Citizendium Blog

Yes or no.

If no, why do we keep making them?

For me, the bloom is off the rose.

The Internet affects us psychologically and socially in ways that people like Maggie Jackson and Nicholas Carr — to name just two — have been writing about fascinatingly. (I have written and spoken about the individual impact of the Internet a fair bit as well. See 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Perhaps it will make me even more of a Web 2.0 apostate to say so, but FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, many blogs, and many online forums are becoming increasingly obnoxious to me. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it’s true. Why? For a whole variety of reasons. But before I get into the reasons, let me say that these concerns don’t apply so much to Wikipedia, YouTube (except for YouTube forum discussions, which are obnoxious), or my own two new projects, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (still ramping up). Those actually produce (or usefully organize) quite a bit of interesting content. But as to many others — well, for me personally, things have reached a breaking point.

1. Facelessness

Frequently, we find ourselves in conversation with people we don’t know. We have nothing invested with them socially. When I first started talking to people in this way on mailing lists and USENET, back in 1993 I guess it was, online conversations were a bizarre but compelling game. It was still fascinating that I could speak to people who lived halfway across the world. It was the first time that I had conversed very much with people from Europe or Australia. It was also the first time that I could connect with people with very special interests (in my case, the fiddle tradition of County Donegal, Ireland). The social possibilities seemed rich.

Now they seem woefully impoverished. The stunning diversity of humanity online does not make up for the annoying effects of anonymity and disembodiment — or in one word, facelessness.

It so happens that I “know” fairly well on the order of dozens of people, people each of whom I have, at one time or another, spent many hours conversing and/or working. I’ve met some of these people in real life (IRL), but I would not recognize most of them if I were to pass them on the street. And, when you get down to it, I don’t really know much about these people. We only know about our shared interests — Citizendium, Wikipedia, fiddle music, or what have you.

To be honest, this makes me sad. I think that I should know my Internet acquaintances. I’ve spent so much time with them, I feel that I know them — and yet, I don’t. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I think there is a small sort of tragedy here. It seems pathetic that we so often meet a powerful and natural need for human companionship by sitting down and interfacing with a computer, usually through the medium of the written word. But really to get to know people, we need to be around them — hear their voices, watch their facial expressions, see how they react to things in your immediate vicinity, and in short “pass time” with them.

Please do not write to say that you have gotten to know all sorts of people intimately through deep conversations about many topics that you could not have discussed face-to-face. Yeah, I know. Me too. I have been doing that for a long time myself, so I know it’s possible. And yet a failure to “interface” in person has seemed to make all the difference to the long-lastingness of the relationships. The people who I have met in person after those long conversations I still count as friends; others, whom I never met in person, I’m sorry to say I’ve forgotten some of their names. (That’s an apropos word here — “interface” — isn’t it? On the Internet, we are faceless; so we don’t really connect, we “interface.”)

2. Groupthink

The second reason Web 2.0 is becoming obnoxious to me is that I really, really hate groupthink. It may sound very strange that the main architect of Wikipedia is an individualist, but I am and always have been. Please don’t misunderstand; I am not, contrary to Andrew Lih and the London Review of Books, an Ayn Rand-following Objectivist, and that’s partly because I detest the way so many of Rand’s followers themselves engaged in groupthink without admitting or even knowing it.

But let’s not get off on that tangent. My present complaint is about the groupthink inherent in the design of so many Web 2.0 websites. It is one thing to aggregate opinions and data that reflects opinions, as Google and Slashdot do. (I think James Surowiecki’s excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds has been largely misappropriated in defense of many of these websites, by the way. Not all online crowds are wise.) It is quite another thing to be part of a community that has a variety of mechanisms that allow us to reward people who agree with us and punish those who disagree with us. Those are the tools of conformity and groupthink. As far as I can tell, the rating of comments in Amazon and YouTube are nearly as interesting as the comments themselves. As a result, we’re stuck with a lot of really overinflated ratings on YouTube (though, again, I really like a lot of the content on YouTube, for all the garbage available there) and a lot of pointless head-nodding in Amazon reviews.

