Citizendium Blog

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!“)

Lunchtime speech at the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 13th Annual Symposium: Altered Identities, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 13, 2008.

I. Introduction

Let me say up front, for the benefit of privacy advocates, that I agree entirely that it is possible to have an interesting discussion and productive collaborative effort among anonymous contributors, and I support the right to anonymity online, as a general rule. But, as I’m going to argue, such a right need not entail a right to be anonymous in every community online. After all, surely people also have the right to participate in communities in which real-world identities are required of all participants-that is, they have a right to join voluntary organizations in which everyone knows who everyone else really is. There are actually quite a few such communities online, although they tend to be academic communities.

Before I introduce my thesis, I want to distinguish two claims regarding
anonymity: first, there is the claim that personal information should be available to the administrators of a website, but not necessarily publicly; and second, there’s the claim that real names should appear publicly on one’s contributions. I will be arguing for the latter claim, that real names should appear publicly.

But actually, I would like to put my thesis not in terms of how real names should appear, but instead in terms of what online communities are justified in requiring. Specifically in online knowledge communities-that is, Internet groups that are working to create publicly-accessible compendia of knowledge-organizers are justified in requiring that contributors use their own names, not pseudonyms. I maintain that if you want to log in and contribute to the world’s knowledge as part of an open, community project, it’s very reasonable to require that you use your real name. I don’t want, right now, to make the more dramatic claim that we should require real names in online knowledge communities-I am saying merely that it is justified or warranted to do so.

Many Internet types would not give even this modest thesis a serious hearing. Most people who spend any time in online communities regard anonymity, or pseudonymity, as a right with very few exceptions. To these people, my love of real names makes me anathema. It is extremely unhip of me to suggest that people be required to use their real names in any online community. But since I have never been or aspired to be hip, that’s no great loss to me.

What I want to do in this talk is first to introduce the notion of an Internet knowledge community, and discuss how different types handle anonymity as a matter of policy. Then I will address some of the main arguments in favor of online anonymity. Finally, I will offer two arguments that it is justified to require real names for membership in online knowledge communities.

…

Continue here.

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.

I’ve uploaded two recent essays — speeches, really, but written out.  The first is “Citizendium: A New Vision for Online Knowledge Communities,” which I delivered at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, Feb. 7, 2008, as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Lecture Series, “Wikipedia - Democratization of Knowledge or Triumph of Amateurs,” hosted by Marshall Poe.  Here’s a bit that sets up the problem to solve:

… It would be boring and banal for me to point out that collaboration on free content represents an interesting opportunity. Of course it does. The Internet has been exploiting that opportunity for almost ten years, at least ever since the Open Directory Project got started in 1998. The real question is whether there are any interesting new free content opportunities. And there is, I think. The most interesting unexploited opportunity before the Internet today is high quality and high relevance. In short, if developing sheer quantity of content was the big exciting problem ten years ago, we’ve licked that one. The big exciting problem now is quality: how to create enormous amounts of high-quality and highly-relevant content. And this is–I guarantee it–a much more difficult problem, and one that not nearly as many online projects will be able to solve. …

I go on to argue for three fundamental principles underlying the Citizendium:

… Clearly, something really important has been left out of the Web 2.0 equation. What? What needs to be added so that our communities produce content that is not merely abundant, useful, and interesting, but also reliable and relevant?

I have three principles, which I will state briefly first but then elaborate, because it is very easy to misunderstand in all three cases. They are:

1. Find a meaningful role for experts within the project.
2. Require contributors to use their real-world identities.
3. Establish the rule of law by committing contributors to a social contract that makes them full partners in the project.

Adopting these three principles will help transform Web 2.0 into Web 3.0. Leveraged intelligently, these principles will allow an online community to produce high quality and relevance, without necessarily compromising high productivity. They will, in short, help the Internet to grow up.

Let’s consider these principles each briefly in turn. …

I also give a report about the latest CZ progress.  Here’s the whole thing.

The second is “How the Internet Is Changing What We (Think We) Know,” a speech I gave when kindly invited by a local Columbus-area library.  This is not so much project propaganda as the examination of a socio-philosophical problem:

… Before the Internet, we were already awash in information. Wading through all that information in search of some hard knowledge was very difficult indeed.

The Internet is making this old and difficult problem even worse. If we had an abundance of information in, say, the 1970s, the Internet has created a superabundance of information today. Out of curiosity, I looked up some numbers. According to one estimate, there are now over 1.2 billion people online; Netcraft estimated that there are over 100 million websites, and about half of those are active. And those estimates come from over a year ago.

