Citizendium Blog

John Seigenthaler, Sr., distinguished, long-time editor of The Tennessean and a founding editor of USA Today, made big news (in the wiki world, at least) by taking Wikipedia to task for the outrageously libellous article they had written about him.  Microsoft, being a giant evil corporation, could elicit no similar howls of outrage over Wikipedia’s biased articles about it; so it tried to resort to paying someone to edit articles that they perceive as biased.

Closer to home, I find it frustrating that I am constantly having to go to the Talk pages on the Wikipedia articles about me to correct people, who don’t know anything about me, or about the origin of Wikipedia, who are writing about me or the projects I’ve been involved in.  It’s actually led me to create a handy page on my own Web space that I can link to and tell people, “Just go look at this.”

Similarly, my colleague, the astrophysicist Dr. Bernard Haisch had an editorial published in the LA Times in which he complained, quite justifably, of his treatment at the hands of Wikipedians with an ax to grind.  As he explains, “if there are problems [with the biography Wikipedia has written about you], you should click on the discussion page and politely argue your case there, in the hope that some other self-appointed editor will consider the merits of your case and fix things for you.”

Ironically, Jimmy Wales too had a disagreement with the Wikipedia article about him, although on much thinner grounds.  It seems he didn’t want me to have any credit for the founding of Wikipedia, and he edited his own bio seven times to deny me that credit.  He thus ran afoul a rule of Wikipedia–what I, anyway, would insist is a rule–that the subjects of biographies should not edit articles about themselves.

At root there’s just one problem here.  The people who know most about and who are most affected by articles about themselves (or about their companies, projects, etc.) have no reliable and independent way to get their perspective on the claims made by Wikipedia out there.

We’ve had the idea for an innovative solution to this problem for the Citizendium for several months.  This afternoon, we started making this idea a reality.

(more…)

I’ve just finished a total rewriting of “How to get started with the Citizendium pilot.”  I thought the readers of this blog would be interested to see it; so here it is.

Welcome to the Citizendium pilot project!

This is a general orientation to contributing and becoming part of the community, for new contributors. This is a comprehensive summary, but it is just a summary; there are links to pages with more detail interspersed below (right now, many of these pages haven’t been started).

If you want a general introduction to the project, not just to contributing, see our introduction.

What makes us different?

We’re glad to have you here and hope you’ll join our friendly little (but growing!) community as an active contributor. What makes us different? Well, for one thing, we’re all contributing under our own real names. We take responsibility for our own work, and we like to think we’re a bit more civil than your average Internet community. For another thing, there are editors working right alongside authors. Editors can make decisions about articles in their areas of expertise, but for the most part, we collaborate just as folks do on Wikipedia–only, perhaps, with more collegiality. Editors also have a special task here that doesn’t exist on Wikipedia: they can approve articles in their areas of expertise.

We aren’t Wikipedia. On January 20, we started an experiment. Although we began the pilot project as a fork of Wikipedia, we decided to try “unforking,” i.e., deleting all of the inactive articles, leaving us with only articles that we’ve worked on. We want to develop our own community, with our own rules and guidelines that might, in fact, be quite different from Wikipedia’s. There are already a few differences, apart from the real names requirement and the presence of editors. For example, we do not use “in group” abbreviations like “POV.” We really do take our neutrality policy seriously. We’ll be revisiting all sorts of policies concerning categories, templates, and much else. Also, we don’t permit user boxes on user pages; nor do we permit personal essays linked from user pages. Finally, our project governance, which is still under rapid development, will be quite different. We have a number of non-negotiable policies, and new policies will not be adopted by an impossible “consensus” but by vote of representatives (selected perhaps by “choosing lots”).

(more…)

UPDATE: the articles are now deleted! 

After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki.  This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on.  The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.

This is an experiment.  In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all.  If we see more activity on the wiki, which is what I expect, then the Wikipedia articles will stay deleted.

Let me emphasize that we have had good success on the wiki so far, and I am very grateful to all the people, a few dozen of them, who have been regularly working on CZ articles over the past few months.  We merely think that we can do better, and this change might be a way to do better.  In any case, as we ramp up recruitment (still not started…) and after we go public, we will be expanding greatly, no matter what we do!

