We now have an officially empanelled Charter Drafting Committee (below).

A gmail account was used to collect the votes, and Hayford Peirce did the tallying. He says a few other people had access to the account. Hayford then (today) gave me access to the account as well as the worksheet he used to tally the vote. Just a while ago, I did a separate tally of the vote on my own spreadsheet. (I.e., I didn’t simply compare the e-mailed votes to the spreadsheet, I actually made a whole new spreadsheet.) I caught two clerical errors that made absolutely no difference to the results. In fact, the number of votes (200) and the number of Citizens who voted for each of 5, 4, 3, or 2 candidates is exactly as Hayford has it. This experience has given me renewed appreciation for our volunteer election workers.

An “Advisory Board” was to be named by me, according to our current governing document, the Citizendium Statement of Fundamental Policies, which would adopt a Charter. As promised I would earlier on the forum, I hereby appoint this group of people as a temporary Advisory Board for that purpose.

Listed alphabetically, not in order of number of votes received, the Committee is:

Martin Baldwin-Edwards
Howard Berkowitz
Shamira Gelbman
Matt Innis
Meg Ireland
Russell Jones
Daniel Mietchen
Joe Quick

Congratulations to everyone!

Anyone who wants to see the votes each candidate received may write to Hayford Peirce for that information.

Further information about where the Charter itself will begin being drafted should be available via http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Charter_drafting_committee That page also states the rules of the committee.

I posted the above on Citizendium-L and other project lists. But I want to add here, for the benefit of people outside the project, that this group strikes me as being very representative of the project as a whole. There are 6 men, 2 women. Most of the people elected have been with the project for well over a year, but one is a relatively recent arrival, and one left last year (and is, evidently, back now). Four or five of the eight have Ph.D.’s, two are in their 20s (I think), I guess most are youngish to middle-aged. They all have one thing in common, however: they are all very smart.

We enjoy considerable goodwill from many people. But the Citizendium is also misunderstood. This page is devoted to correcting many errors about us.

Let’s debunk some myths [edit]

Myth: we’re experts-only.

Fact: we love experts—we admit it. And we want more of them. But this is still a remarkably open project. You can be an author with no degrees and only a basic facility with English. We agree heartily with the larger “Web 2.0″ crowd on one point: most reasonably well educated people have something to contribute to a project like this. Our youngest registered members are 13, and we have some active high school students who have done good work.

For further reading, see The Editor Role, The Author Role, and our sign-up form.

Myth: we’re a top-down project, with expert editors giving orders to underlings.

Fact: no, we’re very much bottom-up. We’re a wiki—really. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. We are a strongly, “radically,” collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody “owns” articles or “gives orders” to do this or that. Of course, we aren’t the first to use this method; it gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric Raymond, who compared communities that create free software collaboratively to “bazaars,” as opposed to the old-fashioned “cathedral” model where everyone has a specific role and function, and orders are given from the top down. (See “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added “village elders” wandering the bazaar. Their welcome, moderating presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.

For further reading, see Group Editing and How to collaborate.

Myth: edits appear on the Citizendium only if they have been specifically approved by editors.

Fact: editors do not approve edits before they appear on the website. Once you’re signed up, you can immediately change any article (or, for approved articles, any article draft—example). You can. You really, really can. Editors are not standing over your shoulder. Nor do they want to do so. They have their own projects here. Another author is as likely to critique and edit your work as an editor. It’s like we said. This is a wiki—a real, robust, bottom-up wiki.

For further reading, see The Editor Role. There’s nothing there about approving individual edits!

Myth: we’re Serious. We accept only your most careful, painstaking work. Writing here is like writing a term paper—no fun. We take ourselves Very Seriously.

Fact: this myth is particularly damaging to new recruits, especially to younger people who aren’t sure of themselves. You’re welcome here. You really are. This is a work in progress, and we have fun! Yes, we have a lot of overeducated people here, who are regularly writing really wonderful prose as if it costs them no effort. But we also have no problem whatsoever with you making a rough start on any topic, as long as somebody else will be able to pick up where you left off. We are permanently under construction. You do not have to be painfully careful, as if you might break something and people will start screaming at you, or will freeze you out socially, if you do. We’re much more relaxed than that. We want everybody to be bold, not so careful that you never make any mistakes. If you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not participating hard enough. And you don’t have to write a whole term paper to start an article, though we have a special initiative that encourages educators to assign Citizendium articles instead of term papers. It’s OK with us if you start a relatively short article, just a paragraph or two (we call these “stubs”).

