Citizendium Blog

There’s a rather positive description of the Citizendium, and especially Eduzendium, in an April 28 article in Inside Higher Ed.  Eduzendium co-ordinator Sorin Matei is quoted.  The project is compared to Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Knol.  The question is: which system is best for scholars?  Well — let a thousand flowers bloom and we’ll see in 5-10 years which are prettiest.

CZ is also positively mentioned in a well-reviewed new book by Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

As many people have pointed out and discovered, Encyclopedia Britannica has been made free for bloggers and wiki writers.  (Here’s a take on that from a Citizendium editor — John Dennehy, who is also behind a CUNY experiment with Eduzendium that seems to have gone pretty well.  Do we have microbes?  We’re absolutely disease-ridden.)

The notorious Valleywag blog reported that the Wikimedia Foundation is “gerrymandering” its board, and as my name came up, I appeared on the scene, Voldemort-like (at least to read the post).  It seems that the Wikimedia Foundation has reserved a seat for a “Community Founder.”  Hmm.  As Valleywag says, “Here’s an amusing thought: Why not have Larry Sanger, whom some say has a better claim to founding Wikipedia than Wales, bid for the spot in December, when Wales’s term expires?”

Yeeah.  Well, I’ll be busy.  Very, very busy.  We’re going to announce a major new educational content project in the next month or two, and between that, the encyclopedia project, and other stuff, my plate is full.  Besides, Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years.  Uh,

Some Dutch filmmakers made a documentary (48 minutes), in English, titled “The Truth according to Wikipedia.”  It’s pretty good, but I’m too close to the story to be able to offer anything like an objective opinion.  It’s pretty heavy on Andrew Keen and his over-the-top yet strangely entertaining criticism of the Internet.  I’m in there, talking about Wikipedia; no mention of CZ, unfortunately, but you can’t ask for everything.

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.

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.

What may be the first CZ article to be cited in the mainstream media is “Stravenue.”  It is referred to in this article in the Arizona Daily Star. Here is the relevant sentence:

An entry on a user-generated online encyclopedia, Citizendium, says these roads were designated as stravenues by the developers of the subdivisions.

That’s a start!

I’d like to point out that this is an unusual sort of topic. I believe that, while we should encourage people to write on core topics, we should nevertheless remain open to a very wide assortment of topics. Translation: I am an unrepentant inclusionist.

Google’s “Comments by People in the News” posted a tightened-up version of my blog post in response to Mick O’Leary’s badly-researched and intemperate attack on the Citizendium:

Mick O’Leary, writing for Information Today/ECT in the article “Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble,” gets the Citizendium very badly wrong. Mr. O’Leary could easily have interviewed me to check his facts, but he didn’t. Indeed I wonder whether he even looked at the website at all.

First, are we “stumbling”?

We are not. Mr. O’Leary’s remarks are shot through with errors — even in the title. So far from “stumbling,” we are growing, and indeed accelerating by all measures, including the number of active contributors and the number of articles started per day. I get the impression that he would like us to stumble, but we are not accommodating him.

In this respect it is extremely misleading to lump Citizendium in with Veropedia. The Citizendium is more active by about two orders of magnitude. We average well over 500 edits per day, have 40-50 different editors and authors working on the website each day, and over 200 different contributors each month. By contrast, Veropedia features only a dozen of log entries per day, which amount to someone copying an article over from Wikipedia. And, in fact, it does not use named, verified experts.

…

Read the whole thing.

Observing this exchange, Deep Jive Interests points out that I was able to make a quick rebuttal by using Google’s “Comments by People in the News,” which is a good new thing under the sun:

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The Citizendium Makes it Easier for Authors to Submit Articles

You Can Now Mail in Your Articles

The Citizendium now offers authors the opportunity to submit articles written in their word processor. A Citizendium human Wiki-Converter will convert the document in the MediaWiki mark up code so that the article can appear in the Citizendium as a regular encyclopedia article, complete with images, tables, notes and citation-sources (references).

For the present, the Citizendium will accept articles written in Microsoft ‘.doc’ format, and will accept also ‘.rtf’ files, which most word processors can generate.

Authors send their articles as attachments to the following mailing list; authors submitting articles may submit to the mailing list without ‘subscribing’ to it:

cz-wikiformat@mail.citizendium.org 

In the body of the email, authors may add any comments regarding their article. A member of the wiki-converting team will contact you confirming that your article has been accepted for conversion, and will keep you posted on the conversion progress. Expect some queries from time-to-time, for example for clarification.

After your article has been converted and posted to the Citizendium, you may want to make edits. You can do that yourself, for minor edits, using the Citizendium’s editor. Go to the article page, click the edit tab. The editor box will be in MediaWiki code, but you can easily make edits by following the code format you will see already there. If you have extensive edits, as in the case of a re-write of a section of the article, submit the section to the mailing list and indicate the title of the article it belongs to, and the name of the Wiki-Converter.

