Citizendium Blog

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

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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.

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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

Text of a speech I gave at the Handelsblatt IT Congress: “How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals.”

Here are a few bits.

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Reported at ZDNet’s Between the Lines Blog:

Google’s Marissa Mayer: Speed wins by ZDNet’s Dan Farber — Marissa Mayer of Google gave a testimonial to speed. Her key insight for the crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit is that “slow and steady doesn’t win the race.” Speed is a huge component and big market driver of Web 2.0, she said. It turns out that fractions of a second difference in returning the main page affects the total time spent on the site and whether users come back for more. For example, when the Google Maps home page was put on a diet, shrunk from 100K to about 70K to 80K, traffic was up 10 percent the first week and in the following three weeks, 25 percent more, she said.

During the 0.5 second a Google search query spends “on site” it touches 300 to 700 servers around the US.

The phenomenom is multiplicative: enabling a faster learning curve. Instant gratification helps drive people to become expert users faster. “If you have each transaction take less time, you have expert users more satisfied. You want lots of small and fast interactions if speed is important,” she added.

It looks like Citizendium should strive for speedy serving of key pages like the Main Page and search results. After all, we want to attract and keep users don’t we? Beyond that, interaction is often piecemeal, with users fluttering from page to page to find answers - a different experience to book reading. The essence of Citizendium is the “text and the wikilink” - the more seamless the onsite navigation the better the experience.

Peter Hitchmough