Citizendium Blog

The new CZ skin is up! (It is now set to default.) So, when you go to the wiki you’ll see a brand new look. This helps to distinguish us from That Other Website.

You won’t see the new skin, however, if you fiddled with your skin preferences, i.e., with this page.  If so, and you aren’t using the new skin, you can go to the above URL, click on the “skin” tab, and then select “Pinkwich5″ and click Save. Then you should see the default skin, or in other words, what all new (and un-logged in) people are now seeing.

Thanks hugely to Derek Harkness for coding this up and doing a lot of debugging. It might still have a few bugs. If so, we’ve been using this page of Derek’s to report them.  Thanks also to Greg Sabino Mullane for uploading it and doing other techie stuff.

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.

I’ve uploaded two recent essays — speeches, really, but written out.  The first is “Citizendium: A New Vision for Online Knowledge Communities,” which I delivered at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, Feb. 7, 2008, as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Lecture Series, “Wikipedia - Democratization of Knowledge or Triumph of Amateurs,” hosted by Marshall Poe.  Here’s a bit that sets up the problem to solve:

… It would be boring and banal for me to point out that collaboration on free content represents an interesting opportunity. Of course it does. The Internet has been exploiting that opportunity for almost ten years, at least ever since the Open Directory Project got started in 1998. The real question is whether there are any interesting new free content opportunities. And there is, I think. The most interesting unexploited opportunity before the Internet today is high quality and high relevance. In short, if developing sheer quantity of content was the big exciting problem ten years ago, we’ve licked that one. The big exciting problem now is quality: how to create enormous amounts of high-quality and highly-relevant content. And this is–I guarantee it–a much more difficult problem, and one that not nearly as many online projects will be able to solve. …

I go on to argue for three fundamental principles underlying the Citizendium:

… Clearly, something really important has been left out of the Web 2.0 equation. What? What needs to be added so that our communities produce content that is not merely abundant, useful, and interesting, but also reliable and relevant?

I have three principles, which I will state briefly first but then elaborate, because it is very easy to misunderstand in all three cases. They are:

1. Find a meaningful role for experts within the project.
2. Require contributors to use their real-world identities.
3. Establish the rule of law by committing contributors to a social contract that makes them full partners in the project.

Adopting these three principles will help transform Web 2.0 into Web 3.0. Leveraged intelligently, these principles will allow an online community to produce high quality and relevance, without necessarily compromising high productivity. They will, in short, help the Internet to grow up.

Let’s consider these principles each briefly in turn. …

I also give a report about the latest CZ progress.  Here’s the whole thing.

The second is “How the Internet Is Changing What We (Think We) Know,” a speech I gave when kindly invited by a local Columbus-area library.  This is not so much project propaganda as the examination of a socio-philosophical problem:

… Before the Internet, we were already awash in information. Wading through all that information in search of some hard knowledge was very difficult indeed.

The Internet is making this old and difficult problem even worse. If we had an abundance of information in, say, the 1970s, the Internet has created a superabundance of information today. Out of curiosity, I looked up some numbers. According to one estimate, there are now over 1.2 billion people online; Netcraft estimated that there are over 100 million websites, and about half of those are active. And those estimates come from over a year ago.

With that many people, and that many active websites, clearly there is, as I say, a superabundance of information. Nielsen ratings of Internet search showed that there were some six billion searches performed in December, 2007, in one month—that’s about 72 billion in a year! Google, by the way, was responsible for two thirds of those searches. Now, you might have heard these numbers before; I don’t mean to be telling you news. But I want to worry out loud about a consequence of this situation.

My worry is that the superabundance of information is devaluing knowledge. The more that information piles up on Internet servers around the world, and the easier it is for that information to be found, the less distinctive and attractive that knowledge will appear by comparison. I fear that the Internet has already greatly weakened our sense of what is distinctive about knowledge, and why it is worth seeking. …

I then go on to explain all that in some detail, but for a popular audience.  Here’s the whole thing (complete with pictures!).

For immediate release

University Assignments Going Cyber

Citizendium Announces “Eduzendium” Initiative

January 24, 2008 – In a striking departure from traditional methods of teaching, a new way for students to gain course credits is emerging. As with so much else this decade, it is all down to the Internet.

Traditional teaching saw students laboring to produce essays that to them felt onerous and oftentimes pointless. Once read by the lecturer their writing was generally consigned to the dustbin.

For some students, that situation is now radically changing.

In a never-before-seen new initiative, the online reference encyclopedia project Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org), in collaboration with expert teachers and lecturers, has launched Eduzendium. The Eduzendium project allows students to write their assignments online on the Citizendium on a given topic allocated by their teacher.

Read the whole thing.

Posted to Citizendium-L. 

We’ve broken 5,000 articles today!

Thanks of course to the article writers, as well as the people working on the unchecklisted articles list, which is DONE! Yes, DONE!  We have added our most recent 2,000 articles in a little over three months. That, friends, is what we call acceleration.