For further reading, see Be Bold, Under Construction, and Stubs.

Myth: since real names are required, nobody will participate. Maybe nobody should—participant privacy will be violated, as our bios will be accessible from Google!

Fact: the fact that we have 200+ participants every month makes it obviously false that nobody will participate in a project in which real names are required. We admit that we might get more participants if pseudonyms were widely permitted. (Note: we do permit pseudonyms for certain special reasons, e.g., political dissidents in repressive countries. We have given out ~10 pseudonyms.) As to privacy, biographies are not indexed by Google (or any other search engine that respects the “noindex” tag).

We feel that the advantages of real names outweigh the small sacrifice of allowing our work-in-progress to be viewed publicly. On the one hand, using real names makes people behave themselves more civilly; on the other hand, it makes our articles more credible, since readers know that there are people willing to put their names behind them. Besides, you’re far more likely to impress your friends and employers by posting publicly here than on, say, FaceBook, where many people do use their real names!

For further reading, see CZ:Statistics and Sanger’s “Defense of Modest Real Name Requirements.”

Myth: since this is an academic project, we are not open to articles about pop culture.

Fact: we are open to pop culture. Don’t believe us? See Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin song) and Metal Gear Solid. We are better described as a hybrid academic/public project. Think of it like this: we reject both the idea that knowledge belongs exclusively in the academy, and the idea that, after Wikipedia, the academy has no special role to play in explaining what we know. We think the most productive and reliable system involves the marriage of expertise with wide-ranging public interests and knowledge. So, as long as we can expect to maintain a full set of articles of a certain category, then go to town! If snobs try to shut you down, have them talk to the Editor-in-Chief, who is a confirmed “inclusionist”!

For further reading, see Maintainability or look at Category:Games Workgroup, Category:Hobbies Workgroup, and Category:Media Workgroup.

Myth: since this is an academic project, our articles will have an academic bias.

Fact: our neutrality policy specifically requires that our articles feature the full range of opinion on a subject, including opinion that is outside the mainstream of expert opinion. The important thing is that all opinion be properly labelled and attributed. Besides, as we said, this is a hybrid expert-public project, not just an academic project; the input of the general public is a necessary check on the particular biases that sometimes plague particular disciplines. So far, this problem has not been much in evidence here.

For further reading, see Neutrality Policy.

Myth: the Citizendium is just Nupedia all over again. Or: it’s not different enough from Wikipedia.

Fact: this is a really egregious error made by those familiar enough with the history of Wikipedia and Nupedia to be “a little dangerous,” but not familiar enough to be accurate. Nupedia wasn’t collaborative; the Citizendium is. Nupedia was top-down in many respects (e.g., articles were assigned); we are bottom-up. (Nupedia itself is widely misunderstood, but that’s another matter.) Since Nupedia was allowed to wither and die, the comparison to Nupedia is used to suggest subtly that the Citizendium, too, will wither and die. This is now obviously false, since CZ has produced many thousands of article drafts, where Nupedia produced only a few hundred in the same amount of time, and because CZ has accelerated its growth significantly and will probably continue to do so.

As to Wikipedia, our main differences are that we use real names, make a special role for experts in the system, and require contributors to digitally sign a “social contract.” These differences really make a difference. We have no vandalism. We have very few bad articles, and many of our articles, even our “developing” articles, are excellent, despite our project’s toddlerhood; after five years, we will probably have left Wikipedia entirely in the dust, in terms of quality. We really are a different sort of community, one that takes a commitment to professional behavior seriously. We have our disputes—what vibrant community could be without them?—but they are very rarely the sort of bizarre, Kafkaesque affairs that are so common on Wikipedia.

For further reading, see We aren’t Wikipedia, Sanger’s Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir, and “Who’s more command-and-control, Wikipedia or CZ?” (a blog post).

Myth: there is no point to the Citizendium, because Wikipedia exists.