With that many people, and that many active websites, clearly there is, as I say, a superabundance of information. Nielsen ratings of Internet search showed that there were some six billion searches performed in December, 2007, in one month—that’s about 72 billion in a year! Google, by the way, was responsible for two thirds of those searches. Now, you might have heard these numbers before; I don’t mean to be telling you news. But I want to worry out loud about a consequence of this situation.

My worry is that the superabundance of information is devaluing knowledge. The more that information piles up on Internet servers around the world, and the easier it is for that information to be found, the less distinctive and attractive that knowledge will appear by comparison. I fear that the Internet has already greatly weakened our sense of what is distinctive about knowledge, and why it is worth seeking. …

I then go on to explain all that in some detail, but for a popular audience.  Here’s the whole thing (complete with pictures!).

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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Multiple sources are now saying that Wikipedia is more “on the ropes” than ever, burdened by multiple fresh scandals.  Here’s a review of the sad yet fascinating situation, as I understand it.

Slashdot first highlighted a Register article, which pointed out that a “secret” mailing list was used by a “cabal” of Wikipedia insiders essentially uses to deliberate about sockpuppets — something I’ve repeatedly warned is the Achilles’ heel of any collaborative system that permits pseudonymity and anonymity.  This news caused a furor among Wikipedians (as I think it should have).  I actually invited the disaffected people to join the Citizendium — the first time I had ever gone to WikiEN-L Wikipedians to join us.

Then Slashdot highlighted another Register article (mind you, The Register has never been a big fan of Wikipedia’s).  This is a very long one that goes into considerable depth about a particular case.  It is hard to say who is telling the truth, but certainly some hard questions are being raised which go to the way that Wikipedia is being governed.

Problems with Wikipedia’s governance were pointed out by other recent sources, as well.  Seth Finklestein had an interesting article in The Guardian following up on the mailing list story, and the lawyer who set up the Wikimedia Foundation has been dishing dirt on his new blog, and also criticizing the governance of the project.  I’ve also heard from two ex-employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, who both have fascinating stories to tell, but I’m not about to “out” them.  They both strongly insist that something is rotten in Wikipedia-land, and they insist that the rot starts at the top.

Meanwhile, Slashdot pointed out that Jimmy Wales, illustrating once again his tone-deafness on publicity matters, was now saying that Wikipedia is now suitable for use, and even citation, by students.  I am not making this up.  I only wonder where this downward spiral is going to end.

As much as I would enjoy diving into the fray, I’ll just leave it at this.  My respect for both Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia organization plummeted following the Essjay affair (all blog comments here) and their completely underwhelming response to the scandal.  None of these more recent developments, however disappointing, is particularly surprising to me.  Wikipedia’s caretakers have shown themselves, essentially, to be amoral and ultimately unaccountable.

I am happy to be able to learn from their mistakes, however.  Here are the lessons that I draw.  I hope the Citizendium will do better in each of these respects:

• Governance in the form of a constitutional, democratic republic is necessary for large collaborative projects like Wikipedia (and the Citizendium).
• Governance procedures must, of course, be as open as possible, and those in authority must of course be accountable to the community.  There must not be a “cabal” nor a “dictator,” benevolent or otherwise.
• The rule of law is crucial to a healthy community.  This is something that many Wikipedians have rejected outright, and it’s astonishing to me that they have done so.  (They certainly wouldn’t agree to any such thing in their offline communities.  Why should it be different for their online community?)  If you do not have reliable mechanisms to enforce the rules, you’re going to end up with vague and inconsistent patterns of governance, and the persons in authority will ultimately be unaccountable to anyone.  This is obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of understanding of the philosophy of law.
• Individuals in position of authority should be escorted out on a regular basis.  If they stay on board for too long, they will set up groups and mechanisms that will expand their authority and make it more unaccountable.
• Censorship of criticism of persons in power is always a terrible idea.  (While the Citizendium has a Professionalism policy which requires that people not be abusive, you can abuse me, the Editor-in-Chief, to a much greater extent, and I’ll take it — I have to.)
• The community must also be devoted to reasonably high standards of morality and fair dealing.  If you allow people in authority to get away with corruption or just plain poor judgment, with no significant consequences, you’re going to end up with a never-ending stream of scandals.
• The ability to delete edits from the page history, called “oversight” authority, needs, well, oversight.  Real oversight.  That needs to be built into the MediaWiki software.  The idea that you can cover up your edits, and make it appear as if they didn’t happen, even after they caused harm to others, is a complete nonstarter.  Even if certain edits can be masked from the general public, they should still be visible to independent, responsible oversight bodies within the organization.

