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Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).

Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.

Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).

The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)

Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)

And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.

However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.

(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.

Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.

But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)

After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.

While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.

Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.

Larry Sanger writes "Citizendium, 'the Citizens' Compendium' — a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts — has just announced that it's celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether 'we've made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.' We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we've still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."

Larry Sanger writes "Citizendium, 'the Citizens' Compendium' — a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts — has just announced that it's celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether 'we've made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.' We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we've still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."

Larry Sanger writes "Citizendium, 'the Citizens' Compendium' — a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts — has just announced that it's celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether 'we've made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.' We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we've still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The reports of Sinbad's death become greatly exaggerated. A Wikipedia contributor is unmasked as a fraud, raising questions about why he wasn't called out earlier. NBC airs a piece about how anybody can edit any article on Wikipedia, and errors creep in as a result. (Duh.) But what's most frustrating about all these controversies surrounding Wikipedia is that news reports describe these incidents as if they are a permanent, unsolvable problem with any type of community-built encyclopedia, when in fact there seems to be a straightforward solution." More words follow. Just click the link.

In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail? (Which could be identified as a faculty address either by a domain name like "faculty.schoolname.edu", or by a Web page in the faculty section of the school's Web site identifying the person's e-mail address?) And then once the user's bona fides have been verified in this or some other way, couldn't they put their seal of approval on any article whose contents need to be considered reliable, or that readers want to cite as an authoritative source? In this way, with only a few minutes of effort and without changing a single word of the article, its value is increased many times -- surely one of the best possible trade-offs in terms of effort versus reward. (As for the question of "What experts would do this?", the answer is, presumably the same people who contribute to sites like Wikipedia currently. If their motives are altruistic in the first place, hopefully they would be willing to take this extra step if they knew it would increase the article's usefulness.)

Something like this model is planned by the operators of Citizendium.org, a Wikipedia alternative (I balk at using the word "rival" although it is inevitable that people will see them that way). The last time I wrote about Citizendium, some thought it sounded like such a valentine to the project that they wondered if I was a shill; actually, sometimes a project just comes along that aligns almost exactly with what I would have done if I could have re-done a popular project like Wikipedia with a few design changes, and when that happens, I just say so. Some others may have wondered if I was sucking up for a board position or something. No, that would be, like, work. But I think they have some good ideas that will make them a more useful alternative in some cases, unless Wikipedia copies back some of their ideas in order to serve both needs at once, which would also be a good thing.

Consider the two major issues on which Citizendium is planning to take a different approach from Wikipedia: (1) user verification, and (2) putting published articles into an "approved" state under the stewardship of a credentialed editor, who has to sign off on any future changes to the article. The issue of user verification can be further divided into two sub-issues: (a) verifying users for the purpose of ascertaining their credentials, and (b) verifying users for the purpose of limiting the amount of vandalism committed by new users under pseudonyms. (While editorial control on Citizendium means that it is not possible to vandalize the public-facing version of an article after it has gone into an "approved" state, users can still vandalize an article while it is a "work in progress" being built up towards the first milestone where it can be approved. Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says that such vandals are surprisingly, pathetically motivated even though their work is only seen by a small audience.)

On the first issue, the one of verifying user credentials, I think the verification of .edu addresses especially would be a cheap and easy way to increase the value of every article that that user writes, or signs off on. I don't think, however, it's necessary to go as far as Citizendium is currently planning on going, by requiring real names and biographies of all users. My thinking is that if an article is synthesized by 100 monkeys with typewriters but the finished product is giving the blessing of a credentialed professor of physics, it's pretty much just as reliable as if the professor had written it themselves. And if the same article gets the blessing of multiple credentialed experts, it could justifiably be considered more reliable than many printed sources written by a single author. The point is that the credentials that matter, are those of the people who stake their reputation on the accuracy of the article, not necessarily those of the people who contribute to it. So on this front, I think that while Wikipedia asks too little of users' backgrounds, Citizendium's current plan would ask too much, because as long as you have the credentials of one person who has signed off on an article, collecting non-verifiable bios of the article's other contributors doesn't actually gain anything.

The other side of verifying credentials is the use of credentials to prevent vandalism. In this situation it's not necessary to verify that the user actually is who they say they are; the system only needs to ensure that the same user is not signing up over and over again after previous accounts get banned for abuse. (You could ban users by IP address, but tools like Tor make it easy for users to connect from what appears to be a different IP address every time.) A blog post from Citizendium founder Larry Sanger lists three possible approaches instead: (a) requiring existing user X to vouch for new user Z before Z can join; (b) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page establishing their identity; or (c) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page of some person X who can vouch for Z's identity. I don't know how quickly a system could grow by referrals only -- after all, I was surprised that GMail took off so quickly during the period when you could only join with an "invite" from an existing user. Then again, GMail was giving away something for free that almost everyone could use, so most people who wanted it, would find themselves closely linked to someone else who had it. Citizendium, on the other hand, asks not what they can do for you but what you can do for them, and so might not achieve enough penetration to spread by referrals only.

