Citizendium Blog

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.

UPDATE (7/23): caught up. 

UPDATE (7/21): we’re in the process of catching up, adding dozens of new accounts and recognizing many new editors.  We should also be installing a new automatic account approval system, written by programmer and student Aaron Schulz, as soon as early next week.

I am hereby pledging personally and publicly that, beginning now, anyone who applies to become a CZ author or editor will receive a reply within 24 hours. I will do this personally if we cannot find (or motivate!) enough constables and editorial personnel administrators to do it.

If you appreciate this sentiment and want to pitch in, you might become a constable or editorial personnel administrator. Constables approve author applications; EPAs approve author applications.  Constables should have a bachelor’s degree (or equivalent training) and be at least 25 years old. Editorial personnel administrators must be CZ editors.

Please e-mail me personnally at sanger /at\ citizendium.org if you are interested.

Let’s take full advantage of the ongoing and very encouraging interest in CZ, by getting people on board and motivated to work as soon as possible.

You MediaWiki coders out there, please tell me: what do you need to be motivated to write this user registration tool? We really need a MediaWiki plug-in that does the following. It’s pretty stripped-down.

(1) User fills out:

Name __________________

E-mail __________________

Bio __________________

URLs __________________

          __________________

Other notes __________________

Captcha

(2) The e-mail address is validated.

(3) For application reviewers, all applications are displayed on the same page.

Next to each application are two buttons: approve and reject.

There is also a text box for constable notes to the author.

(4) If an application reviewer presses “approve”:

•  the item is removed from the page
•  an account with the name and e-mail are created
•  the bio is copied into the user page, with [[Category:CZ Author]]
•  a welcome message is posted on the user talk page
•  a brief welcome message is sent to the user

(5) If a constable presses “reject”:

•  the item is removed from the page
•  a rejection message, with the contents of the text box, goes to the applicant

I posted recently on the mailing lists — it’s important enough to put here, too.

All,

Please read this — this is a potentially project-changing mail.

I had a bit of a brainstorm recently. The bottom line is: if you’re interested in taking charge of some new workgroup, issue, or project, write up a plan for yourself, and send it to the Executive Committee (via me). We want to hear from you. Details below.

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Because the Citizendium has a role for experts, some have suggested recently that we’re “elitist.”  But the claim is, frankly, absurd.  Projects that allow teenagers to work with tenured professors and seasoned professionals cannot with any good sense be called “elitist.”  Consider a hierarchy of “elitism” in content-production organizations:

1. Very exclusive: the only participants permitted are not just experts, but distinguished experts.  Example: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  One of the finest free reference works available online, just by the way.  Would it be appropriate to accuse them of being “elitist”?
2. Exclusive: experts/professionals only.  Examples: most big newspapers and magazines; some academic journals.
3. Expert-focused, but semi-expert-welcoming: while experts are most actively recruited, honored, and empowered, the system is also open to people who have a solid but nonexpert understanding of the relevant material.  Example: Encyclopedia of Earth; some academic journals (think: first papers written by grad students).
4. Open, but making a special role for experts: no expertise is needed to participate, but experts are invited to fill a special role in the system.  Example: Citizendium.
5. Radically epistemically egalitarian: everyone may participate, and no roles are made for experts; everyone is on an equal footing when it comes to making judgment about what is allegedly good, true, and beautiful.  Example: HotOrNot, Wikipedia, and most Web 2.0 projects.

We are far more open and egalitarian compared to most everything outside of Web 2.0.  To accuse us of elitism is merely to expose the limitations of your world.

In our pilot project, we’ve gone through several different registration policies, adapting to growth and finding the right one.  We began, in the first couple of months, with a policy that required a CV or resume, plus supporting Web links, from everyone who applied.  On about January 22, we opened up the wiki to self-registration.  At the time, we required only a bio from authors; so, we relied upon the “honor principle,” but we still required a CV and proof of identity from editors.  More recently, as of February 16, we have shut down self-registration on account of rampant vandalism.  We have had no vandalism either before or after the self-registration period.

