Citizendium Blog

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.

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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…

Robert W. King has started a project newsletter, The Citizen, intended for monthly publication.

Thanks to Robert for a nice summary of Citizendium events!

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.

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A new Times Online article mentions CZ glowingly:

A newer, more reliable alternative is Citizendium (en.citizendium.org). It was started by a Wikipedia founder and employs the same idea that anyone can write for the site, but it claims to use a team of vetted experts to make sure articles are accurate, and contributors are all required to use their own names rather than hiding behind aliases. It cannot compete in size: in its first year, only about 4,500 articles have been submitted, compared with 2.1m (in English alone) held by its big sister.

“Big sister”?  Try “crazy old aunt in the attic.”  Yeah, we can’t compete in size, because we are only one-seventh the age of Wikipedia.  Give us time.  But as long as the Times Online is describing us as “a newer, more reliable alternative,” I’ll be happy.

(We really ought to spruce up our press page.  We’ve got huge amounts of coverage but we really don’t have many links to it all, and we haven’t pulled out the juicy quotes like that.  It would help!)

I also found this really interesting story, in which a German MP (Katrina Schubert, deputy leader of the Left Party), braving the laughably obvious irony of the situation, demanded that the German Wikipedia reduce the number of banned Nazi symbols.  She ”encouraged police in Berlin to press charges.”  She has since dropped her charges, but says, “This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”  Yeah, sure.  I’m sure that’s always the case.

For immediate release 

The Citizendium encyclopedia project picks a Creative Commons license

“Our gift to the world: CC-by-sa”

December 21, 2007 – In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

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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.