(Amazon punishes user scores when your comments are low-rated, and it’s very hard to give a bad review without your comment being low-reviewed in turn. I’d guess this is because most people who care enough about a product to say anything about it generally have good opinions about it. This artificially inflates ratings — good for Amazon, bad for the end user who wants a more accurate view of the product. This is why I always pay careful attention to the well-written bad reviews.)

What’s really disconcerting is when people like NYU’s Clay Shirky seems to celebrate groupthink. If he doesn’t, I wish he would clarify sometime. In this Britannica Blog post, he said essentially that the instantaneous and always-on nature of Internet communication means that people are rapidly losing the patience and even the ability to take longer, more complex stuff (like Tolstoy) on board. But Shirky and some others don’t just assert that this switch to instant, bite-sized communication is happening, they (unlike Nick Carr) seem to celebrate it. I do not, because such communication represents a powerful engine of groupthink, which is both tedious and (if history is a guide) dangerous. If you want to be an individualist, you have to think deeply, a lot, by yourself. I would argue that you really have to come to grips with the great minds of the past (and present), as well. None of this can be done in any “bite-sized” way. But twitters and most blog posts from most people are at once both navel-gazing and intensely attuned to the tastes of one’s audience (real, imagined, or hoped-for). When we write briefly in a medium that makes reading and replying instantaneous, if we aren’t plugged in to whatever happens to be on other people’s minds these days, they won’t read and they won’t reply. We become irrelevant if we’re not mainstream; and you’re bound not to be, because true individualism rarely runs in the mainstream. Of course, the “success metrics” of blogs (Technorati scores, for example) and other social media only encourages this natural human tendency to conformity. I don’t know how any serious intellectual can observe this trend and not be a little nervous.

The result is that we become more and more Borg-like (and, plumped in our chairs, less Borg-like). Sorry, but I will not be assimilated. I just won’t play. I won’t Twitter. I won’t blog about the latest cool thing. I won’t update my Facebook page…often.

Let’s put it this way. I have complex, ever-changing, idiosyncratic tastes and views. The notion that I ought to be particularly concerned about “what’s percolating in blogs now” (for example) deeply offends my individualism. It’s sad and ridiculous that I should let my free time be eaten up by the concerns of an often faceless group of people — especially one that often behaves like a pack of hyenas — rather than my own personal concerns, or by interfacing with the great “cathedral-like minds” of the past. I’ll genuflect where I please, Shirky.

3. Such a godawful waste of time

The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook? (Yes, yes, I have taken such quizzes. I’m not proud of it.) Why do we play these games? Aren’t they getting tiresome already?

Seriously, to my way of thinking, there are worthwhile Web 2.0 projects — like, of course, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (not launched yet) — but it seems like the vast majority of the websites, and many attractive and popular features within more worthwhile sites, are a waste of time.

Now, if you tell me, “You’re not getting it, this is social media, it’s for socialization,” I reply, “Yes, but what kind of socialization?” Are you seriously telling me that you make or foster meaningful friendships with all the silly tools and communities that exist out there? If you want to socialize, shouldn’t you be having a beer, playing pool, watching a game or movie together, taking a hike together — that sort of thing? No, I am not convinced. The fact that it is popular does not mean that this kind of socialization is a healthy way of socialization. It is a pale shadow of the real thing.

If competing for a place on Digg’s front page is of little value qua socialization — and on anybody’s account it has little value in terms of getting knowledge or wisdom — then sit down and tell me soberly: what the hell is it good for?

I know a reply to this will go something like this: you’re whistling in the wind. You’re a luddite. You’re trying to stop the tide. Complaining about Web 2.0 today is like complaining about television in 1960. To which I reply: I know that Web 2.0 is here to say; I helped build it and I know exactly the source of its staying power. I wrote in 2004 that sites like Wikipedia are natural institutions. But every human institution is imperfect, and some have far more flaws than others. Prostitution, for example.

