Citizendium Blog

As anyone very familiar with Wikipedia and other wikis knows, no authors are credited on most wiki encyclopedia article pages.  The Citizendium, however, uses real names; they are found in the article histories, though, not on the article pages themselves.  So we are in a position to give people “byline” credit and real-world recognition for their contributions, where Wikipedia and many other typical Web 2.0 projects are not.  As a result, for quite some time, there has been a movement among some Citizens — how many and how representative, I dare not say — to give a full rundown about who has done for each article.

I believe there is serious danger lurking here: to honor people in different amounts based on how much they have worked on an article would have the general tendency to lead to authorship disputes, which would be a huge drain on both time and smooth social relations.  More importantly, however, I think it would tend to make the project less robustly collaborative: it would encourage a culture of credit, where we now have the typical culture of strong collaboration that is associated closely with wikis.  In other words, identifying people as “the lead author” or “the lead authors” of an article would tend to make them guard “their” article more closely, and tend to make others more wary and more likely to ask “permission” to contribute.

I am, however, always game to try new things, as long as they are in a form that I think won’t lead to total disaster.  So I produced a version of the general idea of contributor lists where, among other things, (1) there must be five contributors on the contributor list, if any them is to be credited in the contributor list; (2) they are to be listed in alphabetical order and otherwise not specially singled out for how much work they have done on the article; (3) they are listed under the heading “Contributors” and a message just below their names reads, “CZ is an open collaboration.  Please join these people in developing this article!”; and (4) one may get contributor credit for writing just two substantive sentences.

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The bottom line: our aim is quality, not quantity.  We already know that “crowds” can produce massive quantities of content.  Big deal.  The Citizendium is about developing our massive quantities of content into works of stunning quality, over the long term.  We have a better shot than anyone at doing this.

Many people have essentially asked me, “Since Wikipedia is ‘good enough,’ what is the point of the Citizendium?” The answer, of course, is that Wikipedia isn’t good enough, and given its policies, it is highly unlikely that it ever will be. More to the point, over the long haul, the Citizendium can do better.

But that’s always my reply. It now occurs to me that the underlying insight has not been emphasized enough. As I look at various encyclopedia articles — and my own writings — I am struck by how much work there is to do, to perfect them. For example, to find exactly the right reference, and place it at exactly the right place, is very difficult and time-consuming. Most people don’t spend the time needed to get it exactly right. A work is hailed as brilliant if it merely doesn’t get anything too badly wrong. Well, the great thing about the Citizendium is that we have the (growing) community and the (developing) policies that is allowing us to grow not just another encyclopedia, but a continuously improving encyclopedia. That is the brilliance of our plan.

The day we look forward to is not the day when we have millions of articles, but the day when serious professionals say, “The Citizendium articles in my area are of such stunning quality that I can’t imagine how they could be improved. They have been worked and reworked by hundreds, or thousands, of specialists, in my field. They contain, of course, no known factual errors. The coverage is complete; the tiniest details are covered in more specialized articles. The writing reflects consistently superb craftsmanship: accessible to the college student on more basic topics (without removing accuracy), and clear on more advanced topics. The citations are brilliantly chosen, always reflecting the best (original, or most authoritative) sources. They do not favor any side in any controversy, but provide full details of the debate, so that the reader can be fully informed so as to make up his or her own mind. The bibliographies and external links, fully annotated, list virtually every credible source on their topics. The other supplementary material, on subpages, is of equally high quality. In short, the only reason to change the articles (and whole clusters) now is that the field itself changes.”

An article is one thing. A magisterial article is quite another. The difference is huge and hugely important.

It’s a long road from here to there. Wikipedia is very, very far from that point, and again I doubt it will ever reach that point; if I thought they could, I wouldn’t have started CZ. We, however, have a chance!

In fact, in view of this, you might well ask yourself: what is the point of Wikipedia? It’s never going to get past a certain level of mediocrity; that’s one of the main reasons I stopped working on it a while ago. I think that, as the years go by, we are going to find more and more people asking themselves that — and coming to CZ. Because it’s not just about quantity. It’s about quality. And we have the nascent community and policies in place that actually have a chance to achieve the sort of high quality a global collaboration of scholars can achieve.

Mind you, I still think it’s all right if we start with stubs; we have to start somewhere. But we should also keep our eyes on the prize, because our substantial promise of achieving that sort of stunning quality is really what makes it all worthwhile.

If you are interested in how Citizendium works and how to make it work better, read on.

This is certainly shaping up to be another successful Write-a-Thon – by new article count, far and away the most successful, as we’re closing in on 100 new articles. I am not sure but I think it’s also the most successful in terms of number of edits per day; we’ve had 500 edits in the last eight hours (as I write this).