As I’ve said many times before, Wikipedia has a woefully dysfunctional governance system.  It is time that they did something about it.  This is going to take leadership.  I wonder, however, if there are any real leaders left in Wikipedia-land.  The fact that they do not require real names is going to prove to make such matters difficult – it implies conundrums I wouldn’t wish on anyone.  What I suspect they will end up doing is creating official (real name) registration for members of the community who wish to become full voting Wikipedia “citizens.”  I simply don’t see how else they can do it, without continuing to suffer the problems of the present system.  I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.  Jimmy Wales — who enjoys playing the CEO and celebrity rather than a real leader – clearly doesn’t acknowledge any problem, and without Wales’ concurrence, nothing will happen.

Perhaps the nascent Citizendium governance system, which has started coming online and should be fully operational in the next few months, will prove to be a model for Wikipedia.

Here is a post I made, with some trepidation, to the WikiEN-L mailing list, the main discussion list for the English Wikipedia project.

[Moderators: if you don’t wish to forward this post, I’ll understand. If you do, thanks in advance. –Larry Sanger]

All,

I saw this unfortunate article

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/

and I felt inspired to reach out to the Wikipedia community and invite those of you who are seriously disaffected to give the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) another look. In case you took seriously a certain article about us in the Wikipedia Signpost last summer, let’s just say that wishful reports of our demise were greatly exaggerated. Since then, we’ve nearly doubled our number of articles and our activity; our growth has been accerating, and recently, we’ve had a great growth spurt. Obviously, we’re still small, but we’ve got an excellent opportunity to replicate Wikipedia-style growth.

I’ve never actually extended an invitation to Wikipedians before. I’ve always felt that Wikipedia and the Citizendium naturally attract different constituencies, and that that’s a positive thing. I have never wanted to appear to be competing with Wikipedia for people. I just didn’t think that’s necessary — and I still don’t.

But, especially to those people who are seriously disappointed with the management of the Wikipedia community, I feel it’s appropriate and important that I say: we all (humanity) might be able to do better than the Wikipedia model of production and governance. Maybe, for some of you, it’s time to explore the Citizendium model.

I know I’m going to make a lot of people angry or disappointed by my saying this here, in the lion’s den, so to speak. (Does it help that I started this list? I doubt it. ) I’m sure there will be no shortage of hostile response. But bear in mind, I am reaching out only to people who are seriously disappointed with Wikipedia or its management. I think this is within the properly critical spirit of the open source/free culture movement. After all, I am *not* trying to undermine Wikipedia, which I hope will always exist as a popular source of information. (I’ve always said that.) I’m merely trying to build *another* source of information. I hope that those who are contemplating exiting Wikipedia will consider joining the Citizendium.

If you want to know how (we think) we’re different, see this page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren’t_Wikipedia

The present “scandal” is over the community and governance. So what’s special or interesting about the Citizendium community and governance? Here’s a summary.

The community as a whole is by and large a mature and pleasant place to work. But it’s still an open wiki.

We are ramping up an open, online representative republic. (We’re still drafting our rules!) Among other things, this means we’ve got an Editorial Council (a “legislative”), a Constabulary (a “police force”), an Executive Committee (an “executive”), and we will soon be adding an independent judiciary. These community components are rule-governed and being established with the well-known challenges of Wikipedia’s community in mind.

We take “the rule of law” seriously. “Ignore all rules,” which I originally proposed for Wikipedia as a sort of joke back in the spring of 2001, isn’t recommended. Boldness and not caring too much if you make beginner mistakes are strongly recommended. (But that was the original spirit of “ignore all rules,” in case you didn’t know.)

We require that contributors agree with a Statement of Fundamental Policies. (And, soon, a Citizendium Charter.) No endless arguing about our fundamental policies: we are all committed to them up front. We still argue about stuff that really matters. We take the notion of “cyber-citizenship” seriously.

We require real names. We actually check that there is someone with a particular (real) name and we try to match this name up with an e-mail address. Our methods of doing this are very fallible, but so far they seem to have worked just fine. So sockpuppetry, while in principle still possible, becomes much, much more difficult. (I’m not aware of our having any sockpuppet contributors on CZ.)