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Wasting our free time in faceless groupthink, staring at a screen instead of jostling shoulders or holding hands — is that where we in post-industrial societies are going? Is it where we want to be going? If you’re a kid, is that what you want society to be like when you grow up? If you’re a parent, is that what you want for your kids?

And if not, how can we use our boundless creativity to find a solution?

The sheer number of fields that are intensely interested in wiki knowledge communities is staggering.  (I’ve learned this partly because I’ve been invited to speak by a surprisingly varied assortment of groups.)  I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while.  Here goes (in no particular order):

• Philosophy - social epistemologists are fascinated by the change in standards of knowledge implicit in a wiki encyclopedia like Wikipedia; there are semi-serious metaphysical issues in the relativistic notions lampooned by Stephen Colbert as “wikiality.”
• Library and information science - two of the field’s concerns are credibility of information and how people get their information; people now get a lot of information online via wiki…
• Communication - the game-changing conversational and production dynamics of wikis are fascinating
• Journalism - the idea of a really big collaborative news wiki, not yet successful but seemingly possible, is frightening and fascinating to journalists
• English/writing - the notion of asynchronous, distributed collaborative writing, wiki-style, has a lot of English majors hot and bothered
• Publishing business - massive groups of volunteers working together to create something that is actually usable by people outside those groups poses a potential threat to, and opportunity for, the traditional publishing business model
• Internet business - ooh!  A new way for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to exploit the sheep and make money!
• Computer science - it’s a major new Internet phenomenon, and CS people study the Internet
• Anthropology and Sociology - wiki communities are possibly more fascinating than the ordinary online community because they involve not just interaction but strong collaboration; the description and quantification of such social behavior is fascinating for people in these fields
• Political science and philosophy - what sort of communities are wiki communities?  How are they governed?  How should they be governed?  (A particular interest of mine.)
• Government - governments are intensely interested in wikis because they allow large numbers of people to organize information together, and one of the biggest headaches in governing is precisely how to let large numbers of people to organize information together
• Futurology - wikis like Wikipedia (and maybe Citizendium) portend great things, because they can bring together millions of people in a common cause; what does that mean for the future?
• Activism - see above, the part about millions of people in a common cause.
• Nonprofits - I was surprised to learn, a few years ago, that Wikipedia is the great success story of the nonprofit world; but this shouldn’t have been surprising, because Wikipedia et al. successfully harness zillions of unpaid volunteers, which is exactly what nonprofits dream of doing.
• The open source/free culture community - because these communities produce free knowledge
• Education - Wikipedia and, potentially, Citizendium and a children’s encyclopedia I would like to see created, have forever changed the way most kids, and college and even grad students, study; and educationists, who love love love group work, are highly interested in how wiki can be used as a teaching tool.
• Science and research generally - the impact of wiki knowledge resources on the perception of their fields, and the possibility of using wikis to organize their knowledge, is highly interesting to researchers of all sorts.

Is anyone else as amazed as I am at the sheer number of disciplines interested in the topic?

Why are wiki knowledge projects of such intense and broad-based interest?

There’s a good reason.  It’s because of what wiki knowledge projects are.

They are a new thing under the sun: international communities of volunteers that collaboratively produce free knowledge, information of use to everyone, distributed online; and, in the form of Wikipedia and soon the Citizendium too, they are remarkably huge and well-used.  The mere description is enough to get a whole bunch of people excited about these communities, even if they don’t understand them very well.

But there is an even more essential explanation: wiki knowledge projects are an enormous coming-together of people to understand the world.  Long ago in the 1990s and in the dark ages before that, learning and imparting knowledge socially was as it were fractured, done through a variety of institutions: schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and of course informally in groups.  And these institutions were inherently separated by space and time.  Most of these institutions will continue, I am sure; they have their place.  But the Internet provides a way that everyone, globally, of all ages, of all professions, of various educational attainment, can participate together in the same (virtual) place and at the same time, in both the creation and consumption of a new sort of knowledge project.

I think most people have vaguely, but not quite, realized that we are coming to grips with a new kind of knowledge institution – one that has the potential to be as powerful as any that has come before it, or more so.  (I introduced the idea of wikis as a new institution in this paper.)  Everyone may not quite understand what they’re dealing with, but a growing number of people understand that this new institution is very deeply important.