(more…)

That is a question I am posing on the CZ forum.  I think it is a very interesting question, because if the answers come back, “Yes, I would, because repairing mediocre Wikipedia content isn’t nearly as much fun as starting over from scratch would be,” then by golly I’m going to suggest that we jettison the idea of forking Wikipedia, delete all the unchanged Wikipedia articles, and have people start from scratch.

If you want to reply, do it there on the forum rather than here on this blog.

In an interview with Pallab Ghosh on BBC Radio 4 (Real player 8mins), Tim Berners-Lee argues for Web Science. Sir Tim says that engineering and social science disciplines need to come together to better understand and enable the benefits of the WWW.

TBL is concerned that the web’s unique social properties easily lead to bad outcomes, e.g. new generations of spam-like nuisances, undemocratic social-engineering, and importantly for Citizendium: the web has misinformation and unreliable information. The knight-of-the-web remains upbeat: with the right understanding he is confident that the web will deliver. Important questions remain: how can we predict what will happen? How do we stop the bad derailing the good?

The web is an open creative space with its own rules. A space where a small idea like a blog becomes the blogosphere, and that little idea of a wiki becomes the Wikipedia and the Citizendium.

Tim says that the future web will be a powerful place: a creative medium where the best thing is to be astonished at what others can do.

Peter Hitchmough

Through working as a Personnel Administrator (along with Sarah Tuttle, Ruth Ifcher, and Freddie Salsbury) and helping field some of email Citizendium receives, I’ve had a chance to watch some of the talent joining the pilot project. We’ve gotten some really fantastic applications- both in terms of sheer expertise and of enthusiasm for the project mission. I think the users (Citizens?) that are joining the project will be a great core group to help guide the community once we open things up to the general public. Basically, things look really good (and exciting) from where I’m standing.

On a personal note, it’s also been rewarding for me to watch the “recent changes” page on the wiki and see people I’ve interacted with over email start to edit articles on the wiki. Citizens, if you haven’t already, check out http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges - it’s not only neat to watch but it also gives some good starting points for collaboration with other people working on the wiki. And hopefully over the weekend we can get completely caught up with the flood of applications (we’re very close)… I do apologize to those applicants we haven’t contacted yet. It’ll happen very soon, for sure.

In the longer term, one Personnel issue that I think the Citizendium project and community will need to address is how much of a factor work experience should be in qualifying to be an editor. It’s obviously important since there’s a lot of expertise outside of academia, and a tendency to draw editors only from academia will produce an unbalanced encyclopedia– but how should work experience be balanced against academic experience? A Ph.D is just a proxy for expertise, but it’s probably a pretty good one. What types of work experience might be equivalently good proxies for expertise? What are the experiential, private sector equivalents to academic publications and original research? I certainly don’t have any answers (I suspect Larry is at least two steps ahead of me here, as he often is), but I’ll sign off with a few observations on expertise that won’t be news to anyone involved in this project yet might bear repeating.

The first is that expertise is not uniformly distributed between fields. In some areas, the vast majority of people who know anything about the subject seem to be in or closely tied to academia. In other areas, cutting-edge expertise seems to be more concentrated in industry or business.

The second is that work experiences in industry, business, and professional areas often lead to different kinds of expertise than does research in academia.

And, to wax philosophical, I think the issue of identifying experts outside of academia is a challenging problem with many edge cases, but clearly isn’t a fundamentally hard problem of the type that doesn’t have a real answer: as a professor of mine used to say, “The existence of dawn and dusk does not preclude the existence of day and night.”

Well, I’ve taken far too long to post this draft, and it’s still not finished. It does not reflect the excellent feedback I’ve received on it from some people, simply because I haven’t had time. (Apologies to the people who have commented, you know who you are.)

Citizendium Policy Outline

This is a work in progress. Therefore, I hope the Wikipedia article about the Citizendium will not say tomorrow that CZ will have features X, Y, and Z. These are in most cases negotiable policy ideas, a place for the invitees to the policy project to work from.

We will be working through this set of proposals on Citizendium-L and the Citizendium Forums.

The most current version will be available on the pilot project wiki. To see that, you’ll have to be a member of the pilot project. If I get a chance I’ll post a copy (or someone else will, if I can get someone to take me up on my offer to become CZ webmaster!) of the latest policy outline-in-progress from time to time.