Citizendium Blog

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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/

The Citizendium registration system, coded up by Ohio State student Aaron Schulz, is a remarkable success.  We have gone from a few days (on average) to get new contributors into the wiki last summer, to 24 hours in recent weeks, to (usually) minutes within the last week.

The reason for this is quite simple, and instructive for Web 2.0 project organizers: automation.

And, as a result, we are now enabled, and empowered, to start a serious recruitment drive!

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A few months ago, Jason Calacanis posted a piece on Wikipedia’s Technological Obscurification: Three ways Wikipedia keeps 99% of the population from participating. Not ever having missed a chance to be provocative, he opens with an argument that

The Wikipedia is currently designed to lower participation so it is easier to manage.

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to limit participation in Wikipedia–perhaps that’s what necessary to keep the project on track. However, I think we should be really honest about the fact that Wikipedia is not an open system–at least not open in the sense that anyone can participate. Let’s look at just three examples:
1. Wikipedia pages have become increasingly complex and Wikipedia doesn’t support a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get,” and that means that as you edit if you make something bold or underline you see bold or underline–just like Microsoft Word. Wikipedia doesn’t use a WYSIWYG because if they did more people could edit the pages–people without technology skills–and that would make the entire system collapse–at least according to the folks at the Wikipedia conference I attended.

For example, in this image you can see what it’s like to edit the George W. Bush page:

As you can see you need code in Wiki Markup language in order to edit this page.

 2. The Wikipedia uses “Discussion pages” to reach consensus, and these pages are also coded in mediaWiki so that 99% of people can’t figure them out.

3. The Wikipeda uses IRC chat, which 99% of folks don’t know how to use, in order to discuss the inner workings of Wikipedia.

Setting aside Calacanis’s speculations on why things are the way they are, I think he has some interesting facts on his side about participation.

The second and third points are fairly specific to Wikipedia, but the first point– that people can get buried in the complexity of MediaWiki’s arcane style of editing– is spot on for us, too. There’s no question in my mind that requiring contributors to learn arcane wiki markup language (instead of having an easy option for “what you see is what you get” editing) lowers participation and makes participation less democratic. Part of Citizendium’s stated mission is to be less insular than Wikipedia, and I think a necessary part of making that happen is to make editing easier.

Now, we’re juggling plenty of tech issues and plans, and it’s easy for important things to get put on the backburner. So I guess I just want to put the question out there, for when we have more resources: how important is it for Citizendium to have a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get way to edit articles?

-Mike

Finally.

To join CZ, you can now apply via a Web form.  You no longer have to use e-mail.  And maybe more importantly, our fine constables can approve an application by simply clicking a button — and their work is done!  Thanks much to Aaron Schulz!

This will allow the same number of constables to handle two or three times the number of applications, and we’ll be able to respond faster, or I think we will — maybe on the order of minutes to hours, instead of hours to a day. That’s what I will encourage, anyway.  As a result of this, one of the next initiatives I will be putting time into is — again finally — a big, organized, ambitious recruitment campaign.

Aaron Schulz is a student at my alma mater, Ohio State, and proposed to help with this rather out of the blue last summer. He’s done really excellent work (yet another victory for the Buckeyes!), and the constables are really happy with his ConfirmAccount extension. Here’s a link to it, by the way.

We would have had this installed sooner, but we had to update to the latest MediaWiki version (which is why the wiki has been wonky lately), and that took some doing. Thanks greatly to Greg and Jason for that, and to Zach for pitching in as well.

This is an early Thanksgiving.  It occurs to me that I have not thanked people enough, especially the hardest-working people.  I thank people all the time, but it is usually for over-and-above stuff, and when people first show up.  So, at the risk of embarrassing them, I’m going to thank a whole bunch of people.  I hope you don’t mind, folks.

But I should add something, because I don’t want this sort of attention to go to anybody’s head, either — I mean, frankly, I think it’s a little ridiculous that praise from me would go to anybody’s head.  Most people aren’t that way and they realize that I’m just this guy, so big deal.  But, you see, I’m worried and I speak from experience.  In listing these people and their useful work, I do not mean, in any way shape or form, to be establishing something like a project aristocracy.  I can imagine that some people might be puffed up by this sort of attention, and think that such recognition gives them rights in the project that others do not have.  That would be very wrongheaded.  In fact, not to malign them unjustly I hope, but certain Wikipedians seem to carry about their titles and achievements and “barnstars” and whatnot as so many bludgeons that they can use to get their way.  Damn me if that ever happens on the Citizendium.  I have sometimes accused Wikipedia of being egalitarian in a bad, utopian way, but in this regard I would like CZ to be *more* egalitarian than WP.  I would like us to settle content disputes by kindly, rational compromise first, by reference to expert knowledge second, and by fair, open, law-governed dispute resolution processes last — but NEVER by a presumption that “I’ve been here
longer, I’m a Big Shot, so you gotta listen to me and my friends, or else!” We should always be a freer, more open, and indeed more equal community than that cliquish, competitive attitude implies.

And if you would never dream of being that way — well, clearly, I’m not talking about *you*.

