Citizendium Blog

In an Inside Higher Ed column, “Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia,” Mark A. Wilson claims of Wikipedia, “The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has become reality…”  Wilson calls on college professors to get involved in Wikipedia, using their own real names.  One has to wonder if this is an April Fool’s gag, but it’s a pretty sober-sounding piece.

Here’s is my response, which I added to the IHE comments:

I’m Larry Sanger, and this is false. Please do not use my name to encourage professors to get involved in Wikipedia. My vision has always been for a maximally reliable information resource—not one that is controlled by faceless, often hostile, often irresponsible people, many of them teenagers and college students.

Over the years there have been repeated calls to professors to get involved and improve Wikipedia. Few have heeded the call, and those who have have come back pretty consistently saying, “This place is nuts.” Indeed, long ago—in 2002—I seriously considered starting up a Wikipedia “Sifter” project (you can still read about this in archives) in which experts would approve Wikipedia articles. At the time I was told by some of the more active Wikipedians, essentially: “Don’t expect those alleged experts to get any special treatment from us. They’re no better than the rest of us, and they shouldn’t get all uppity and act like they are!” It then became clear to me that Wikipedia simply had no place for experts. I could not in good conscience recommend that any serious knowledge professional participate in Wikipedia. I still cannot.

Inside Higher Ed and this columnist would do better to acquaint themselves with a project that actually gives college professors, and other experts, a modest but real stake in guidance of content decisions and management of content policy: the Citizendium. I can’t fault the author for not mentioning us, as we are new and, with only 5,800 articles, still unproven. But a positive passing mention would help to create a better alternative to Wikipedia. Please spread the word.

Sign up here. It’s a good time to sign up; tomorrow is our monthly Write-a-Thon, which is always very lively!

Let me temper the above comments with a few additional remarks:

• I have long maintained, and I still do, that Wikipedia is very useful, and that most of the people working on Wikipedia are excellent hands.  I do not mean to dismiss Wikipedia, or the work of most Wikipedians, wholesale.  I simply want to quash any notion that I can be associated with a call to experts to descend on Wikipedia, which I think is a bad idea.
• Perhaps I should also clarify that the significant advantage of the Citizendium is not merely that it makes a place for experts.  That is only one of our differences (and advantages).  But it is the difference that is relevant to any suggestion that experts get involved in Wikipedia.
• I understand that there are certain topics, especially more technical and mathematical topics, where Wikipedians behave themselves rather better and where expert knowledge is accorded an appropriate (not fawning, of course) respect.  I don’t mean to deny this, and well done to all involved for their success with articles on such topics.

In a few weeks, a small group and I will be announcing a major new educational project, free and non-profit, with very significant funding from a retired businessman.  We will be meeting in New York City early next month, talking to some potential advisers and funders.  I am sorry to have to be so vague.  For now, suffice it to say that everyone will benefit, but school children most of all — and the effort will answer the petition I mentioned earlier, which I hope you will sign if you have not done so already.  That’s why I want to mention this, even without any detail: there are philanthropists who will get behind that sort of project.  I know, because I have met one; his generosity inspired that petition in the first place.  I also had to let out a little of the excitement!  The idea is a corker!

If you agree with this appeal, please sign this petition of support!

This is a public appeal to philanthropists who are supporting the education of children.  The author (Dr. Larry Sanger) is co-founder of Wikipedia and editor-in-chief of the new Citizendium.  Originally posted March 22, rewritten March 24.  This petition was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog, and elsewhere.

We (the undersigned) have a simple, deeply powerful suggestion: “liberate” the best educational content.  Buy or commission truly excellent content, aimed at school children (K-12).  Then post it online for free.  Let children reap the rewards of your generosity forever.  Just think:

• Free, top-grade textbooks about everything, free to everyone online
• Free, in-depth, expert-designed educational software
• Free, high-quality educational videos

Just imagine the possibilities of good this would do for the whole world.

Isn’t this already happening?  No.  Most educational content you find for free online lacks either detail or high quality.  But we want the best for our children: for that, we still must and do pay.  There is not much truly excellent free educational content online.

