Citizendium Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!).

A “column.”

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

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

(more…)

Just a brief post about a thought that came to me.

Some people might be a little puzzled why I am pushing for higher quality in online content, and why I am not content with “good enough.”  There is actually a fairly simple reason, actually.  It is that collecting quality content increases efficiency.

“It’s the quality, stupid,” or something like that, will soon be on everyone’s lips and fingertips.

There are tremendous amounts of data online, but the vast quantities make it difficult to find the best: the highest quality data is hidden among mountains of cruft.  Most of us specifically want the highest quality data — we want the most authoritative introduction to a topic, the highest quality video, the most recent and accurate statistics, the least biased and best-informed product ratings, etc.  And some of us spend huge amounts of time looking for the highest quality data; I often do.  Therefore, a website like the Citizendium that aims to aggregate the best information online would — if successful — render that sort of searching unnecessary.  Whatever sort of search-for-quality can be aggregated, we’ll aggregate it.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that merely declaring that you are trying to achieve high quality doesn’t make it so.  I don’t think that the Wikipedia model, without a credible vetting process, will ever do this job.  I very much doubt Knol will, either, given the similarity of its plan to so many other mediocre online content-creation projects.  In short, neither Wikipedia nor Knol is likely to remove the necessity for huge amounts of research for better information.  They’ll simply add more and more cruft that one must wade through in one’s search.

The Citizendium, on the other hand, might be different.  Massively detailed and authoritative articles and clusters might, once and for all, create single go-to locations for every topic, cutting down research to a fraction.  By tapping into the global community of intellectuals, we have a better chance to do this than even Britannica or other reference publishers.  We could achieve this goal this by aggregating, essentially the effort of serious researchers — which can, of course, include students and regular smart folks — but which ultimately must be guided by experts.  Even if we don’t get it right, someone eventually will, because it is possible and because there is such a huge potential demand for it.  I look forward to that day!

If you support this vision, I hope you will help move the Citizendium toward it — and expect improvements in the project in every dimension, beginning, in a few days, with the announcement of our Creative Commons license.

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.

It is interesting that, if you do the Google search for “biology,” you won’t find the fine Citizendium article on the subject.  It is actually better than the #1 result (the Wikipedia article), and it is certainly of more interest and use for people who do the “biology” search than many items in the top 100.

This alone demonstrates that there is something wrong with Google.  But what, precisely?  What is Google doing wrong, and how could they do better?

If you don’t know how to stay on top of your e-mail, and you have a half hour to learn how, this is very cool.  I don’t know if it works (or if it will work for you), but it makes sense to me.

I’d appreciate your suggestions about how to stay on top of e-mail, if you have any!

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

(more…)

In a case that could have a huge impact on the legal situation of online collaborative communities–including the Citizendium–golf pro Fuzzy Zoeller is suing the company with the IP address that showed up when an anonymous Wikipedia contributor defamed him.

An uncomfortably strong argument can be made that Zoeller deserves legal relief if he has been defamed.  Wikipedia’s reach is now enormous, and if indeed it has gained a reputation, whether deserved or not, as a source of reasonably reliable information, and it defames someone for any significant length of time, such defamation can do very real harm to a person’s reputation.  Some of Wikipedia’s more irrational defenders will wish to deny this.  But no matter how much you love Wikipedia, you cannot credibly deny that Wikipedia is capable of very real and very harmful defamation.

(more…)

Over the last 48 hours, a vandal or group of vandals has been maliciously assaulting the wiki.

I am not sure what the appeal to vandalism is. Perhaps it is like a rock star trashing a hotel room. Either way, gathering enemies achieves a sort of relevance. So to the vandals…thank you for making us relevant.

When this project was created, we foresaw the possibility of attacks and prepared our hosting provider (Steadfast.net) to harden both the box and switch against attacks.

Hardening the wiki is a different matter. Each method used must be carefully chosen to avoid CPU, memory and bandwidth bottlenecks. What is in place now is stop-gap, but I believe it will survive slashdotting. The new software stops all bot/script activity at a cost of logging a lot of data.

Sadly, anti-spam/anti-vandal software solutions are not mature or even in alpha stages. Obvious solutions are lacking, such as throttling. I have not been able to find a CAPTCHA extension for new account creation and may have to write a homegrown one.

Stopping vandalism requires time. Time is money. I hate burning money. Like IRC in the early days, when you could split servers and create spoofs…the code will just get better inevitably.

-Jason Potkanski