And over the coming years, they will realize that it is deeply important that we get it right.

Message to me from Mashable.com:

Hello and congrats,

Just in case you didn’t see it yet, you are a finalist in The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards (openwebawards.com). Our announcement post went out already: http://mashable.com/2008/11/19/openwebawards-voting-1/

From here we will be covering each of the finalists in each of the 26 categories over the next week in which you will be showcased.

This is a popularity vote, so spread the word to ensure your place in the final voting round:

1. You can create a custom version of our voting widget above to post to your company blog or website? Just visit the Open Web Awards Widget Creator and check the box to preset a category or company. This means your fans only need to enter an email address to vote - simple!

2. Spread the word through our 100+ International Blog Partners and make sure to leave comments, so their readers know who to vote for

Congratulations again and let me know if you have any questions.

Vote for the Citizendium Here!

Not that I’m particularly proud of that.

The following describes an idea I had a few weeks ago while attending an entrepreneur’s conference in Paris.  I have little desire and even less time (between Citizendium and Watchknow) to pursue this myself, so I commend it to anyone who is interested.  I want to kick it out the door and see if it survives on its own.  I will not be working on it myself.  I was informed that this idea resembles the moribund PICS project somewhat.  I view this as an interesting possible alternative to the too-influential search behemoths, Google and Yahoo, as well as their various would-be Web 2.0 competitors: it would make Web search entirely distributed, decentralized, and less subject to the control of any single interest.  By the way, I circulated the idea among a set of very distinguished Internet thinkers and was graced with some interesting replies.  Suffice it to say that quite a few very smart people think this is worth thinking about, at the very least.  “The case for syndicated Web ratings,” below, captures why I am so excited about this idea.

The idea

Should there be a universal standard, like RSS, that enables people to rate (and otherwise describe) websites — and to syndicate that data? If there were such a standard and such syndicated data, search engines could seed their results in creative ways using the data. That’s the basic idea.

Ultimately, such a standard could greatly decentralize the power of Internet search. How? Well, imagine five kinds of tools.

(1) Tools and data types for the ratings themselves:

(a) “Rating toolbars,” like StumbleUpon’s, allow you to recommend and rate a website you’re looking at. In addition, you can write a description, add tags, and rate it on specific dimensions like length, accuracy, grade level, and “family-friendliness.” The toolbar then publishes a “feed” of your ratings wherever you choose. The only required data for an individual rating are: URL and up-or-down.

(b) Moreover, it could be possible to rate another person’s or entity’s feed (meta-rating), as well as a feed of feeds (meta-meta-rating).

(c) Moreover, a feed could have meta-data about the person doing the rating, listing facts like education level, age, ethnicity, political views, or whatever a person might feel is relevant.

(2) Social bookmarking services, such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, as well as websites like Mahalo and Wikia Search, would be encouraged to publish their data using the standard (or at least allow their users to publish their own work easily). Mapping from existing attributes used by, e.g., del.icio.us to a well-designed standard would seem to be easy.

(3) Various “Web rating registrars” collect many feeds in one central location. Most registrars are absolutely open; a few are carefully edited. Moreover, most registrars, based on internal, statistical analysis of ratings, and/or meta- and meta-meta-ratings, offer a service that labels certain feeds as recommending porn, spam, and virus-infested webpages — a sort of distributed blacklist of both websites and of feeds.

(4) Search engines then use the data aggregated by the registrar(s). Due to the quantity and variety of data published in the aggregated feeds, it becomes possible to weight and filter search results not just on Google-style pagerank algorithms, but also things like:

(a) quality according to generally trusted sources; or quality according to your peer group; or quality according to academic and academic-endorsed sources; etc.

(b) whether the page contains porn, spam, or viruses.

(c) webpage type (e.g., one attribute might allow us to search just those pages that are marked as movie reviews).

(d) education level of resource (i.e., suitability for children; or post-graduate work).

