Citizendium Blog

Hey, have you been putting off joining us?  Have you been putting off writing for us?  Tomorrow is Stop the Procrastination Day.  It’s the monthly Write-a-Thon!  Join the party!  The last one, by the way, worked very nicely.

If you’re not a Citizen yet, join us tomorrow, and we will go to superhuman efforts to get you on board as quickly as possible.  Definitely faster than our 24 hour guarantee.  Whatcha waiting for?  An invitation?  (We’re working on that.)

In a blog post, one of our more prominent Web 2.0 supporters, Jason Calacanis, invites people to compare CZ and WP articles side-by-side, citing our “Northwest Passage” article (which is currently our Article of the Week) and Wikipedia’s.

I appreciate the implied compliment, but I think the time for meaningful side-by-side comparisons is still some time off.  There is no question that, in most cases, articles take time to develop to their fullest potential.  This is just as true on CZ as on WP.  We are still a very new project, and many of our articles simply have not benefitted from the time and scale effects that Wikipedia articles have enjoyed (but have not actually been perfected by) over the years.

That said, a lot of our articles are excellent right out of the gate — for instance, our “New Article of the Week,” which was started July 22, ”Edward I.”  And there is no question that the average level of our new articles is far better than Wikipedia’s new articles were.  Jimmy Wales said recently that he remembers the days when one could start the Africa article and write, “Africa is a continent.”  Indeed, I believe that’s exactly how the Wikipedia “Africa” article did read for a while.  Well, such a stub would be deleted fairly quickly on CZ.  Now, I must admit in fairness that we still have no “Africa” article at all – for shame!  Still, this and many other major oversights will be fixed before too long.

The Citizendium is unfinished, but on a vector of improvement that will, over the coming few years, take it head and shoulders over Wikipedia in terms of quality.  And then in terms of quantity, too!

I do have to agree with Jason:

This is going to get very interesting over the next five years.

The Write-a-Thon was regarded as great fun and a success by its participants and ever since I’ve been wanting to blog about the meaning of it.

It worked for a couple of reasons.  First, there was a shared understanding, which solved a coordination problem (or created a coordination opportunity?):

1. Large numbers of people were made aware of “an event” going on on the wiki, explicitly labelled as a relatively rare (monthly) event.
2. The globality of the event was emphasized, if only by necessity (the Write-a-Thon lasted from July 31, 1200 UTC, in New Zealand, until August 2, 1000 UTC, in Hawaii).
3. They knew, also, that large numbers of other people, from around the globe, knew these things; so there was a shared understanding.
4. Given this shared understanding, they could reasonably infer that other people would actually show up.
5. That gave some people a reason to show up themselves, a reason that they did not have at other times: an expectation of more participants on the wiki.
6. So they showed up!

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