Citizendium Blog

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:

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!

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.

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.

Speech delivered at the Jefferson Society, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 9, 2007, and at the Institute of European Affairs, Dublin, Ireland, September 28, 2007, as the inaugural talk for the IEA’s “Our Digital Futures” program.

I want to begin by asking a question that might strike you as perhaps a little absurd. The question is, “Why haven’t governments tried to regulate online communities more?” To be sure, there have been instances where governments have stepped in. For instance, in January of last year in Germany, the father of a deceased computer hacker used the German court system to try to have an article about his son removed from the German Wikipedia. As a result, wikipedia.de actually went offline for a brief period. It’s come back online, of course, and in fact the article in question is still up.

Here’s another example. In May of last year, attorneys general from eight U.S. states demanded that MySpace turn over the names of registered sex offenders lurking on the website, which as you probably know is heavily frequented by teenagers. The website deleted pages of some 7,000 registered sex offenders. And the following July, they said that in fact some 29,000 registered sex offenders had accounts, which were subsequently deleted.

Those are just a few examples. But we can make some generalizations. The Internet is famously full of outrageously false, defamatory, and offensive information, and is said to be a haven for criminal activity. This leads back to the question I asked earlier: why haven’t governments tried to regulate online communities even more than they have?

We might well find this question a little absurd, especially if we champion the liberal ideals that form the foundation of Western civil society. Indeed, no doubt one reason is our widespread commitment to freedom of speech. But consider another possible reason—one that, I think, is very interesting.

Read the rest here.

Apparently, someone has done an interesting meta-study of scientific publishing, and titled his paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” (PLoS Medicine).

As a sarcastic philosopher type, it is my duty to observe that Dr. Ioannidis’ claim is self-stultifying.  If most published research findings are false, it follows that, probably, Ioannidis’ research finding is false.  Therefore, probably, most published research findings are true!

Summary by WSJ Online.

My essay “Who Says We Know,” which appeared first on Edge, was translated into German [link updated, thanks Gerd-Lothar] and appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung, the newspaper I tried (but failed) to read back when I was living in Munich in 1989-90.

Das Fazit der Debatte ist: Die starke Hinwendung zur Spezialisierung in der heutigen Zeit liegt ständig im Clinch mit unserer heutigen Verpflichtung zur absoluten Gleichbehandlung der Menschen. Doch so viel mir die Gleichheit bedeutet, wenn ich mich zwischen ihr und der Wahrheit entscheiden muss, stehe ich auf der Seite der Wahrheit.

Jawohl!

I gave the keynote last Thursday at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, “Imagining the Future: Scholarly Communication 2.0,” in San Francisco.  The speech was called “What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly Publishing.”  I had a great time there, met Brewster Kahle and various other interesting people.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

When I was asked to speak to you, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, I have to admit that I found this puzzling, because I don’t know anything about scholarly publishing. Why should someone who knows so little about scholarly publishing be asked to give a speech to the Society for Scholarly Publishing? That’s a paradox.

I found a similar paradox in an article by John Thompson in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2005. Thompson wrote: “academic publishers can survive today only if they become something other than academic publishers” (June 17, 2005).

The quote actually explains why I’m here. I’m here because I can tell you about a way to become something other than academic publishers. I suppose this is a little absurd, but as a philosopher, I am trained to take joy in life’s little absurdities.

So I’m going to try to make the case that scholarly publishers should start expert Web 2.0 projects. Here’s my plan for the talk.

•  I’m going to begin by painting a picture, a vision of what information online could look like in ten or twenty years. In short, I’m going to build a castle in the air. But then I will try to put a foundation underneath it.
• I’ll go over a number of examples of free encyclopedia projects from which we can learn.
• Then I’ll draw out some general principles.
• I’ll consider various business models for projects started by scholarly publishers.
• Finally, I’ll give you some ideas for projects you might start.

More here.

Wednesday I’ll be at my alma mater, Reed College, giving another speech, this time for the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges.

A new Encyclopedia of Life, which will attempt to catalog all 1.8 million named species, “available everywhere by single access on command” — I think that means free to read, at least – has been announced.  Its two supporting foundations are going to be funding it to the tune of — wait for it — $100 million, over a period of 10 years, this Reuters article reports.

This is stunning news.  With that amount of money, and the partners involved, it seems that chances are good that they’ll do excellent work.  I can easily imagine the Citizendium Biology Workgroup — perhaps our most active — saying to themselves, “Well, what’s the point of our writing articles about species now?”  It’s possible indeed that the EOL will do such a fantastic job that it will render all future of compendia of species useless.  But this is, you have to admit, not very likely.  Perhaps the first thing to notice is that we like to have multiple references, even if we have a truly excellent one in hand.  We have not yet seen the perfect encyclopedia; there will always be room for other approaches.  So to Citizendium’s biologists, I say: there will be a point, because there’s always an interest in and desire for alternative approaches.

Moreover, those of us with experience with business and publishing ventures of various kinds know that it is all too possible, even with a $100 million commitment, to fail to achieve the full vision — indeed, it is probable, since most business ventures fail.  The EOL looks quite a bit like the Digital Universe, which has had an impressive vision, but little else, for quite some time now.  It was Joe Firmage’s vision that attracted me to that project in the first place, and they have had something like over $14 million in funding in the last few years.  But, sadly, there is relatively little to show for the time and money; just what you see on digitaluniverse.net and earthportal.net, and some more stuff going on behind the scenes.  Nothing to sneeze at, perhaps — but not the vision.