I suggested that one alternative would be to send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique. The problem here, apart from the privacy concerns, is the delay that users would incur before their registration was complete, which would take away the "instant gratification" that they could get from starting to contribute right away. (You could let users edit before their address is verified, but that would just enable the same person to keep re-creating new accounts with unique but fake addresses, and use them to commit vandalism before the account was found out.)

Another idea would be that for new users, their first, say, three edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by verified users, and once the first three edits have been approved, the user is able to make edits in real time. (Since anybody would be able to review a new user's edits to make sure they were not spam, the new user's edits could be reviewed very quickly, since any Citizendium volunteer who was online, could review the latest entries in the edit queue and approve them.) It's true that a user could game this system by, for example, submitting three minor improvements, and then using their unblocked account to vandalize articles while they're being worked on. However, even in this case, the "vandal" would probably end up having a positive contribution to the site, because of the three small improvements that they'd already made. If a legitimate Citizendium volunteer would have to spend more effort making those three small improvements, than it would take to let a new user make those constructive changes and then ban them and revert their destructive changes once the user is caught committing vandalism (and the latter wouldn't take much effort at all), then Citizendium has actually gotten a good deal out of the "vandal"! (To make this work, a user's first contributions could not be "neutral" changes like replacing one word with a synonym; they would have to be actual improvements, even small ones, thus ensuring that the net effect of a potential "vandal" is positive.) There may be other possible solutions. These are just alternatives in case the model of referral by trusted users turns out not to work.

Now switching to the other side of the reliability issue: Whether the default article that is displayed to the public for a given topic, should be the latest "stable" version approved by credentialed users, or the very latest version incorporating all edits submitted by any user whatsoever. Having talked with members of the Citizendium and Wikipedia communities in their respective forums, there appear to be three schools of thought on the article stability issue. The first is that the whole idea of putting articles into an "approved" state and moderating all changes going forward, goes against the "spirit" of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. The second, suggested on the Wikipedia discussion list by Sheldon Rampton, is that it would be a useful feature if credentialed users could select certain page versions in the page history and "sign off" on the accuracy of one of those past versions; the page displayed by default would be the bleeding-edge latest one (with all of the possible vandalism and inaccuracies that entails), but users who wanted a reliable, citable source could look in the history. The third school of thought is that reliability is so valuable, that the default page displayed to the public and carrying the stamp of the project, should be the latest version approved by credentialed editors -- the model that Citizendium currently has in mind.

I'm not really partial to the first view, since I think the success of the project should be defined by how it achieves its goals (whatever you define those goals to be) and not in whether it kept with its original "spirit". Since Wikipedia has far more readers than contributors, if your motivations for contributing to or maintaining Wikipedia are at all oriented towards doing good for other people, presumably meeting the needs of readers is more important than keeping the party going for contributors (provided, of course, that the environment for contributors is at least pleasant enough to keep them contributing). The choice between the second and third points of view is more interesting. There's no obvious best-of-both-worlds choice here, because what motivates many contributors (the fact that their changes go live to the entire world, right away) is also what motivates vandals.

On the other hand, the problem doesn't sound unsolvable. You could go with the Citizendium model of editor-approved changes but create a prioritized system for "urgent" updates, in the case of changes to an article made to incorporate current events. Suppose users (who have been verified using one or more of the methods above) are each issued a certain number of "credits" that they can use to mark a proposed update as an urgent, breaking change. (Misusing these credits to mark changes as "urgent", that really aren't, would be considered abuse tantamount to spamming or vandalism.) Then let's say, for example, Anna Nicole Smith dies. A user could submit this change to the Anna Nicole Smith article, along with a link to a reliable news source (e.g. a wire service story) and a credit marking the change as "urgent". Since an editor would not need any particular expertise to view the article and verify that the change was accurate, any editor could review the "urgent request queue" and approve that particular change for publication, ensuring that the queue was checked frequently throughout the day and urgent updates would get pushed through quickly. Thus the site could keep pace with breaking current events without the kind of inaccuracies that plagued Kenneth Lay's Wikipedia entry when he died.