Fact: Wikipedia has uneven quality, and is extremely off-putting to most experts—indeed, to most people, period—who might otherwise contribute to it. We believe that, in the end, a lot more people will be comfortable with and attracted to the open, yet sensible CZ model. Some of us expect a tipping point to come in the next year or two, in which CZ will be flooded with more and more people who are now firmly persuaded that we are a force to contend with. There is no danger whatsoever of our giving up. Your work here will be well used as part of a resource with tens of thousands, and then probably hundreds of thousands, of articles.

Besides, we’re sure you’ll agree that the world can use more than one “go to” source for free reference information. We are the best hope for a real alternative!

For further reading, see Why Citizendium? and Workgroup Weeks.

Myth: most Citizendium articles are just copied from Wikipedia.

Fact: wrong. While we do allow people to copy Wikipedia articles here, we keep careful track of them, and by far most of our articles are completely original. Besides, many if not most of the articles that are sourced from Wikipedia are not counted in our CZ Live article count (currently 7,000). We strongly encourage people who copy their articles from Wikipedia to work on them here; we generally prefer that people start over, in order to give the public “added value.” If someone copies a Wikipedia article here without changing it, we won’t take credit for it, and we are more than willing to let others start over from scratch on the topic.

For further reading, see How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles and Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians.

Myth: our experts are called “constables.”

Fact: no, our experts are called “editors.” Constables are community moderators, who are mainly tasked with letting people into the system, and (only occasionally) enforcing our Professionalism policy (which says, basically, to be polite). Our constables are, as it turns out, some of the kindest and most welcome people here.

For further reading, see CZ:Constabulary.

Some other interesting facts you might not have known about us [edit]

Here are some more assorted facts that are not common knowledge, but which might put us in a new and exciting light for you:

• Despite being an active and open wiki, we have no vandalism, and little if any “trolling.” What other wiki can say that?
• Our well-developed articles feature subpages (here’s a list), which cover many other kinds of reference information you might want. An encyclopedia article, plus supporting reference material, is called a “cluster.”
• CZ articles are intended to be coherent narratives, not random grab-bags of facts.
• The person who led Wikipedia in its seminal first year, and designed many of its fundamental policies, is also leading CZ. Suffice it to say that he learns from his mistakes.
• It is easy to get a quick start. In our sign-up procedure, we don’t actually ask that much information about you. A human being will review your account request, and let you into the system typically within 24 hours, but often within just a few hours. Once you’ve signed up, it is easy to start a new article.
• We have a neutrality policy, which we have a better chance of living up to than the Other Place.
• Our Citizens are bound by a social contract. It’s not called “the Citizens’ Compendium” for nothing!
• Editorial policy decisions are settled by our Editorial Council, not by some bogus, and impossible, “consensus.”
• Larry Sanger has declared, when he first announced the Citizendium in September 2006, that he would leave his position as editor-in-chief within two to three years, in order to set a positive precedent. He is not “dictator for life.”
• We are not a Silicon Valley for-profit business. We are a non-profit, civic project that uses CC-by-sa as the license for our content, and our Citizens are essentially co-owners of the project.

Why all the errors about CZ? [edit]

So, why have there been so many errors passed around about CZ? And why are so many of our interesting innovations largely unknown? There are probably two reasons.

First, this is a genuinely innovative project. Nothing quite like it has ever existed before. The expert-public hybrid model and several other innovations are quite simply new. But most people are not able to take such novel things on board easily, because they think in terms of prototypes or examples. Therefore, to them, we are like a traditional academic project, like Nupedia, or like Wikipedia. In short, most people naturally think in terms of stereotypes, and so we have been stereotyped. No doubt that’s been the fate of most real innovators. This means only that we need to educate people–which this page attempts to do.

Second, a lot of Web 2.0 advocates, whose online temples are websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, are philosophically opposed to our basic policies. They tend to be radical egalitarians and closet anarchists. Therefore, they hate the idea that we ask people to take responsibility for their contributions and that we make a special role for experts. So it’s easy for our opponents to create straw men which they proceed to knock down. Here, the proper strategy is to answer criticisms quickly and show them to be, indeed, attacks on straw men.

This is from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Myths_and_Facts

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.

(more…)

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.