Why not?  We do not know.  Perhaps because those who create and support educational content generally view the Internet either as a dangerous competitor or as an adolescent free-for-all.  Perhaps.  But also think of the Internet as an amazingly efficient and cheap distribution mechanism.  You (philanthropists) can single-handedly use it to provide curricula to the entire world, for free.  You choose the type of content, the subject, the grade level, the authors, everything.  You need not ask anyone’s permission.  If you spend the money, content will appear online — and millions of children will benefit.  It is up to you!

Let us put this in perspective.  Back in 1960, if a billionaire wanted to give the best possible textbook to every child in the world, that would have been too costly even for the richest billionaire.  But no longer.  Even those with small fortunes can provide a textbook (etc.) to everyone with Internet access–hundreds of millions of children.  Philanthropists, you could do this.

You have been spending millions of dollars annually to improve education, but we believe you have largely ignored this key opportunity.  Sometimes the simplest ways are the best.  If you want to answer, “But the problems with U.S. schools do not have to do with our textbooks or content,” we might agree with you.  Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else.  We do not offer an answer to that.

But this opportunity is “low-hanging fruit.”  High-quality, free content undeniably and directly benefits the world, the entire world, through the magic of the Internet.  Educational content gives knowledge to children.  Why not pay for it?  What is stopping you?  After all, it is not only collective “Web 2.0″ efforts that can liberate content.  You have a fantastic mechanism for distributing free curricula to virtually every school child in the U.S., and the whole world can benefit, to boot.  Why not use it?

Regards and deep thanks in advance,

The Undersigned

P.S. Follow-ups to the petition will be posted both on this blog and the mailing list SharedKnowing.  Sign up to that mailing list if you want to be sure to receive info about how this petition fares.

[Digg this] - [Vote on Slashdot] 

Thanks very much to ECT News/LinuxInsider for this interview, in which I got the opportunity to explain what makes the Citizendium different (probably nothing new for most readers of this blog), but also to explain (and mostly praise) many other online encyclopedia projects.  One project I neglected to mention was the nascent Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, edited by my former Digital Universe colleague, Dr. Bernard Haisch, and built on the model of the Encyclopedia of Earth that I helped engineer — though both differ significantly from CZ.  Unless plans have changed, both are intended to be the first components of a Digital Universe Encyclopedia.

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.

Nate Anderson has actually done his homework for his recent Ars Technica analysis of us.  He’s evidently read enough about us that he is among a very small group — outside our properly self-critical group of active Citizens – that has produced a contribution to the interesting debate about CZ’s merits and future.  Here’s a reply.

(more…)

It seems that everyone is talking about Google’s new Knol project — the Citizendium has got a tremendous amount of press as a result.  So I wanted to add another note on the topic.

At the Citizendium we are motivated by one thing only: to become the best knowledge base that Earth has ever seen.  We believe we have, over the long term, a better chance at this than any other project.

If Knol were to reveal a genuine expert contributor that was not already an expert editor on CZ whom CZ would approve as an editor, it would be my pleasure to welcome that person to become part of our new knowledge society.

What our expert editors discover is that the expert-guided collaborative environment on the Citizendium is unprecedented, remarkably productive, and really without parallel.

Delivering one’s expert knowledge with the input from a general knowledge community helps all our editors to assess — and improve — the ways in which their knowledge is stored and communicated.

Only the Citizendium does that.

We are by no means complacent, and we intend fully to watch Google’s new Knol project.  We will utilize constructively any contributor that will genuinely add to the world’s knowledge store by inviting them to join us a CZ contributor.

Creating a new knowledge society is what the Citizendium is doing and every genuine expert should be an editor on CZ.  Moreover, everyone who wants to work as part of an open, public project shoulder-to-shoulder with such experts should join us as well.