So there's a trade-off there, between displaying all the latest changes by default and motivating people to contribute but also running the risk of vandalism, versus displaying only the latest editor-approved page. Where there is not a trade-off, that I can see, is in the option of simply having an editor-approved version of a given page -- whether it's displayed by default, or only stored in the version history where people can look for it. To me, both of these steps seem to consist of pure gain for relatively little effort:

1. Verify credentials of academic professionals by poking their .edu address.
2. Allow them to give their "blessing" to certain versions of a page in the page history, so that users can rely on those specific page versions and even cite them as sources where appropriate.

So I hope that Citizendium will help bring more prominence to the idea, and that something similar might get incorporated back into Wikipedia. The approval of an identity-verified expert can improve an article's value so much, for such comparitively little extra effort, that it makes no sense not to have that option.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The reports of Sinbad's death become greatly exaggerated. A Wikipedia contributor is unmasked as a fraud, raising questions about why he wasn't called out earlier. NBC airs a piece about how anybody can edit any article on Wikipedia, and errors creep in as a result. (Duh.) But what's most frustrating about all these controversies surrounding Wikipedia is that news reports describe these incidents as if they are a permanent, unsolvable problem with any type of community-built encyclopedia, when in fact there seems to be a straightforward solution." More words follow. Just click the link.

In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail? (Which could be identified as a faculty address either by a domain name like "faculty.schoolname.edu", or by a Web page in the faculty section of the school's Web site identifying the person's e-mail address?) And then once the user's bona fides have been verified in this or some other way, couldn't they put their seal of approval on any article whose contents need to be considered reliable, or that readers want to cite as an authoritative source? In this way, with only a few minutes of effort and without changing a single word of the article, its value is increased many times -- surely one of the best possible trade-offs in terms of effort versus reward. (As for the question of "What experts would do this?", the answer is, presumably the same people who contribute to sites like Wikipedia currently. If their motives are altruistic in the first place, hopefully they would be willing to take this extra step if they knew it would increase the article's usefulness.)

Something like this model is planned by the operators of Citizendium.org, a Wikipedia alternative (I balk at using the word "rival" although it is inevitable that people will see them that way). The last time I wrote about Citizendium, some thought it sounded like such a valentine to the project that they wondered if I was a shill; actually, sometimes a project just comes along that aligns almost exactly with what I would have done if I could have re-done a popular project like Wikipedia with a few design changes, and when that happens, I just say so. Some others may have wondered if I was sucking up for a board position or something. No, that would be, like, work. But I think they have some good ideas that will make them a more useful alternative in some cases, unless Wikipedia copies back some of their ideas in order to serve both needs at once, which would also be a good thing.

Consider the two major issues on which Citizendium is planning to take a different approach from Wikipedia: (1) user verification, and (2) putting published articles into an "approved" state under the stewardship of a credentialed editor, who has to sign off on any future changes to the article. The issue of user verification can be further divided into two sub-issues: (a) verifying users for the purpose of ascertaining their credentials, and (b) verifying users for the purpose of limiting the amount of vandalism committed by new users under pseudonyms. (While editorial control on Citizendium means that it is not possible to vandalize the public-facing version of an article after it has gone into an "approved" state, users can still vandalize an article while it is a "work in progress" being built up towards the first milestone where it can be approved. Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says that such vandals are surprisingly, pathetically motivated even though their work is only seen by a small audience.)

On the first issue, the one of verifying user credentials, I think the verification of .edu addresses especially would be a cheap and easy way to increase the value of every article that that user writes, or signs off on. I don't think, however, it's necessary to go as far as Citizendium is currently planning on going, by requiring real names and biographies of all users. My thinking is that if an article is synthesized by 100 monkeys with typewriters but the finished product is giving the blessing of a credentialed professor of physics, it's pretty much just as reliable as if the professor had written it themselves. And if the same article gets the blessing of multiple credentialed experts, it could justifiably be considered more reliable than many printed sources written by a single author. The point is that the credentials that matter, are those of the people who stake their reputation on the accuracy of the article, not necessarily those of the people who contribute to it. So on this front, I think that while Wikipedia asks too little of users' backgrounds, Citizendium's current plan would ask too much, because as long as you have the credentials of one person who has signed off on an article, collecting non-verifiable bios of the article's other contributors doesn't actually gain anything.