That said in preface, here’s the rogue’s gallery from the Citizendium’s first year, in alphabetical order, and what I honor them for.  And I’m very sorry if I left anyone out, or if I failed to mention some shining achievement of yours — I’m just going based on what I remember and what I had personal experience with, and the project is already bigger than I can always personally track.  But yes, I do actually know all these people and am at least somewhat acquainted with their work for the project!  I am sure I must have left out some hard-working people, some may have slipped through the cracks, and I’m sorry that I did…

Click through to the list.

As a result of the Write-a-Thon yesterday, we broke 3,000 articles! Woo-hoo!

Well, extrapolating from month-old numbers generated by Aleksander Stos, we probably have over 4,000, but we aren’t taking credit for them all (nor should we; these are mostly Wikipedia copies).

And before you start making the inevitable comparisons with Wikipedia’s article count after 11 months, bear in mind: our articles are much longer and meatier, and much higher quality than those early Wikipedia articles were. We’ve got close to 5 million words in our articles, the median article size being 511 words. For comparison, this e-mail is just 184 words. (In 2001, an article the length of this mail would have been a longish article.) Besides, we didn’t go public until last March.

I noticed that Alek updated our wonderful statistics page and, considering that we were considerably more active in September than last summer, I think we’re not just growing, we’re accelerating in many metrics. I expect even more clearly accelerating growth in the months after our next press release (not anytime very soon–but soon enough to make me nervous!).

In short, we’re doing well! Why not celebrate by writing a new article!

From a grant proposal.

In some ways, the Citizendium works similarly to Wikipedia: an open, bottom-up wiki, a wide variety of people may join and contribute to whatever topic they want, whenever they want. The interface, using MediaWiki software, is fairly simple and easy for any reasonably technically adept person to learn. This system has allowed the Citizendium, like Wikipedia, to create thousands of articles in a short time. Yet the project is truly a by-the-bootstraps operation; when first announced, the project had a zero budget, and has been able to survive for a year on little more than $40,000 in donations and with one full-time employee.

But Citizendium’s differences with Wikipedia have proven extremely consequential and successful. Because the Citizendium requires the use of real names and biographies, there has been virtually no vandalism; furthermore, the community is mature and collegial, yet still dynamic. Because the Citizendium has a guiding role for experts, articles tend to be of remarkably high quality. Moreover, there are over 40 approved articles and over 600 “developed” articles, i.e., articles close to approval.

In addition, the Citizendium has recently enabled contributors to add various other kinds of reference information: bibliographies, external links, tables, image galleries, timelines, and much else. There is a particular need for an enhancement to MediaWiki that would incorporate these different types of information into the software. With support, the Citizendium Foundation could hire a programmer who would transform the text-oriented MediaWiki platform into something that handles all different sorts of information intelligently. The Citizendium, in turn, would show the world how to use the software.

Support for an administrative assistant would also help the project to do a serious recruitment drive; until now, most people have arrived via the many mentions of Citizendium in the technical press. Similarly, support for a development director would help the project tap into the no doubt millions of dollars that are available for a project that has already proven itself in this way.

In short, while the Citizendium has already shown that it has the potential to solve Wikipedia’s problems, further support would make this assured.

The U.K.-based Daily Mail has an interesting take on CZ; for them, the story is that we are “on course to match the online encyclopedia’s [Wikipedia's] success just six months after it was launched, according to its founder.”  I think I might have said something like that, but surely with considerably more qualification and uncertainty.  I hope no one will hold us to this extremely ambitious notion.  We’re on track of Wikipedia’s early growth, in terms of activity and word count (and within an order of magnitude, in terms of article count).  But I wouldn’t wish to imply that this means we certainly will match Wikipedia’s longer-term growth.  Just that we still might.

UPDATE: it’s now August 1 in most parts of the world, and already the Write-a-Thon is a modest success…and the day hasn’t even begun in the U.S. … 

Tomorrow (Wednesday, August 1), we’re going to have a Write-a-Thon.  The concept is simple: come to the wiki, write a new article, edit somebody else’s new article, and record what you’ve done on the Write-a-Thon page.  And do this when everybody is doing it.  If it’s modestly successful, we’ll do it monthly.

Think of it as a way to let people who might not be on hand every day (the way some wikiholics are) know when a good time would be to join when the joint is jumping.  It’s a better excuse than most to come and see what’s going on on the Citizendium.  We can’t do it too often of course.  But monthly seems like about right.

Don’t be a party poop!  If you can come and stay for only a stub, we’ll take it!

And if you’re not a Citizen yet, don’t forget: I have made a personal guarantee that your application will be replied-to within 24 hours.  Tomorrow, we’ll make it faster than that.

Leslie Brooks has a short piece up asking “where the hell are the women in the Citizendium project?” I’m not impressed by the tone of the piece itself, but I think it is a good question (we do have more male than female contributors). Really, I think the question should be expanded to women and wikis in general– I would imagine that Wikipedia may be equally or moreso biased toward male contributors, but it’s just easier to tally up contributions by gender when people are editing under their real names. Regardless, engaging both male and female contributors is something we really need to think about.

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