Citizendium Blog

The Institute of European Affairs, a prestigious Dublin, Ireland thinktank, invited me to kick off their “Our Digital Futures” program.  So I came and said a few more things about the politics of knowledge.  Here’s their summary of the talk:

Larry Sanger began by asking why governments have not regulated internet content more. The new “cyberpolitys”, communities on the internet, are generally assumed to be able to self regulate. Yet, looking far into the future, he posited the view that if Citizendium, his latest project, were to become an authoritative encyclopaedia for mankind, its internal governance would be of utmost importance. The more successful collaborative projects such as Wikipedia become, the more likely it is that an external authority will attempt to regulate their content. To avoid government intervention, the authoritative projects of the future must self govern to some extent. The best protection against undue government interference in open collaborative projects is internal governance. The Republican State may provide the best model through which future cyberpolitys can self govern. 

I had a number of comments about recent events.  I was delighted that Ireland’s Minister for Communication, Eamon Ryan, was on hand, among others, and had some kind things to say.

While there I also received a copy of IEA Senior Researcher Johnny Ryan’s new book, Countering Militant Islamist Radicalisation on the Internet: A User Driven Strategy to Recover the Web.  I might write more about that later — but who’da thunk Internet communities might be terrorism-fighting tools?  That’s what he suggests, and he makes a pretty compelling case for the thesis, from what I can tell.

You can listen here.

I got an interview request out of the blue from a Frankfurter Rundschau reporter last week.  He wanted to know what I thought about various Web 2.0 topics like Second Life and MySpace.  I gave him some off-the-cuff answers.  This was turned into a story: “MySpace wird bald uncool” or “MySpace will soon be uncool.”  I am now the arbiter of coolness!!!

I didn’t quite say that; I just made the off-the-cuff observation, “More and more people will come to agree with me that MySpace-type social networking websites are annoying. Well, I don’t really know that, I’m just hoping.”  Believe me, I’m the last person you want to ask what will become cool or uncool to teenagers.  It is laughable to suppose I know anything, or care, about that.  I was just expressing my hopes, my dreams, not actually making a prediction.  (Actually, I’m on FaceBook myself.)  I also don’t (or didn’t, until last week) know that boomers now have their own MySpace-clone social networks.  “Ehrlich gesagt, wusste ich gar nicht, dass so etwas schon existiert,” I said, but not in German.  But somehow, this seems plausible for the aging Aquarians I know.

CZ got a plug anyway!

JP Rangaswami, aka the blogger “confused of calcutta,” has written an entertaining evaluation of the Citizendium. Though I know he says it in humility, I must ungraciously agree with him: he really is confused.

But let me address him directly.  JP, you say:

I must be Confused. …

Imagine someone coming to you and saying “You know what? We’re going to solve your spam problem for you. What we’re going to do, we’re going to set up this small committee that looks into every e-mail you get, and we’re only going to send you the ones we think are OK. Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about who’s going to be on this committee and how they get there. After all, we know best.”

…

I know one thing. I’m a lot more worried about The Cult of The Expert than I am about The Cult Of The Amateur.

We’ve had the Cult Of The Expert for centuries now. And we’ve seen how and why it breaks down, why it fails. Small groups of experts can be “gamed”, often without realising it. Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.

JP, you take a very simplistic assumption — that the Citizendium is just another top-down, elitist project — and you dress it up to sound hip. I wouldn’t know about the hipness, that’s something I’ve obviously never aspired to, but as to the assumption, well, it’s just completely wrong.

“Citizendium,” the name, is formed from “Citizens’ Compendium.” That’s our identity. We ain’t elitist. At present, we have around 2000 authors drawn from the general public, and some 200 expert editors. Editors are not infrequently challenged on their views. It is, after all, a wiki. We are soon going to set up a dispute resolution body; it will be staffed in part by non-expert authors. Editors are the village elders wandering the bazaar; they aren’t attempting to redesign their cathedral to look a little more like a bazaar.