The other side of verifying credentials is the use of credentials to prevent vandalism. In this situation it's not necessary to verify that the user actually is who they say they are; the system only needs to ensure that the same user is not signing up over and over again after previous accounts get banned for abuse. (You could ban users by IP address, but tools like Tor make it easy for users to connect from what appears to be a different IP address every time.) A blog post from Citizendium founder Larry Sanger lists three possible approaches instead: (a) requiring existing user X to vouch for new user Z before Z can join; (b) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page establishing their identity; or (c) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page of some person X who can vouch for Z's identity. I don't know how quickly a system could grow by referrals only -- after all, I was surprised that GMail took off so quickly during the period when you could only join with an "invite" from an existing user. Then again, GMail was giving away something for free that almost everyone could use, so most people who wanted it, would find themselves closely linked to someone else who had it. Citizendium, on the other hand, asks not what they can do for you but what you can do for them, and so might not achieve enough penetration to spread by referrals only.

I suggested that one alternative would be to send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique. The problem here, apart from the privacy concerns, is the delay that users would incur before their registration was complete, which would take away the "instant gratification" that they could get from starting to contribute right away. (You could let users edit before their address is verified, but that would just enable the same person to keep re-creating new accounts with unique but fake addresses, and use them to commit vandalism before the account was found out.)

Another idea would be that for new users, their first, say, three edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by verified users, and once the first three edits have been approved, the user is able to make edits in real time. (Since anybody would be able to review a new user's edits to make sure they were not spam, the new user's edits could be reviewed very quickly, since any Citizendium volunteer who was online, could review the latest entries in the edit queue and approve them.) It's true that a user could game this system by, for example, submitting three minor improvements, and then using their unblocked account to vandalize articles while they're being worked on. However, even in this case, the "vandal" would probably end up having a positive contribution to the site, because of the three small improvements that they'd already made. If a legitimate Citizendium volunteer would have to spend more effort making those three small improvements, than it would take to let a new user make those constructive changes and then ban them and revert their destructive changes once the user is caught committing vandalism (and the latter wouldn't take much effort at all), then Citizendium has actually gotten a good deal out of the "vandal"! (To make this work, a user's first contributions could not be "neutral" changes like replacing one word with a synonym; they would have to be actual improvements, even small ones, thus ensuring that the net effect of a potential "vandal" is positive.) There may be other possible solutions. These are just alternatives in case the model of referral by trusted users turns out not to work.

Now switching to the other side of the reliability issue: Whether the default article that is displayed to the public for a given topic, should be the latest "stable" version approved by credentialed users, or the very latest version incorporating all edits submitted by any user whatsoever. Having talked with members of the Citizendium and Wikipedia communities in their respective forums, there appear to be three schools of thought on the article stability issue. The first is that the whole idea of putting articles into an "approved" state and moderating all changes going forward, goes against the "spirit" of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. The second, suggested on the Wikipedia discussion list by Sheldon Rampton, is that it would be a useful feature if credentialed users could select certain page versions in the page history and "sign off" on the accuracy of one of those past versions; the page displayed by default would be the bleeding-edge latest one (with all of the possible vandalism and inaccuracies that entails), but users who wanted a reliable, citable source could look in the history. The third school of thought is that reliability is so valuable, that the default page displayed to the public and carrying the stamp of the project, should be the latest version approved by credentialed editors -- the model that Citizendium currently has in mind.

I'm not really partial to the first view, since I think the success of the project should be defined by how it achieves its goals (whatever you define those goals to be) and not in whether it kept with its original "spirit". Since Wikipedia has far more readers than contributors, if your motivations for contributing to or maintaining Wikipedia are at all oriented towards doing good for other people, presumably meeting the needs of readers is more important than keeping the party going for contributors (provided, of course, that the environment for contributors is at least pleasant enough to keep them contributing). The choice between the second and third points of view is more interesting. There's no obvious best-of-both-worlds choice here, because what motivates many contributors (the fact that their changes go live to the entire world, right away) is also what motivates vandals.

On the other hand, the problem doesn't sound unsolvable. You could go with the Citizendium model of editor-approved changes but create a prioritized system for "urgent" updates, in the case of changes to an article made to incorporate current events. Suppose users (who have been verified using one or more of the methods above) are each issued a certain number of "credits" that they can use to mark a proposed update as an urgent, breaking change. (Misusing these credits to mark changes as "urgent", that really aren't, would be considered abuse tantamount to spamming or vandalism.) Then let's say, for example, Anna Nicole Smith dies. A user could submit this change to the Anna Nicole Smith article, along with a link to a reliable news source (e.g. a wire service story) and a credit marking the change as "urgent". Since an editor would not need any particular expertise to view the article and verify that the change was accurate, any editor could review the "urgent request queue" and approve that particular change for publication, ensuring that the queue was checked frequently throughout the day and urgent updates would get pushed through quickly. Thus the site could keep pace with breaking current events without the kind of inaccuracies that plagued Kenneth Lay's Wikipedia entry when he died.