(5) Making distributed rating into a Digg-type game.  As new pages came on the Web, once they had a certain minimum number of ratings, you can easily imagine “fresh meat” websites that enable and encourage people to rate them even more, letting users rate the newest, most popular stuff coming online about their particular interests. This would work a little like Digg or Reddit, except that the inputs would not come from individual users “Digging” a story, but from countless decentralized feeds rating a fresh page for the first time.

The case for syndicated Web ratings

On first glance at least, the case for syndicated Web ratings is surprisingly, even startlingly compelling.

Improves poor search engine results.  Probably the most common complaint about search engine results is that, while often relevant and useful, they do not always place the highest quality material front and center.  The best is often buried deep. The system is not broken, but it could use improvement.  If there were enough syndicated Web rating data, and effective mechanisms were in place to combat gaming the rating system (e.g., using statistical analysis of ratings, meta-ratings, and “certified” rating providers), the result could be used by search engines to deliver far higher-quality results.  This would also subtly encourage people to create higher-quality Web pages, i.e., pages that are more likely to be highly-rated.  (Cf. here this paper.)

Decentralizes search power.  Not only would the system be open, it would be fully distributed and decentralized, like the Blogosphere.  If well-constructed, a syndicated Web rating system would place the most powerful, important dataset for making the Web searchable directly in the hands of Internet users.  This could essentially “level the playing field” and could be profoundly disruptive to Google et al.

Many more people would be involved in vetting the Web.  There are huge numbers of people using Digg, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon, as well as newer services like Mahalo and Wikia Search.  But their users are contributing just to those search/bookmarking services, and are not benefitting the search results used on a daily basis on services like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com.  How many more people would take the time to recommend and rate Web pages if they knew their data would be distributed across the Web, and would help the proper placement of websites they know and love?  It could be an order of magnitude or more: suddenly, we all have a direct vote about search results.

Speeds up recognition of good new websites.  Websites would not have to wait for months or even years for their quality to be recognized, as they do now. Right now, Google dominates search, and Google’s rankings are effectively but still somewhat lamely determined by a somewhat mysterious, proprietary algorithm involving the most-linked-to and most-clicked-on websites. Since it often takes some really excellent pages months or even years to receive the number of links they “deserve” — if they ever do receive them — it takes that long for them to rise up in Google’s search results. By contrast, if we could seed search results in line with massive amounts of data about website ratings, a really excellent new website might be placed at the top of the rankings almost immediately.

Could be used to tailor search to the individual user. With data about education level, a search engine could, on request, return only those pages appropriate for a 5-7 year old — or for post-doctoral researchers.  Moreover, with data included in the feed about the rater, we would be enabled to see, for any given search, what the top rated websites were for our peer group. How teenage girls rate a news article might differ greatly from how 40-year-old men rate them — and this would be useful data for both groups to have.  With data about pornography contributed by trusted sources, the user could opt to have a search guaranteed to omit pornography.  In general, the adoption of the standard could improve the flexibility and power of Internet search.  And because it would be an open standard, it would become possible to use the standard (and later versions of the standard) to organize all manner of distributed Internet rating, description, organization projects, possibly more effectively than proprietary products have done.  For example, the system could foster an open project to create a free, more powerful search alternative to proprietary “walled garden” services for children and education.  (See item (4) under “The idea” above.)

Could be a way to combat Web abuse.  In particular, a syndicated Web rating system could be used as a neutral, universally distributed protocol for publishing and sharing data about what websites are considered sources of viruses, spam, porn, and criminal activity.  These problems — long considered the most serious of Internet problems — might be best attacked by widely distributing, decentralizing, and only then organizing the means to attack them.

If this analysis is correct, the idea could be deeply disruptive — but positively so.

How gaming the system could be combatted

What stops people from posting multiple feeds, all of them favorable to their own websites?  Indeed, won’t gaming the system be far worse in this case than under the present system?  At least under the present system, if you want to game the system, you must go to the trouble of creating interlinking “dummy” websites and spamming blogs with links, and so forth — that makes gaming the system relatively difficult.  But this system makes it possible to influence search results directly.  This might be why no such system has been created yet.  That, anyway, is what a critic might say.

