Citizendium Blog

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.

UPDATE (evening): 500 edits in six hours, well over 50 articles today (it might be more like 75), and I’ve received dozens and dozens of mails from people who said, “Sorry, I’ll start contributing soon.”  It’s really great to have confirmation of so much deep support for what we’re doing here!

A huge number of new people, or newly-active people, arrived following my mailing to thousands of people with Citizendium accounts.  Apparently, they just needed a reminder.  (This isn’t a sort of reminder I’ll send regularly, though, trust me.)  Right now, there are more unfamiliar names than familiar ones on recent changes – that’s just how I like it.

Actually, I separated accounts into five categories:

1. People with bios who had made an edit
2. People with bios who hadn’t made an edit
3. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages who had made an edit (there were some)
4. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages, who hadn’t made any edits
5. People with poorly-formed usernames

(Actually, I’m about to send out #5 — with no small amount of nervousness.  )

Here is the letter I sent to #1:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Someone just pointed my attention to this page, which says that Wikipedia had 4.9 million words in January 2002 — slightly less than what we have now.  And I still maintain that the comparison would be more meaningful to make next March (use your browser to search on the page for “3,200 articles after one year”).  You might say that Wikipedia was growing faster at that point in its career — but then, we’re decidedly accelerating now, too, notwithstanding a Halloween lull just now.

Pretty cool.

For immediate release

Citizendium Wiki Celebrates One Year Online
New Knowledge Society Takes Root, Flourishes

Article number triples in six months. Growth of knowledge base accelerates. What began as an online knowledge experiment is here to stay. New developments announced to celebrate first anniversary of the Citizendium online reference source. Robust growth, faster application turnaround, credibility seen as keys to the Citizendium project’s continued success. Trusted source of knowledge sees increasing growth ahead.

October 30, 2007 – It has been one year since the private launch of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) wiki, an online reference source aiming to create “the world’s most trusted knowledge base.” The innovative non-profit project combines free-wheeling, open wiki collaboration with real names and guidance by expert editors.

Since then, more than 2,100 people have joined as authors and editors and 3,300 articles are under development. The project has tripled its article count since its public launch last March. Also, the rate at which it creates new articles has tripled in the last ten months and doubled in the last one hundred days.

“We’ve grown nicely, and are now clearly accelerating,” said the project’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Larry Sanger, who is also co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger, in a progress report (http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html), used the occasion to “debunk myths” about the project, acknowledge significant progress, announce several new initiatives for the expert-guided online project, and make some bold predictions.

According to Sanger, the Citizendium’s readers have only just begun to see the power of the project’s model. “Simply put, we’ve pioneered a new and better way to use wikis, and an interesting, dynamic way to build an online knowledge base,” Sanger said. “Increasingly, the Citizendium is looking like the next step in the evolution of the collaborative Internet.”

The project has been virtually free of the sort of vandalism and irresponsibility for which other Web 2.0 projects are frequently criticized, partly because real names are required for participation. By allowing self-driven public contribution, with oversight by editors who are established experts in their fields, there is a framework to ensure dynamic growth without sacrificing quality and credibility.

“Some said it couldn’t be done, but the Citizendium proves that experts and the general public can work together collaboratively to create high quality encyclopedic content,” said Sanger.

The project announced some significant new features and projects:

+ A new automated registration process allows for the turnaround of user applications within a few hours at most. So the project has finally launched its first recruitment campaign, with significant results already.

+ An innovative use of wiki software involves placing various sorts of reference information on “subpages” of the main topic page. For example, attached to the article about Biology (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology) are wiki pages listing related articles, a bibliography, external links, and an image gallery. The pages are linked together via a tab interface.

+ The new “Core Articles” initiative identifies and prioritizes new articles for addition to the Citizendium.

+ The Eduzendium initiative (http://www.eduzendium.org/), now in a pilot project, encourages professors to use the Citizendium for serious public writing assignments. Several excellent articles have already been written this way. Sanger wrote in the progress report that it’s “perfect” for such college work, “because most topics are wide open, and the project is managed in a way that will appeal to most professors.”

+ A monthly “Write-a-Thon” spans the globe for one day each month, adding extra collaborative activities during a concentrated time span. The next one is Nov. 7th.

+ The project, part of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is hoping to raise at least $10,000 in an end-of-the-year fundraiser.

For several other interesting achievements, see: http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html#demonstrated

Also in the progress report, Sanger predicted that an “explosion of growth” will come in the next year, and that the project will have 100,000 articles by 2011, if not sooner.

“We look forward to welcoming all new visitors to the Citizendium website,” Sanger said, “and I encourage any user who appreciates what we are creating to sign up to become an author or editor.”

LINKS:

Website: http://www.citizendium.org/
Progress report: http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html
Biology article: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology
Eduzendium: http://www.eduzendium.org/
Press page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Press
This press release: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Oct302007

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Larry Sanger, Editor-in-Chief
Write for phone number.
sanger@citizendium.org
http://www.larrysanger.org/