On the issue in question — should there be a “secret cabal” of people to deal with sockpuppets? –  well, it’s interesting. On the one hand, we don’t have a sockpuppet problem to speak of, because we require real names. On the other hand, we do have a “Constabulary,” and occasionally they deal with difficult cases, and indeed privately, but the constables are bound by certain rules. Among the rules are the right to appeal to a fully independent body. For example, recently one editor (a very kind University of Edinburgh professor who served in the same appeal function that we’ll soon formalize with the Judicial Board) “heard” an appeal and reversed my decision to ban someone. This is fine with me and I am glad to be able to demonstrate that I do *not* have the final say. No single individual should, in a republic.

The notion of a *secret* body that actually has authority to determine cases is, needless to say, anathema in a project committed to the rule of law. But, just as with closed police records, closed access is sometimes necessary to protect contributor privacy and interests, and to avoid libel issues needlessly. If a person wishes us to make our deliberations public, we will. We regard it as their *right* as a citizen. This guarantee of rights, however, would be rather more problematic if we weren’t using real names.

In terms of management, to set a positive precedent, I plan to step down as editor-in-chief and hand over the reins to someone else — within the next year or two at most. This will require that I do fundraising to pay this person’s salary, because I myself have been living strictly from writing, speaking, and consulting fees. I will at that time no longer play *any* role, formal or informal, in the governance of the Citizendium encyclopedia project. (I will try to behave like the traditional disinterested U.S. ex-president.) It just seems obvious to me that the leader of an allegedly democratic project should actually *step aside* when he’s handed over the reins of power.

Finally, we have a role for experts (only they are called our “editors”), who can approve articles and make content decisions where necessary, but who otherwise work shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone. In fact, anyone can join (as an “author”) and contribute, as long as they are 13 or older, write good English and otherwise make a positive contribution, agree with our fundamental principles, and help us establish that the name/identity they claim is their own real name.

If you are motivated to try something different, join here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount

Coincidentally, tomorrow (Wednesday) is a good day to join. It’s our monthly Write-a-Thon (details linked from the front page).

By the way, I’m sorry to those who have been waiting, but I hope to announce our license before *too* much longer. The announcement will be accompanied by a very long essay, which I haven’t finished yet. Please don’t assume the license will be incompatible with Wikipedia’s…there’s a decent chance it will be compatible.

Also, by the way, I’m going to start up SharedKnowing (a new, “neutral” mailing list) soon. Some prominent Wikipedians are already subscribed. Join here:

http://mail.citizendium.org/mailman/listinfo/sharedknowing#more

In conclusion, I’m hoping sincerely for the best outcome for everyone. I hope Wikipedia can overcome its obviously difficult problems, and let me add that I don’t expect the Citizendium to be free of problems when it’s bigger, either. They’ll just be different, and I hope not so fundamental.

My best to the Wikipedia community,
Larry Sanger
Wikipedia ex-co-founder

—–
Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/
Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/
sanger@citizendium.org

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.

In a very positive article in The Irish Times yesterday, Karlin Lillington reports about my Institute of European Affairs talk and focused on this point: if Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 communities don’t regulate themselves more responsibly, they might — much to my own personal dismay — find themselves increasingly regulated by anti-liberal governments.  So, I recommended that online communities do a better job of regulating themselves.  The article does a fairly good job of summing up the point.  Excellent publicity for us, to be sure!  Slainte!

Dear All,

I’d like to invite you to join an old-fashioned discussion list, SharedKnowing:

http://mail.citizendium.org/mailman/listinfo/sharedknowing

This unmoderated (or semi-moderated) list will be devoted to well-reasoned, polite discussion and announcements about the nature of online knowledge production communities. It is open to everyone. I hope it might become a central clearing-house of general information and free, open, yet polite discussion about a cluster of issues that are of great interest to many people, and of growing importance to society at large.

See the list info page. There, I have explained:

• Purpose of the list 
• How to subscribe and unsubscribe
• How to post
• When will the discussion start?
• Who should join
• Core and example questions
• Relevant and irrelevant Internet communities/websites
• Other encouraged posts
• Subjects that will be deemed off-topic
• List rules
• List management

To give people time to arrive, discussion will start in a few weeks.

I’m starting this list for several reasons. First, as a scholar (of sorts) and project organizer, I have an active, practical interest in these topics. Second, as I write and prepare speeches (something I’m doing a lot these days), I would like to have a big group of knowledgeable, like-minded friends to bounce ideas off of. Finally, quite honestly, I miss good old-fashioned discussion lists. Back in the 90s, I ran several, and one of them, ASP-Disc, was really great. I’d like to replicate that sort of lively community.

Please post this message as widely as possible!

Regards

Larry Sanger

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