The solution is that most search engines will not be so silly as to aggregate the ratings in any simple way, or treat all feeds (or individual ratings) equally.  First, it will be possible to “certify” and rate feeds; second, there will be internal indicators of abuse that search engine coders will be able to analyze and exploit.

It is entirely possible that a search engine will not use a feed if it is not in some way adequately “endorsed.”  Endorsement might be via networks of certified feeds, which have a distributed protocol allowing network members to vet other feeds.

The internal indicators of abuse might prove to be more powerful, however.  If a certain website is often described as “porn,” for example, and if it is recommended by a feed as non-porn, the feed registrar might discard that particular feed.  More generally, ratings and descriptions will be mutually reinforcing in a variety of ways, so that it will be possible to devise algorithms to detect abuse automatically.

But probably the most effective way to combat system-gaming will be a combination of certifying feeds and internal data analysis.  While it might be easier to post a feed in bad faith than to create a web of supporting websites, the data in the system itself will be far richer and thus capable of creating more powerful, creative solutions to the gaming problem.

Indeed, it seems entirely possible that we could, using syndicated Web ratings, engineer systems that are virtually perfect in their elimination of virus-ridden websites, porn, really bad blogs, and other stuff.  At bottom, the combination of transparent, rich data and the fact that most Internet users act in good faith might mean the disappearance of cruft from our search results.

What if the system succeeds?

“But wait,” you might say, “I don’t like the idea that cruft will disappear from search results.  There is something comforting about cruft being in our search results.  That means that any schlub like me can get the ear of the whole world.  Even if this Web rating system is distributed and decentralized, it is not really egalitarian.  Wouldn’t it mean the effective silencing of people who are unjustly regarded as ‘not good enough,’ or not mainstream enough, to be rated highly?”

The short answer is: no, and in fact the effect might be precisely the opposite: it would probably empower the regular folks even more the current search system.  Since meta-tagging would enable us to label our feeds in various ways, we could search for results that are important and relevant for our peers.  Moreover, a syndicated Web rating system would allow us to pluck undiscovered talents out of the obscurity that Google’s popularity-based algorithm places them in.

Besides — if the new system has undesirable results, no doubt Google or a Google-like system, that does not use syndicated ratings, will still exist and still be heavily used.

This project should be developed openly

This effort should be developed openly in the free-for-all way that characterizes much open source development.  This is absolutely required, in fact, because otherwise there will likely not be adequate adoption of the standard.  The standard should be propagated by an open, neutral consortium, not any single entity, and certainly not any for-profit business.  No single interest should have control over a standard that could be so consequential.

I have no interest in leading the effort, or even participating very much in it, except as a user.  I am merely putting the idea out there and hoping that others, who have more experience writing standards and working with syndication, will be motivated to create the components of the system.  My main concern is that the standard itself be adopted according to an open, democratic process, and not be unduly influenced by any single interest.

Questions and answers

Shouldn’t we discuss this idea and make sure it really is a good one before we rush off headlong to implement it?

Yes.  Hopefully the discussion will happen on the Blogosphere, Slashdot, and elsewhere as well.  I asked for comments on SharedKnowing, for what it’s worth.  It’s a Big Idea and it would affect everyone online deeply, and so it needs a huge amount of vetting and exploration.

How would I create a Web ratings feed?  I wouldn’t want to write XML by hand.

If the idea has legs, people will create free software that will write the XML for you, as well as post it automatically (i.e., syndicate it for anyone’s use).  It is easy to imagine people writing toolbars like the StumbleUpon toolbar, which allow you to rate websites and provide other information about them, which info is then syndicated automatically.

Where would the feeds be posted?

Think of this on analogy with blog feeds.  One could post one’s ratings feed anywhere online, where they could be found by webcrawlers.  But one could also register the feed with various feed registrars (in the same way you register a blog feed with Technorati), or post directly to the registrars.

What might the markup for a rating feed look like?