So there's a trade-off there, between displaying all the latest changes by default and motivating people to contribute but also running the risk of vandalism, versus displaying only the latest editor-approved page. Where there is not a trade-off, that I can see, is in the option of simply having an editor-approved version of a given page -- whether it's displayed by default, or only stored in the version history where people can look for it. To me, both of these steps seem to consist of pure gain for relatively little effort:

1. Verify credentials of academic professionals by poking their .edu address.
2. Allow them to give their "blessing" to certain versions of a page in the page history, so that users can rely on those specific page versions and even cite them as sources where appropriate.

So I hope that Citizendium will help bring more prominence to the idea, and that something similar might get incorporated back into Wikipedia. The approval of an identity-verified expert can improve an article's value so much, for such comparitively little extra effort, that it makes no sense not to have that option.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The reports of Sinbad's death become greatly exaggerated. A Wikipedia contributor is unmasked as a fraud, raising questions about why he wasn't called out earlier. NBC airs a piece about how anybody can edit any article on Wikipedia, and errors creep in as a result. (Duh.) But what's most frustrating about all these controversies surrounding Wikipedia is that news reports describe these incidents as if they are a permanent, unsolvable problem with any type of community-built encyclopedia, when in fact there seems to be a straightforward solution." More words follow. Just click the link.

In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail? (Which could be identified as a faculty address either by a domain name like "faculty.schoolname.edu", or by a Web page in the faculty section of the school's Web site identifying the person's e-mail address?) And then once the user's bona fides have been verified in this or some other way, couldn't they put their seal of approval on any article whose contents need to be considered reliable, or that readers want to cite as an authoritative source? In this way, with only a few minutes of effort and without changing a single word of the article, its value is increased many times -- surely one of the best possible trade-offs in terms of effort versus reward. (As for the question of "What experts would do this?", the answer is, presumably the same people who contribute to sites like Wikipedia currently. If their motives are altruistic in the first place, hopefully they would be willing to take this extra step if they knew it would increase the article's usefulness.)

Something like this model is planned by the operators of Citizendium.org, a Wikipedia alternative (I balk at using the word "rival" although it is inevitable that people will see them that way). The last time I wrote about Citizendium, some thought it sounded like such a valentine to the project that they wondered if I was a shill; actually, sometimes a project just comes along that aligns almost exactly with what I would have done if I could have re-done a popular project like Wikipedia with a few design changes, and when that happens, I just say so. Some others may have wondered if I was sucking up for a board position or something. No, that would be, like, work. But I think they have some good ideas that will make them a more useful alternative in some cases, unless Wikipedia copies back some of their ideas in order to serve both needs at once, which would also be a good thing.

Consider the two major issues on which Citizendium is planning to take a different approach from Wikipedia: (1) user verification, and (2) putting published articles into an "approved" state under the stewardship of a credentialed editor, who has to sign off on any future changes to the article. The issue of user verification can be further divided into two sub-issues: (a) verifying users for the purpose of ascertaining their credentials, and (b) verifying users for the purpose of limiting the amount of vandalism committed by new users under pseudonyms. (While editorial control on Citizendium means that it is not possible to vandalize the public-facing version of an article after it has gone into an "approved" state, users can still vandalize an article while it is a "work in progress" being built up towards the first milestone where it can be approved. Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says that such vandals are surprisingly, pathetically motivated even though their work is only seen by a small audience.)

On the first issue, the one of verifying user credentials, I think the verification of .edu addresses especially would be a cheap and easy way to increase the value of every article that that user writes, or signs off on. I don't think, however, it's necessary to go as far as Citizendium is currently planning on going, by requiring real names and biographies of all users. My thinking is that if an article is synthesized by 100 monkeys with typewriters but the finished product is giving the blessing of a credentialed professor of physics, it's pretty much just as reliable as if the professor had written it themselves. And if the same article gets the blessing of multiple credentialed experts, it could justifiably be considered more reliable than many printed sources written by a single author. The point is that the credentials that matter, are those of the people who stake their reputation on the accuracy of the article, not necessarily those of the people who contribute to it. So on this front, I think that while Wikipedia asks too little of users' backgrounds, Citizendium's current plan would ask too much, because as long as you have the credentials of one person who has signed off on an article, collecting non-verifiable bios of the article's other contributors doesn't actually gain anything.