Since we have moved back to hand-approval of new applications (you’re welcome to join us, by the way!), the Executive Committee and the Constabulary have been doing a bit of soul-searching.  It isn’t just that we don’t want to waste our valuable time babysitting idiot vandals.  We are very concerned about the credibility of the Citizendium as a reference work.  If we rely heavily on the “honor principle” (used for example by my alma mater) for determining real identities, we assume that most of our contributors will be, well, honorable.  Perhaps we are too old and jaded but I think most of us believe that too many contributors are not really honorable at all.  We simply do not want to wake up in five years, to find that someone has done a study of the Citizendium and demonstrated that in fact 25% of all of our contributors are using neither their real names nor pre-approved pseudonyms.  In short, we’ve reluctantly concluded that the honor principle, even coupled with a willingness instantly to ban people like Essjay who are exposed for using false personas, really isn’t due diligence.

We’ve come to this conclusion “reluctantly” because we also know that ease of registration is absolutely essential to really rapid growth and dynamism.  So we are planning two things:

• While we still need human beings involved in the application approval process, we’re writing requirements for a new system, to be integrated with MediaWiki, that will greatly automate the approval process.  Constables will be able to approve new applications with the press of a button, which should speed things up a lot.
• But we will also give authors at least three alternatives for establishing their identities.  They can either (1) allow an existing Citizen to vouch for their identity; or (2) provide a link to a corporate or institutional Web page, or other credible Web page, that provides their name and relevant details of their identity, that (if we wished) we could check up with; or (3) point to the Web page of a person we can e-mail to confirm their identity.

Ultimately, (1) might prove to be the method of registration used most often.  The notion, then, is that if a person is discovered to have a fraudulent persona, the member who vouched for that person is also either reprimanded or banned.  But it should be quite easy, ultimately, to automate this recommendation system, since the recommenders are already in our system.  We’ll be able to help ourselves to it once we do our public launch–hopefully just a few short weeks away.

I’ve just finished a total rewriting of “How to get started with the Citizendium pilot.”  I thought the readers of this blog would be interested to see it; so here it is.

Welcome to the Citizendium pilot project!

This is a general orientation to contributing and becoming part of the community, for new contributors. This is a comprehensive summary, but it is just a summary; there are links to pages with more detail interspersed below (right now, many of these pages haven’t been started).

If you want a general introduction to the project, not just to contributing, see our introduction.

What makes us different?

We’re glad to have you here and hope you’ll join our friendly little (but growing!) community as an active contributor. What makes us different? Well, for one thing, we’re all contributing under our own real names. We take responsibility for our own work, and we like to think we’re a bit more civil than your average Internet community. For another thing, there are editors working right alongside authors. Editors can make decisions about articles in their areas of expertise, but for the most part, we collaborate just as folks do on Wikipedia–only, perhaps, with more collegiality. Editors also have a special task here that doesn’t exist on Wikipedia: they can approve articles in their areas of expertise.

We aren’t Wikipedia. On January 20, we started an experiment. Although we began the pilot project as a fork of Wikipedia, we decided to try “unforking,” i.e., deleting all of the inactive articles, leaving us with only articles that we’ve worked on. We want to develop our own community, with our own rules and guidelines that might, in fact, be quite different from Wikipedia’s. There are already a few differences, apart from the real names requirement and the presence of editors. For example, we do not use “in group” abbreviations like “POV.” We really do take our neutrality policy seriously. We’ll be revisiting all sorts of policies concerning categories, templates, and much else. Also, we don’t permit user boxes on user pages; nor do we permit personal essays linked from user pages. Finally, our project governance, which is still under rapid development, will be quite different. We have a number of non-negotiable policies, and new policies will not be adopted by an impossible “consensus” but by vote of representatives (selected perhaps by “choosing lots”).

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We’re happy to be able to say that we have now gone through and made at least our initial replies to all applicants to join the pilot project. If everything went smoothly, you should be in the system now. Otherwise, we’re waiting for something from you (typically, more info, a real name, etc.).

Thanks very much to our constables and personnel administrators, Ruth Ifcher, Sarah Tuttle, Mike Johnson, Phil Wardle, Fred Salsbury, and a few others, for pitching in.

Next, we’re going to send mails to people in different categories. There are three main categories:

(1) We’ve asked for info from you and you haven’t sent it yet. There are quite a few of these.

(2) We’ve asked you to be an author or an editor, and asked you to create a username, but you haven’t done that yet.

(3) You’ve made a username and we’ve activated it. (We’ll simply be asking these people to get to work.)

We’re bound to have made mistakes with this many applications. Sorry if that’s true in your case. We’re also sorry it has taken so long to finish.