also erudite — “magisterial” comes to mind.

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