So, basically, you, and not a few other people, have got the Citizendium all wrong. But I have a sneaking suspicion that this is intentional, actually. You, and others with your reaction to CZ, see that we have made a role for experts.  This, of course, is completely outrageous.  It’s so wrong, in fact, that it really doesn’t matter that we are a wiki; it doesn’t matter that it’s an open, public project; it doesn’t matter that editors and authors really do work shoulder-to-shoulder.  If we deviate from the party line — radical epistemic egalitarianism — then we are Elitists, pure and simple.  And therefore the enemy.

I’m asking you to stretch your world of possibilities a little.  If your mind is not completely closed to the possibility, you will see that it is not simply contradictory to have a merely guiding role for experts in Web 2.0 projects.  There is a middle way; it’s not necessarily old-fashioned elitism vs. radical egalitarianism.  Unlike Andrew Keen, I am an advocate for that middle way.  If you’re interested, I’ve written something of a manifesto for this view.

And by the way: I agree with you that diagnosing the exact problem about search is hard.  Simply having experts choose the winners and losers isn’t the answer.  But ignoring expert opinion entirely is silly, too.

From the Cool Concept dept., http://unype.com/ – a combination of “unite” and “Skype,” I guess.  It’s a mashup that allows people to interact via Google Earth.  Skype plugs in, too.  Very tiny download.  Also, September is Multi-User Google Earth Awareness Month.  The guy behind it is Murat Aktihanoglu, 3D guru, an ex-co-worker of mine.

Like, why hasn’t anybody done this yet?  Does this mean we don’t have to put up with lame-o landscapes created on Second Life?

As you might know, we’re deep in development of an expansion of the Citizendium’s scope.  The basic idea is that we’re going to have different kinds of reference material on subpages of encyclopedia article pages.

Link lists are one sort of subpage we’re talking about.  Here are some policy guidelines I wrote up today for link pages.

I think that ultimately, a really successful Citizendium collection of Links pages would constitute a very useful Web directory, with three advantages over previous directories: (1) links would have been chosen for quality first and foremost, and ultimately vetted by experts, (2) it will be very easy to prevent “link spam” given the way our community is set up, and (3) the links would be filed under an ever-expanding, very fine-grained category scheme. The result could be used by search engines, via various algorithms, to drive the selection of higher-quality search results. The result, one hopes, is that the highest-quality results would be more likely to float to the top of search results.

This is what I argued in a keynote delivered at the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges Annual Meeting, Reed College, June 13, 2007: What should we do about Internet “cruft”? Toward knowledge-rich websites

Here are some excerpts.

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As I said, here’s the full review.

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I wrote a solicited review of The Cult of the Amateur for the magazine New Scientist.

The Blogosphere is up in arms over Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen deliberately set out to tweak the mavens of Web 2.0 - and he is succeeding. This is great fun to witness, because said mavens often have all the self-righteousness of revolutionaries, at least when it comes to the virtues of Web 2.0, and are thus eminently tweakable.

Keen decries everything that he imagines to be wrong with the internet - especially the mediocre work of amateurs. Free but substandard content is apparently destroying whole industries, particularly our culture industries. He hates the fact that so much of today’s internet content is collaborative and distributed. The so-called wisdom of crowds is itself an “extraordinary popular delusion”, he says; the best work comes from the individual, professional mind. Anonymity coupled with anarchy leads to myriad abuses, from the corporate gaming of YouTube to “moral disorder”. …

Maybe I’ll post the full text…

UPDATE: done

Alex Halavais was interviewed about Citizendium for Assignment Zero and among other things said this:

Q: You were quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October of last year as saying that you didn’t think Citizendium was going to work, that “it looks far too restrictive, and it costs too much effort to join and contribute.” Now that it’s firmly on its way, do you still feel that way?

A: I’m not ready to eat my words yet, although that quote really only got at a corner of what I thought on the matter. I still think Citizendium is going to face some of the difficulties that Nupedia did. It’s a little like early aircraft design: there is a clear point at which a collaborative project takes off and gets off the ground. If it makes that point, then it will probably keep flying for a while.

Wikipedia took off by taking out a lot of the checks and balances that we expect to find in an encyclopedia. Citizendium is including those checks from the beginning, and I think that’s an interesting model. I suspect that starting off loose and tightening up the ship as things move forward–much like the cyclical process of most programming projects these days–is probably a good model.