What are knols? No, they aren’t Dungeons & Dragons monsters, or small hills, they’re purportedly “units of knowledge,” and they are encyclopedia articles Google is inviting people to write. So Google is entering head-to-head competition with Wikipedia — not so much with the Citizendium (thankfully, we have a different niche: quality) — making things much more interesting. (Of course, philosophers have had a zillion different names for “units of knowledge,” and none of them could be used to describe a Web page.)

A reporter asked me some questions about Google’s announcement, which I answered by e-mail.  Here are my answers.

What is your assessment of the Knol initiative?

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what many others have done. Countless websites already exist that invite signed essays and information (remember h2g2.com?) and other content for public rating. Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract many genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a “knol” and be compared and ranked by “the crowd” — not by expert peers — is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish. Still, other Web companies have had reasonably good success making money with such Web services, and Google might make a lot of money with theirs.

Second, lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. Many of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project, particularly with Google Ads appearing on the articles. It does not appear to be in the spirit of the free culture movement. Still, it is good that Google has decided to make ads optional.

Third, lack of collaboration. (See below under your last question.)

Do you think it addresses your concerns about Wikipedia, namely, that expert opinion should have a larger role in shaping knowledge?

Nope.

On the one hand, Knol would be a very different project from Wikipedia, first and foremost because it is not strongly collaborative. For that reason, the governance problems will be different and probably less difficult. (Google is wrong to think, however, that they can avoid making any editorial decisions. Such decisions will be forced upon them by people who try to abuse the system.)

On the other hand, Knol is apt to produce precisely the same sort of uneven content, with many of the same abuses, that Wikipedia has. Without actual editors, the same sort of problems about misleading and damaging information are apt to plague Knol. While I know that many people do not think that such problems are serious, we at the Citizendium do. And a growing part of the general public is coming to agree with us. In fact, producing a more mature, responsible source of information is one of our main motivations for working so hard under our new model.

How will Knol affect your own efforts with Citizendium?

The problem with the Internet is not the lack of information; it is the lack of findable high-quality information.  Knol does not appear to be a serious attempt to solve this problem, but the Citizendium is.

So Knol is unlikely to change our efforts with the Citizendium at all. In fact, we are soon going to announce a new Creative Commons license, and in January we will turn toward a strong, concerted push toward “CZ 2.0.” This will involve adding a adding a Board of Directors and, generally, expanding our governance so as to empower many different people and groups to develop the project more proactively. We expect to grow strongly — and quite possibly explosively — in 2008. It is worth pointing out that the Citizendium actually produced slightly more words (about five million) in its first year than Wikipedia did in its first year. And our words were, needless to say, of much higher quality than Wikipedia’s were then.

Is this a project Citizendium might collaborate with? Or is Google’s project at cross purposes with your own?

A kind of collaboration seems possible. Obviously, the Citizendium provides two important things that the Knol model is missing: expert guidance and strong collaboration. I’ve already discussed Knol’s likely weakness in attracting experts. Another reason I am not particularly worried about Knol is that the quality and depth of encyclopedia articles written collaboratively by a huge global community, especially under expert guidance, will eventually beat out anything produced by individuals, regardless of their ability. Frankly, Knol is reinventing the wheel; the Citizendium is the future.

If Google allows Knol’s contributors to retain their copyright — something they would do well to comment on — then those writers could always bring their content to the Citizendium to be developed further, collaboratively. Maybe the only way Knol might collaborate with Citizendium is this: Knol allows their contributors to link prominently to a Citizendium article, as a locale where those articles could be developed collaboratively. If Knol removed the Google Ads from all articles that were being developed further in collaboration with the Citizendium, we might be interested in developing such a relationship. Of course, I’d have to check with the Citizendium community, for which I cannot speak definitively on such an important matter (it isn’t a dictatorship).

Thanks for asking my opinion.

P.S. It’s not lost on me that this is similar to http://www.whatsyourarticle.org/

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.

I suppose I should feel grateful for this mention in Wired Magazine, in spite of the terminally idiotic concept and silly comparison. 

I should also be grateful for that outdated statistic.  2,300 articles?  Anyone curious enough to look at the website will see that we’ve nearly doubled that by now…