The other side of verifying credentials is the use of credentials to prevent vandalism. In this situation it's not necessary to verify that the user actually is who they say they are; the system only needs to ensure that the same user is not signing up over and over again after previous accounts get banned for abuse. (You could ban users by IP address, but tools like Tor make it easy for users to connect from what appears to be a different IP address every time.) A blog post from Citizendium founder Larry Sanger lists three possible approaches instead: (a) requiring existing user X to vouch for new user Z before Z can join; (b) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page establishing their identity; or (c) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page of some person X who can vouch for Z's identity. I don't know how quickly a system could grow by referrals only -- after all, I was surprised that GMail took off so quickly during the period when you could only join with an "invite" from an existing user. Then again, GMail was giving away something for free that almost everyone could use, so most people who wanted it, would find themselves closely linked to someone else who had it. Citizendium, on the other hand, asks not what they can do for you but what you can do for them, and so might not achieve enough penetration to spread by referrals only.

I suggested that one alternative would be to send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique. The problem here, apart from the privacy concerns, is the delay that users would incur before their registration was complete, which would take away the "instant gratification" that they could get from starting to contribute right away. (You could let users edit before their address is verified, but that would just enable the same person to keep re-creating new accounts with unique but fake addresses, and use them to commit vandalism before the account was found out.)

Another idea would be that for new users, their first, say, three edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by verified users, and once the first three edits have been approved, the user is able to make edits in real time. (Since anybody would be able to review a new user's edits to make sure they were not spam, the new user's edits could be reviewed very quickly, since any Citizendium volunteer who was online, could review the latest entries in the edit queue and approve them.) It's true that a user could game this system by, for example, submitting three minor improvements, and then using their unblocked account to vandalize articles while they're being worked on. However, even in this case, the "vandal" would probably end up having a positive contribution to the site, because of the three small improvements that they'd already made. If a legitimate Citizendium volunteer would have to spend more effort making those three small improvements, than it would take to let a new user make those constructive changes and then ban them and revert their destructive changes once the user is caught committing vandalism (and the latter wouldn't take much effort at all), then Citizendium has actually gotten a good deal out of the "vandal"! (To make this work, a user's first contributions could not be "neutral" changes like replacing one word with a synonym; they would have to be actual improvements, even small ones, thus ensuring that the net effect of a potential "vandal" is positive.) There may be other possible solutions. These are just alternatives in case the model of referral by trusted users turns out not to work.

Now switching to the other side of the reliability issue: Whether the default article that is displayed to the public for a given topic, should be the latest "stable" version approved by credentialed users, or the very latest version incorporating all edits submitted by any user whatsoever. Having talked with members of the Citizendium and Wikipedia communities in their respective forums, there appear to be three schools of thought on the article stability issue. The first is that the whole idea of putting articles into an "approved" state and moderating all changes going forward, goes against the "spirit" of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. The second, suggested on the Wikipedia discussion list by Sheldon Rampton, is that it would be a useful feature if credentialed users could select certain page versions in the page history and "sign off" on the accuracy of one of those past versions; the page displayed by default would be the bleeding-edge latest one (with all of the possible vandalism and inaccuracies that entails), but users who wanted a reliable, citable source could look in the history. The third school of thought is that reliability is so valuable, that the default page displayed to the public and carrying the stamp of the project, should be the latest version approved by credentialed editors -- the model that Citizendium currently has in mind.

I'm not really partial to the first view, since I think the success of the project should be defined by how it achieves its goals (whatever you define those goals to be) and not in whether it kept with its original "spirit". Since Wikipedia has far more readers than contributors, if your motivations for contributing to or maintaining Wikipedia are at all oriented towards doing good for other people, presumably meeting the needs of readers is more important than keeping the party going for contributors (provided, of course, that the environment for contributors is at least pleasant enough to keep them contributing). The choice between the second and third points of view is more interesting. There's no obvious best-of-both-worlds choice here, because what motivates many contributors (the fact that their changes go live to the entire world, right away) is also what motivates vandals.

On the other hand, the problem doesn't sound unsolvable. You could go with the Citizendium model of editor-approved changes but create a prioritized system for "urgent" updates, in the case of changes to an article made to incorporate current events. Suppose users (who have been verified using one or more of the methods above) are each issued a certain number of "credits" that they can use to mark a proposed update as an urgent, breaking change. (Misusing these credits to mark changes as "urgent", that really aren't, would be considered abuse tantamount to spamming or vandalism.) Then let's say, for example, Anna Nicole Smith dies. A user could submit this change to the Anna Nicole Smith article, along with a link to a reliable news source (e.g. a wire service story) and a credit marking the change as "urgent". Since an editor would not need any particular expertise to view the article and verify that the change was accurate, any editor could review the "urgent request queue" and approve that particular change for publication, ensuring that the queue was checked frequently throughout the day and urgent updates would get pushed through quickly. Thus the site could keep pace with breaking current events without the kind of inaccuracies that plagued Kenneth Lay's Wikipedia entry when he died.