 We define a markup schema that allows people to declare whether they think a Web page, or a whole domain or subdomain, is high quality, or garbage; and to describe and evaluate it on any number of features. Just for example — we need not use these exact tags or features — we might write something like this:

<webrating>
<url>http://en.citizendium.org/</url>
<url-equiv>http://www.citizendium.org/</url-equiv>
<domain-or-page>domain</domain-or-page>
<overall-rating>7</overall-rating>
<overall-rating-yes-or-no>yes</overall-rating-yes-or-no>
<content-quantity>4</content-quantity>
<content-quality>9</content-quality>
<education-level>college</education-level>
<website-type>reference</website-type>
<pornography>no</pornography>
<keywords>encyclopedia reference wiki free open content collaboration</keywords>
<description>A new wiki encyclopedia project inviting everyone to participate under their own real names, and making a special, low-key role for experts.</description>
</webrating>

What elements should be required by the standard?

It seems that search engines could be improved with just two officially “required” elements: the URL and a “yes or no” overall rating.  This would allow, e.g., digg.com users to publish their ratings.  It is possible that after further discussion we will decide that certain other elements might be needed.  Of course, feed aggregators and registrars, and search engines, might require various additional pieces of information.

There is a difference between “high quality” and usefulness.  Some academic papers, for instance, might be very high quality, but useful for only a very small number of people.  How can this be taken into account in the ratings standard?

It could be approached in many ways, no doubt.  For example, we might adopt “usefulness” as an element.  One might then rate a page with an academic paper on it highly (or not!) in terms of reliability, but low in terms of usefulness-for-me.  The default “yes-or-no” rating would then be interpreted as usefulness-for-me, not as high quality.  Another idea would be simply to make use of an education level element, or even a special attribute for academic papers.  In any event, this is the sort of question of detail that those developing the standard should think long and hard about.

How could the system get started?

You might say this is an interesting idea, but how can it get started?  Probably, if it happens at all, entrepreneurs will make it happen.  The system would involve, in fact, at least four different new business types, namely (1), (3), (4), and (5) under “The idea” above, and existing social bookmarking websites might be persuaded to drive it forward as well.

Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet indicates that something like this is the natural next step.  There is a natural progression of search “generativity”:

1. The Yahoo! directory — proprietary, centralized directory
2. Google — proprietary, centralized search
3. Mahalo and Wikia Search — free, centralized search enhanced by human input
4. Syndicated Web ratings — free, decentralized search enhanced by human input (with data support for dynamically created tagging and directory systems)

In short, this may the prototypical “idea whose time has come.”  If enough people are interested, the support for a truly distributed project like this will quickly appear.  But if people aren’t that excited about it, it will die a perhaps well-deserved death.

But another reason to be optimistic that the standard, once published, will be rapidly adopted and used, is the simple fact that there are so many people already engaged in rating and recommending websites, even though the ratings benefit only the other users of the websites. But how many more of us would actually take the time to rate and describe websites, if we knew the work would positively affect the results of all competitive Web search services? In other words, what if we knew that our vote would count? We’d vote!

Shouldn’t we simply pressure social bookmarking websites to work on a standard and use it to publish their data?

It couldn’t hurt.  If we should target any websites for such pressuring, it should be those that are already sympathetic to the ideals of the open source community.  Go to work on them.  Of course, many will prefer to ignore this idea, because it is profoundly disruptive.

I support this idea and I want to make it happen.  What should I do?

Here are some things you could do:

1. Write about it.  Debate about it.  Help build the critical mass of people interested in the idea.
2. Join forums that are discussing the idea, and work toward a shared understanding of what the standard should look like.
3. If there is support for the idea, eventually someone will set up a wiki to work on the standard.  Then you could help work on the standard.
4. Start writing software, or adapting your current software — preferably, free software — to do the things listed under “The idea” above.  Then announce your software and get other people working on it.  Standards are often developed alongside applications that use them.

The idea is loose…and it’s up to you and the innovation commons in general to make it happen, if it’s going to happen.

What do the following pieces of jargon have in common?