But with the EOL, well, the bloom is still on the Rosa, and it looks much better thought-out than the Digital Universe, and also much better focused.  The idea of an encyclopedia focused on all species is an excellent one if for no other reason than that it is both clear and appealing.  The general look and feel of it is excellent as well, and the planned standard sections, such as images, charts, maps, videos, etc., are exciting to contemplate.  The question is whether they will, with their impressive funding and personnel, actually be able to come together and create a new expert content production model that will actually populate those templates with data.  I certainly hope so.

What the Citizendium has going for it is that we are following a model that is — well, I dare not say proven, but at least well supported and not particularly mysterious.  How we might end up with millions of meaty, excellent articles, starting with (ahem) much less money than EOL is starting with, is not hard to understand.  It’s not a foregone conclusion that we’ll achieve that success, but we’re on our way.

If EOL achieves its own great success by borrowing the best of Wikipedia’s processes and attracting a lot of the world’s biologists to the table, they will have pioneered a method that can be used in every field.  That is exciting and something to hope for, regardless of what it might mean for the Citizendium.

Edge asked me to sum up my thoughts on the experts vs. dabblers question:

Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge 

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.  Here are a few bits:

… As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers.  …  The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but — unlike the old order — gives the general public a place at the table as well.

…consider: what do we most want, as responsible, independent-minded researchers, out of an encyclopedia?  Primarily, I think most of us want mainstream expert opinion stated clearly and accurately; but we don’t want to ignore minority and popular views, either, precisely because we know that experts are sometimes wrong, even systematically wrong.

I’ll have no truck with the view that simply because something is out of the mainstream—unscientific, irrational, speculative, or politically incorrect—it therefore does not belong in an encyclopedia. …

…experts are—albeit fallibly—the best-suited to articulate what expert opinion is.  It is for the most part experts who create the resources that fact-checkers use to check facts.  This makes their direct input in an encyclopedia invaluable.

Wikipedia’s defenders … are entirely committed to what I call dabblerism, by which I mean the view that no one should have any special role or authority in a content creation system simply on account of their expertise. …

… One has to wonder what the results would have been if Nature had chosen 1,000 Britannica articles randomly, and then matched Wikipedia articles up with those.

… Surely it isn’t impossible for professors to exit the cathedral — to borrow Eric Raymond’s metaphor — and wander the bazaar, offering guidance and highlighting what is excellent. Will that necessarily make the bazaar less of a bazaar?

Wikipedia is deeply egalitarian.  One of its guiding principles is epistemic (knowledge) egalitarianism.  According to epistemic egalitarianism, we are all fundamentally equal in our authority or rights to articulate what should pass for knowledge; the only grounds on which a claim can compete against other claims are to be found in the content of the claim itself, never in who makes it.

Ultimately, at the bottom of the debate, the deep modern commitment to specialization is in an epic struggle with an equally deep modern commitment to egalitarianism.  It’s Truth versus Equality, and as much as I love Equality, if it comes down to choosing, I’m on the side of Truth.

There might be some commentary on Edge coming out within the next week.  Could be lots of fun!

Because the Citizendium has a role for experts, some have suggested recently that we’re “elitist.”  But the claim is, frankly, absurd.  Projects that allow teenagers to work with tenured professors and seasoned professionals cannot with any good sense be called “elitist.”  Consider a hierarchy of “elitism” in content-production organizations:

1. Very exclusive: the only participants permitted are not just experts, but distinguished experts.  Example: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  One of the finest free reference works available online, just by the way.  Would it be appropriate to accuse them of being “elitist”?
2. Exclusive: experts/professionals only.  Examples: most big newspapers and magazines; some academic journals.
3. Expert-focused, but semi-expert-welcoming: while experts are most actively recruited, honored, and empowered, the system is also open to people who have a solid but nonexpert understanding of the relevant material.  Example: Encyclopedia of Earth; some academic journals (think: first papers written by grad students).
4. Open, but making a special role for experts: no expertise is needed to participate, but experts are invited to fill a special role in the system.  Example: Citizendium.
5. Radically epistemically egalitarian: everyone may participate, and no roles are made for experts; everyone is on an equal footing when it comes to making judgment about what is allegedly good, true, and beautiful.  Example: HotOrNot, Wikipedia, and most Web 2.0 projects.

We are far more open and egalitarian compared to most everything outside of Web 2.0.  To accuse us of elitism is merely to expose the limitations of your world.

Here’s something I cut from an essay I’m working on — but it stands on its own as a mini-essay.

The world is amazed by what global, self-selecting groups can do collaboratively — so much so that “You” are Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.”  But few have considered, or anyway taken seriously, the ideas of requiring the use of real names, absolutely insisting on professional standards of behavior, and giving collaborative projects some gentle expert oversight.  To suggest that it is feasible to add these innovations — quite radical innovations, really, by Web 2.0 standards — is tantamount to suggesting that we can secure the stunning productivity of Web 2.0 without suffering the common ills of irresponsibility, obnoxious behavior, and mediocrity.  That is precisely the proposition on which the new Citizendium effort rests.  We are Web 2.0 with real names, fairly enforced rules, and a role for experts.

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