So there's a trade-off there, between displaying all the latest changes by default and motivating people to contribute but also running the risk of vandalism, versus displaying only the latest editor-approved page. Where there is not a trade-off, that I can see, is in the option of simply having an editor-approved version of a given page -- whether it's displayed by default, or only stored in the version history where people can look for it. To me, both of these steps seem to consist of pure gain for relatively little effort:

1. Verify credentials of academic professionals by poking their .edu address.
2. Allow them to give their "blessing" to certain versions of a page in the page history, so that users can rely on those specific page versions and even cite them as sources where appropriate.

So I hope that Citizendium will help bring more prominence to the idea, and that something similar might get incorporated back into Wikipedia. The approval of an identity-verified expert can improve an article's value so much, for such comparitively little extra effort, that it makes no sense not to have that option.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The reports of Sinbad's death become greatly exaggerated. A Wikipedia contributor is unmasked as a fraud, raising questions about why he wasn't called out earlier. NBC airs a piece about how anybody can edit any article on Wikipedia, and errors creep in as a result. (Duh.) But what's most frustrating about all these controversies surrounding Wikipedia is that news reports describe these incidents as if they are a permanent, unsolvable problem with any type of community-built encyclopedia, when in fact there seems to be a straightforward solution." More words follow. Just click the link.

In its simplest form, couldn't a person's academic credentials be verified by sending a confirmation link to their .edu e-mail? (Which could be identified as a faculty address either by a domain name like "faculty.schoolname.edu", or by a Web page in the faculty section of the school's Web site identifying the person's e-mail address?) And then once the user's bona fides have been verified in this or some other way, couldn't they put their seal of approval on any article whose contents need to be considered reliable, or that readers want to cite as an authoritative source? In this way, with only a few minutes of effort and without changing a single word of the article, its value is increased many times -- surely one of the best possible trade-offs in terms of effort versus reward. (As for the question of "What experts would do this?", the answer is, presumably the same people who contribute to sites like Wikipedia currently. If their motives are altruistic in the first place, hopefully they would be willing to take this extra step if they knew it would increase the article's usefulness.)

Something like this model is planned by the operators of Citizendium.org, a Wikipedia alternative (I balk at using the word "rival" although it is inevitable that people will see them that way). The last time I wrote about Citizendium, some thought it sounded like such a valentine to the project that they wondered if I was a shill; actually, sometimes a project just comes along that aligns almost exactly with what I would have done if I could have re-done a popular project like Wikipedia with a few design changes, and when that happens, I just say so. Some others may have wondered if I was sucking up for a board position or something. No, that would be, like, work. But I think they have some good ideas that will make them a more useful alternative in some cases, unless Wikipedia copies back some of their ideas in order to serve both needs at once, which would also be a good thing.

Consider the two major issues on which Citizendium is planning to take a different approach from Wikipedia: (1) user verification, and (2) putting published articles into an "approved" state under the stewardship of a credentialed editor, who has to sign off on any future changes to the article. The issue of user verification can be further divided into two sub-issues: (a) verifying users for the purpose of ascertaining their credentials, and (b) verifying users for the purpose of limiting the amount of vandalism committed by new users under pseudonyms. (While editorial control on Citizendium means that it is not possible to vandalize the public-facing version of an article after it has gone into an "approved" state, users can still vandalize an article while it is a "work in progress" being built up towards the first milestone where it can be approved. Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says that such vandals are surprisingly, pathetically motivated even though their work is only seen by a small audience.)

On the first issue, the one of verifying user credentials, I think the verification of .edu addresses especially would be a cheap and easy way to increase the value of every article that that user writes, or signs off on. I don't think, however, it's necessary to go as far as Citizendium is currently planning on going, by requiring real names and biographies of all users. My thinking is that if an article is synthesized by 100 monkeys with typewriters but the finished product is giving the blessing of a credentialed professor of physics, it's pretty much just as reliable as if the professor had written it themselves. And if the same article gets the blessing of multiple credentialed experts, it could justifiably be considered more reliable than many printed sources written by a single author. The point is that the credentials that matter, are those of the people who stake their reputation on the accuracy of the article, not necessarily those of the people who contribute to it. So on this front, I think that while Wikipedia asks too little of users' backgrounds, Citizendium's current plan would ask too much, because as long as you have the credentials of one person who has signed off on an article, collecting non-verifiable bios of the article's other contributors doesn't actually gain anything.