Obviously, Stub Week has something to do with this. And this gives me ideas (uh oh, look out). Actually, the conjunction of several purported insights is very suggestive:

1. Write-a-Thon plus Stub Week equals very high activity and record numbers of articles per day. No one is surprised by this, either, I suspect. Hmm…
2. CZ has, after one year (half of which was in a private pilot project), amassed more words than Wikipedia did in its first year (some 5 million). I estimate that our average (mean, not median) length article is six times longer than Wikipedia’s was in early 2002. I recall that, as I touted Wikipedia’s success in our first press release and in the project’s first public speech (to a Stanford class), I was embarrassed by the preponderance of very short, low-quality articles. But I also knew that incrementalism (doing a task in bits and pieces, rather than all at once) is what got people involved…
3. Like it or not, number of articles is what people pay attention to, more than length or quality of articles. We are supposed to have done not so well because we have “only” 3,400 articles…
4. We’ve got something like 2,200 “CZ Authors,” but only about 10% edit the wiki every month. I know that this is par for the course for projects like ours (the long tail and all that), but I can’t shake the feeling that we could be getting a lot more of these people involved. Why go to the trouble of creating an account (it is some trouble, after all) if you don’t intend to edit the wiki at all?
5. As is well known, people get involved in a project (or any activity) if they experience easy and satisfying success early on.

These thoughts together suggest a certain line of argument in favor of stub articles and incrementalism.

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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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I am hereby calling for formal (or semi-formal), well-reasoned position statements, from anyone – including people outside the Citizendium community — about what licensing scheme the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) should use. The issues are covered in an incomplete and semi-systematic way on three separate pages here (under “License”):

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Summaries_of_policy_arguments

There are many interesting issues involved, but it boils down to one: under what license should we release articles that we have created ourselves? (Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are now available under the GFDL.)

I am giving us a deadline: we will have made the final decision on the license by November 15, two months from now. So the essays should be received by, let’s say, October 20 — if you want the decisionmakers to be able to absorb them.

Citizens may post links to their essays here:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:License_Essays

If you like, you can make your essay a subpage of that page. Please don’t make your essay a subpage of your user page (that’s actually contrary to user page rules).

Non-Citizens can host the essay yourself, or send it to us and we will host it, in HTML, PDF, or MediaWiki form. Send links to me (or another Citizen) to post.

Because this is an issue that deeply affects the future and vitality of the project as a whole, I will be taking a strong personal interest in it. I myself will be writing an essay summing up my own views, but I would like to have the benefit of your essays, first!

Please forward this important call for essays to potentially interested parties. I personally will be putting it only on Citizendium-L, Citizendium-Editors, and the blog.

Leslie Brooks has a short piece up asking “where the hell are the women in the Citizendium project?” I’m not impressed by the tone of the piece itself, but I think it is a good question (we do have more male than female contributors). Really, I think the question should be expanded to women and wikis in general– I would imagine that Wikipedia may be equally or moreso biased toward male contributors, but it’s just easier to tally up contributions by gender when people are editing under their real names. Regardless, engaging both male and female contributors is something we really need to think about.

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Five announcements here.

(1) Big Cleanup complete

I’m very happy to announce that as of yesterday, the Big Cleanup is complete! It took a little over two months. Not too bad, I think. Thanks again to the people who went through literally thousands of articles systematically and cleaned them up. This has arguably changed the nature of CZ–decidedly for the better. The advantages are listed on CZ:The_Big_Cleanup.

(2) Unchecklisted articles remain

There are still some unchecklisted articles, however–these are articles that were created since we started the Big Cleanup. See: CZ:Unchecklisted_Articles Please feel free to sign up on that page to “checklist” the rest of the articles.

(3) New guideline: always add the checklist to new articles

We can now install a new guideline, which I assume no one will have a problem with. Here it is. NEW GUIDELINE: whenever you create a new article, or you notice that someone else has created a new article, add the article checklist to the talk page. Note that the checklist can now be found conveniently in the sidebar, under “project pages.” I’ve added this guideline to a few different pages in the appropriate places on the wiki.

(4) Next steps?

Now that the Big Cleanup is done and most of our articles are checklisted, we can now use the results for all sorts of new Big Initiatives. So what’s the next Big Thing? Citizens, please look at this Board and make suggestions, or state your opinions about what our top priorities should be next.

(5) Lots of statistics graphs

I just wanted to point out the fine work of Aleksander Stos in creating this helpful statistics page. Thanks, Alex. There’s much else to announce, but it will have to wait until later.

I posted recently on the mailing lists — it’s important enough to put here, too.

All,

Please read this — this is a potentially project-changing mail.

I had a bit of a brainstorm recently. The bottom line is: if you’re interested in taking charge of some new workgroup, issue, or project, write up a plan for yourself, and send it to the Executive Committee (via me). We want to hear from you. Details below.

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1. We aim to create a giant free general encyclopedia.
2. We’re managed by a nonprofit.
3. We use MediaWiki software.
4. We use wiki methods of strong collaboration. We don’t sign articles or even have lead authors; we strongly encourage everybody to “be bold” and mix it up.
5. No credentials are needed to participate (as an author).
6. We still rely on “soft security” to a great extent. We mostly trust people and solve what few behavioral problems we’ve seen as they arise.
7. We are committed to a neutral, unbiased presentation of information.
8. We have similar naming conventions, and some other similar conventions.
9. Quite a few of our articles came from Wikipedia.
10. The community and project has been organized by the same person who organized Wikipedia.

Quite similar, it seems. But…

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