To submit articles, you must sign-up as an author in the Citizendium, if you have not already done so. You do that by filling in a simple web form. If you wish to learn more about the author role, see The Author Role.Also check out the Citizendium ‘Main Page’ for more information.

If you have questions, post them to the mailing list. Someone will get back to you with an answer. The Citizendium aims at credibility and quality, not just quantity, in its articles. Both the general public and credentialed experts are encouraged to get involved. We use our real names, not pseudonyms. We’re both collegial and congenial.

ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES:

• cz-wikiformat@mail.citizendium.org

LINKS:

• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:The_Author_Role
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Wiki-converting (home page for the Wiki-Converter project)

PRESS CONTACT INFORMATION:

Prof. Anthony Sebastian (leader of the Wiki-Converter project)

Professor of Medicine

University of California San Francisco

Anthony_Sebastian@msn.com

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Anthony.Sebastian

Dr. Larry Sanger

Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium; co-founder of Wikipedia

sanger@citizendium.org

http://www.larrysanger.org/

One of the worst “news analysis” articles ever written about the Citizendium, going under the title “Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble,” was posted this morning to ECT News Network sites, including LinuxInsider, TechNewsWorld, E-Commerce Times, and MacNewsWorld.  Here is a reply that I submitted to the columnist’s editors, to the LinuxInsider talk page (where it hasn’t appeared yet), as well as Google’s “Comments by People in the News” service.

To the editors:

The characterizations of the Citizendium in the article “Would-Be Wikipedia Replacements Stumble” by Mick O’Leary, writing for Information Today/ECT, are either false or deeply misleading, and in any case journalistically irresponsible. This article does a huge disservice to the hundreds of people who contribute to the Citizendium each month, as I will demonstrate. Mr. O’Leary should have actually interviewed me–which he easily could have done. But I was never contacted. It appears that he had already made up his mind and the facts were not going to stand in his way.

To comment on a few of his poorly-researched remarks:

“This occurs through a highly convoluted process for submitting, reviewing and approving changes, in which editors and authors collaborate in an intricate hierarchical relationship.”

This is simply and proveably untrue, and belies any understanding whatsoever on Mr. O’Leary’s part about how the Citizendium actually works. The process of making changes to Citizendium articles is virtually identical to that of making changes on Wikipedia: it is a wiki. You can see this by a casual glance at our recent changes page. As Wikipedia’s main architect, I am not about to change parts of the Wikipedia model that work. The ease of contribution is the same in the Citizendium and Wikipedia.

Furthermore, it is highly misleading to say that there is “an intricate hierarchical relationship” between Citizendium editors and authors. In fact, they work side-by-side on the wiki, editing each other’s prose; editor authority is rarely exercised. Mostly, editors “lead by example.”

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…by a blogging librarian.

From a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman, discussing a talk by Andrew Keen of Cult of the Amateur infamy:

[Keen is] a fan of Citizendium, the Larry Sanger project to create a wikipedia by leveraging experts; of Google’s “wikipedia-killer”, Knol; of Jason Calcanis’s hand-rolled search engine Mahalo. These projects seem deeply reactionary to me, like they’re missing the fundamental truth of the projects that they’re copying: that the movements of a mass number of people on the internet can accomplish tasks that it’s very hard for a small group of experts to solve.

This might be an apt criticism of Knol and Mahalo (maybe — it’s a very simplistic criticism, in any case), but it represents a total misunderstanding of the Citizendium.  It is very sad that some people still think that we are an experts-only project; we aren’t, as anyone who has investigated us the slightest bit knows.

What Ethan and, sadly, too many outside of the CZ fold do not realize is that CZ represents a step forward, not a step backward.  I as much as anyone helped pioneer the very practice Ethan praises, of mass online movements accomplishing distributed content tasks.  I’m not about to give up on that (for chrissakes).  And CZ doesn’t.  In fact, we invite everyone to participate, as long as they are willing to follow our modest, sensible rules.  We know (indeed, we illustrate) that distributing work in a bottom-up way among an open community is the best way to run the sort of project we’re pursuing.  But we are a step forward in that we have actually set up a more sensible governance framework to pursue this project.  Part of this involves giving experts a role — not a top-down command-and-control role, of course — in the project.  But another part involves requiring people to take real-world responsibility for their contributions.  Another part involves having contributors commit to a set of principles that the community runs by.

The result is that we are approaching 5,200 entries (with an average article length several times what Wikipedia’s was in its first year) and we continue to accelerate.  Expect not just solid growth this year (that much is a given), but great things.  I’m serious; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

And, please.  By now, CZ is obviously no longer a “Larry Sanger project,” any more than Wikipedia can be described as a “Larry Sanger project.”  It is a CZ community project.  Did I write all those articles?  Of course not.  It bothers me when people describe the project that way, because it gives me credit for their work.  I don’t deserve that.

But people will always insist on shoehorning facts to fit their own cynical and simplistic analyses…