Thank you all so much! As I said when thanking you last fall, I feel a curious combination of pride and humility — pride at having started this, but humility at the constant reminder that this project is, after all, staffed by self-motivated volunteers. Let me explain. We are here merely because we share a common vision of an excellent, exciting, online knowledge resource. It would be silly and insulting for me to take credit for your practical commitment to this vision; your commitment is your own, and it is the reason we have succeeded as well as we have so far, and also the reason we will, probably, grow even faster and more impressively this year. Sometimes, you know, I think it is presumptuous for me even to thank you. After all, you aren’t doing this for me. Your work isn’t a favor to me; so what gives me the right to thank you? Well, I do feel gratitude, but not because you’ve contributed to something I “own”: this is a non-profit, community project in which we all enjoy ownership. Rather, I feel gratitude because you believe in a vision I happen to have articulated, and are working to make it come true. But if I am allowed to thank you for this, you are also surely allowed to thank each other just as much, because (necessarily) this is not just my personal vision anymore.

Anyway, we still have a lot of hard work to do, and while I would say we’re off the ground, I would also say in all honesty that we’re still wobbly and still in our infancy. What can we do to create the next 5,000 articles in, say, six months (or less)?

Here is my answer. Looking toward the future, my medium-term aim now is toward a systematic workgroup-based recruitment effort, as I explained yesterday. I think this is exactly what the project needs. By doing everything we need to do to get ready for workgroup recruitment (e.g., improving the help pages, getting in touch with existing editors and authors in a workgroup, reskinning the wiki, and much else), we will satisfy many (not all) of the aims that you set for us in last month’s big brainstorming session. I hope you will help me with all that needs to be done here. I know it just won’t happen if I don’t lead the way, but it also won’t happen if I’m the only one working on the effort. So, if you do want to help and want specific, delimited assignments, or (if you prefer) vague, general ones, I am happy to pass them out. Otherwise, of course you know what to do.

By the way, I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but I hope one day soon you’ll support the cause in one more way, namely, add yourself to the userinfo system.  We’ve got 14 people in the system — see the group status page.  Well, maybe this way to organize ourselves will not prove to be the best way, but I think it’s worth a serious try. I think that if we have some more influential project members using the system to plan and report their doings, others will join in as well…hint, hint.

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

Thanks to Robert for a nice summary of Citizendium events!

I am thankful for 4,000 CZ live articles. I am thankful for zooming from 3,200 to 4,000 (a 25% increase in article count, if not word count!) in under one month.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The big tech blog ars technica has a post about our anniversary.  Much of the article just reports highlights from our progress report, which is nice.  I replied here.

But it quotes Tim Lee, whose blog post about us compares us to Wikipedia (unfavorably).  Just brilliant.  Um, I hate to point out the obvious, but we just got started, and it’s ridiculous to compare (negatively) a new project, even one that is guided by experts, with one that has been around for six times as long and has had orders of magnitude more activity.  If anything, it’s amazing that, in spite of our extreme youth, we have managed to write as many good articles as we have.  We’ve certainly done a lot better on that score than Wikipedia (or Nupedia, for that matter) did in its first year — a more meaningful comparison, if any comparison is meaningful.  Anyway, Lee’s is a facile approach altogether.

Also, in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog, Brock Read also reports (not unapprovingly) some of the highlights of the progress report, but then again quotes Tim Lee, who is disappointed with the quality of our Milton Friedman article as compared to Wikipedia’s.  Again, see above.  We have many “stubs” and are actually more or less encouraging them now (well, we’re going to take a vote on this, but the community seems to be solidly in favor).  So you should expect to see a lot of short, rough articles for some time yet.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Here’s an “action item”…a favor.

Could you link to two specific Citizendium articles, “Butler” and “Telephone newspaper,” from your websites, home pages, or blogs, wherever they might be? And please use the specific text “butler” and “telephone newspaper”. You see, this is known as “Google bombing,” and it helps if the text is always the same. But we’re doing it for a good cause. Trust me!

Here are HTML versions of the links:

<a href=”http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Butler”>butler</a>
<a href=”http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Telephone_newspaper”>telephone newspaper</a>

For an example of my own links to these pages, you can look at my personal home page (in the first paragraph).

Why? Well, it bothers me somewhat that Citizendium has a Google PageRank of 6. This is bound to increase, of course, merely with the passage of time. But a little push couldn’t hurt. Besides, I’d like to get the idea out there that it’s OK to link to CZ articles.

UPDATE (late evening the same day): it’s Saturday, usually a fairly slow day on the wiki.  For whatever reason, however, we’ve had over 1,000 edits in the last 24 hours.  That’s pretty remarkable, I think.

In the wake of the mass mailing last Sunday/Monday, we’ve still got a lot of newer and returned people at work. I spent a little time this morning thanking some of the new people (who were doing work in the last 24 hours). There were 16 of them, by my count, in the last 24 hours, but I might have missed a few.

Of course, ongoing thanks are due to the “old hands.” These days, you can always expect to see something from Steve Ewen, Richard Jensen, Robert King, Yi Zhe Wu, Michael J. Formica (who is pretty new actually), Paul Wormer, Joe Quick, and many others who are clearly committed…or clearly should “be committed”… (Just kidding!)

I’m seeing many fewer “beginner faux pas” on recent changes, too…which is not surprising…it’s not like the basic rules are complex.

As a result, we’ve sustained our daily edit count and new article creation rate at very high levels the last few weeks, and passed 3800 live articles yesterday. That’s 500 articles, a 15% gain, in 18 days. For the sake of comparison: the previous 500 articles required 43 days.