The truth is that Sanger has made clear he doesn’t think of this as an elitist approach, and that there is a role for credentialed expertise in an open encyclopedia. Ironically, Wales seems to be approaching that view from the other side, recognizing the importance of stabilizing the content of Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia remains too loose, and Citizendium is still short on the momentum needed to launch it forward, but they are converging on a similar ideal.

I think it’s good that Citizendium is there, and I think it is a very worthwhile endeavor. I just don’t know that it’s going to be able to gather enough excitement among its users to allow for the kind of mass of articles needed to make it appealing to a large user base.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that I couldn’t tell, without some research, whether this was merely a report of research done for another article, or an article unto itself.  That’s one aspect — not necessarily a disadvantage, but it can be in some cases — of the “publish, then filter” model, which Assignment Zero is following.  Except that they are really following a model similar to CZ’s: it’s “post, then filter, then publish as approved.”

I was on the public radio program “To the Point” today with Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, and Xeni Jardin, talking about Keen’s book and the future of Web 2.0.  Xeni has blogged it already on BoingBoing.  It was a pretty interesting exchange.  Andrew followed his now-usual shtick, saying that quality culture and professional livelihoods were threatened by the Web 2.0 “cult of the amateur,” but he was disappointingly unresponsive to a few of the harder questions.  Clay had a surprisingly fresh take toward Keen’s thesis, saying we ought to take it more seriously “than it deserves” (a nice way to put it).  Xeni had a knee-jerk reaction and basically said, “I don’t buy it, it’s just obviously wrong, isn’t it?”  Myself, I argued that Andrew lumps together two separable issues, namely, the decline in quality (”dumbing down”) caused by amateur participations, on the one hand, and the decline of the media professions allegedly (but implausibly) caused by the availability of free content, on the other.  Can’t there be high-quality free content?  After all, it is free (gratis) content, produced by journalists themselves (not amateur work) that is threatening the profitability of newspapers; we can imagine free content projects that are guided by experts.  Like the Citizendium!

I’ll be making a similar point in a review of Keen’s book coming out next week, I think, in New Scientist.

It came out in print a few months ago, but I just noticed that The Focus has just posted my essay “Education 2.0″ online.

Here’s the whole thing.

IN THE LAST TEN YEARS OR SO, the Internet has deeply disrupted many industries. Music downloading sites have revolutionized the music industry and shuttered many physical stores. eBay and Amazon.com and other online retailers have changed the way we shop, especially for harder-to-find items. Free news content online, and aggregators such as Google News, have threatened the profitability of traditional news media. Wikipedia and the new Citizendium have the full attention of reference publishers. The financial industry has been overrun by do-it-yourselfism. The real estate industry is wondering how to respond to the levelling influence of cheap online housing listings, such as Craigslist. And these are only a few examples; virtually no industry has been left untouched by this Internet revolution.

Why has the Internet been so broadly disruptive? Consider what the Internet is: a giant digital network. Much information that was previously available only in a “hard copy” is now instantly available over this nearly universal network. That fact alone is enough to explain why free news content online has threatened the profits of the news industry.

Organizing education online

This giant network makes information dissemination not only easier, but also decentralized. Moreover, it has fostered a new kind of social organization, namely, social interaction that is asynchronous, at-a-distance, and dependent upon decisions made by sovereign individuals rather than a top-down hierarchy. This new kind of social organization describes such startling new developments as Wikipedia and Craigslist, and “Web 2.0” social networks generally.

I want to consider the impact the Internet might be expected to have on the future of one industry in particular: education. The Internet has the potential to bring changes to education on the same scale as the changes to other industries; but most students are still attending brick-and-mortar schools as they did one hundred years ago. This is unlikely to change. I believe an Internet revolution in education would not take the form of enhanced distance education; but while education may not be delivered online for many more students, it can be organized online. And as I want to argue, that is where the really exciting possibilities lie.

Imagine that education were not delivered but organized and managed in a way that were fully digitized, decentralized, self-directed, asynchronous, and at-a-distance. It is not hard to imagine a digital, decentralized degree-granting institution that “lives” primarily on the Internet, and organizes teachers and students to meet face-to-face. Such an institution need not offer courses, pay teachers, or collect tuition from students at all, but could act merely as a middleman and record transactions.

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