• free software
• open source software (OSS, FOSS)
• open content 
• Internet communities
• Web 2.0
• strong collaboration
• mass collaboration
• collaborative revolution
• crowdsourcing
  (Can you add to this list?)

Answer: they are all used to describe the phenomenon of a bunch of people working together online, in open communities, to create specific bodies of free information, like open source software, Citizendium, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Slashdot, Web forums and mailing lists, and so forth.  Granted, they each mean something slightly different.  Internet geeks can expound on the differences and meanings at great length.

What name will win out in the long run?  Or does that question not make sense — are we really dealing with many significantly different phenomena here, which really need all these different descriptors?

Some Dutch filmmakers made a documentary (48 minutes), in English, titled “The Truth according to Wikipedia.”  It’s pretty good, but I’m too close to the story to be able to offer anything like an objective opinion.  It’s pretty heavy on Andrew Keen and his over-the-top yet strangely entertaining criticism of the Internet.  I’m in there, talking about Wikipedia; no mention of CZ, unfortunately, but you can’t ask for everything.

As was announced at an awards ceremony this evening (I unfortunately couldn’t attend), the Citizendium received an “Award of Excellence” from the Society for New Communications Research.  We are grateful to the Society for the recognition.

The bottom line: our aim is quality, not quantity.  We already know that “crowds” can produce massive quantities of content.  Big deal.  The Citizendium is about developing our massive quantities of content into works of stunning quality, over the long term.  We have a better shot than anyone at doing this.

Many people have essentially asked me, “Since Wikipedia is ‘good enough,’ what is the point of the Citizendium?” The answer, of course, is that Wikipedia isn’t good enough, and given its policies, it is highly unlikely that it ever will be. More to the point, over the long haul, the Citizendium can do better.

But that’s always my reply. It now occurs to me that the underlying insight has not been emphasized enough. As I look at various encyclopedia articles — and my own writings — I am struck by how much work there is to do, to perfect them. For example, to find exactly the right reference, and place it at exactly the right place, is very difficult and time-consuming. Most people don’t spend the time needed to get it exactly right. A work is hailed as brilliant if it merely doesn’t get anything too badly wrong. Well, the great thing about the Citizendium is that we have the (growing) community and the (developing) policies that is allowing us to grow not just another encyclopedia, but a continuously improving encyclopedia. That is the brilliance of our plan.

The day we look forward to is not the day when we have millions of articles, but the day when serious professionals say, “The Citizendium articles in my area are of such stunning quality that I can’t imagine how they could be improved. They have been worked and reworked by hundreds, or thousands, of specialists, in my field. They contain, of course, no known factual errors. The coverage is complete; the tiniest details are covered in more specialized articles. The writing reflects consistently superb craftsmanship: accessible to the college student on more basic topics (without removing accuracy), and clear on more advanced topics. The citations are brilliantly chosen, always reflecting the best (original, or most authoritative) sources. They do not favor any side in any controversy, but provide full details of the debate, so that the reader can be fully informed so as to make up his or her own mind. The bibliographies and external links, fully annotated, list virtually every credible source on their topics. The other supplementary material, on subpages, is of equally high quality. In short, the only reason to change the articles (and whole clusters) now is that the field itself changes.”

An article is one thing. A magisterial article is quite another. The difference is huge and hugely important.

It’s a long road from here to there. Wikipedia is very, very far from that point, and again I doubt it will ever reach that point; if I thought they could, I wouldn’t have started CZ. We, however, have a chance!

In fact, in view of this, you might well ask yourself: what is the point of Wikipedia? It’s never going to get past a certain level of mediocrity; that’s one of the main reasons I stopped working on it a while ago. I think that, as the years go by, we are going to find more and more people asking themselves that — and coming to CZ. Because it’s not just about quantity. It’s about quality. And we have the nascent community and policies in place that actually have a chance to achieve the sort of high quality a global collaboration of scholars can achieve.

Mind you, I still think it’s all right if we start with stubs; we have to start somewhere. But we should also keep our eyes on the prize, because our substantial promise of achieving that sort of stunning quality is really what makes it all worthwhile.