The other side of verifying credentials is the use of credentials to prevent vandalism. In this situation it's not necessary to verify that the user actually is who they say they are; the system only needs to ensure that the same user is not signing up over and over again after previous accounts get banned for abuse. (You could ban users by IP address, but tools like Tor make it easy for users to connect from what appears to be a different IP address every time.) A blog post from Citizendium founder Larry Sanger lists three possible approaches instead: (a) requiring existing user X to vouch for new user Z before Z can join; (b) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page establishing their identity; or (c) requiring new user Z to provide a link to a "credible" Web page of some person X who can vouch for Z's identity. I don't know how quickly a system could grow by referrals only -- after all, I was surprised that GMail took off so quickly during the period when you could only join with an "invite" from an existing user. Then again, GMail was giving away something for free that almost everyone could use, so most people who wanted it, would find themselves closely linked to someone else who had it. Citizendium, on the other hand, asks not what they can do for you but what you can do for them, and so might not achieve enough penetration to spread by referrals only.

I suggested that one alternative would be to send a postcard to each new user's physical address with a unique six-digit number, which they would have to enter in order to complete their registration, in order to verify that new users really were unique. The problem here, apart from the privacy concerns, is the delay that users would incur before their registration was complete, which would take away the "instant gratification" that they could get from starting to contribute right away. (You could let users edit before their address is verified, but that would just enable the same person to keep re-creating new accounts with unique but fake addresses, and use them to commit vandalism before the account was found out.)

Another idea would be that for new users, their first, say, three edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by verified users, and once the first three edits have been approved, the user is able to make edits in real time. (Since anybody would be able to review a new user's edits to make sure they were not spam, the new user's edits could be reviewed very quickly, since any Citizendium volunteer who was online, could review the latest entries in the edit queue and approve them.) It's true that a user could game this system by, for example, submitting three minor improvements, and then using their unblocked account to vandalize articles while they're being worked on. However, even in this case, the "vandal" would probably end up having a positive contribution to the site, because of the three small improvements that they'd already made. If a legitimate Citizendium volunteer would have to spend more effort making those three small improvements, than it would take to let a new user make those constructive changes and then ban them and revert their destructive changes once the user is caught committing vandalism (and the latter wouldn't take much effort at all), then Citizendium has actually gotten a good deal out of the "vandal"! (To make this work, a user's first contributions could not be "neutral" changes like replacing one word with a synonym; they would have to be actual improvements, even small ones, thus ensuring that the net effect of a potential "vandal" is positive.) There may be other possible solutions. These are just alternatives in case the model of referral by trusted users turns out not to work.

Now switching to the other side of the reliability issue: Whether the default article that is displayed to the public for a given topic, should be the latest "stable" version approved by credentialed users, or the very latest version incorporating all edits submitted by any user whatsoever. Having talked with members of the Citizendium and Wikipedia communities in their respective forums, there appear to be three schools of thought on the article stability issue. The first is that the whole idea of putting articles into an "approved" state and moderating all changes going forward, goes against the "spirit" of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. The second, suggested on the Wikipedia discussion list by Sheldon Rampton, is that it would be a useful feature if credentialed users could select certain page versions in the page history and "sign off" on the accuracy of one of those past versions; the page displayed by default would be the bleeding-edge latest one (with all of the possible vandalism and inaccuracies that entails), but users who wanted a reliable, citable source could look in the history. The third school of thought is that reliability is so valuable, that the default page displayed to the public and carrying the stamp of the project, should be the latest version approved by credentialed editors -- the model that Citizendium currently has in mind.

I'm not really partial to the first view, since I think the success of the project should be defined by how it achieves its goals (whatever you define those goals to be) and not in whether it kept with its original "spirit". Since Wikipedia has far more readers than contributors, if your motivations for contributing to or maintaining Wikipedia are at all oriented towards doing good for other people, presumably meeting the needs of readers is more important than keeping the party going for contributors (provided, of course, that the environment for contributors is at least pleasant enough to keep them contributing). The choice between the second and third points of view is more interesting. There's no obvious best-of-both-worlds choice here, because what motivates many contributors (the fact that their changes go live to the entire world, right away) is also what motivates vandals.

On the other hand, the problem doesn't sound unsolvable. You could go with the Citizendium model of editor-approved changes but create a prioritized system for "urgent" updates, in the case of changes to an article made to incorporate current events. Suppose users (who have been verified using one or more of the methods above) are each issued a certain number of "credits" that they can use to mark a proposed update as an urgent, breaking change. (Misusing these credits to mark changes as "urgent", that really aren't, would be considered abuse tantamount to spamming or vandalism.) Then let's say, for example, Anna Nicole Smith dies. A user could submit this change to the Anna Nicole Smith article, along with a link to a reliable news source (e.g. a wire service story) and a credit marking the change as "urgent". Since an editor would not need any particular expertise to view the article and verify that the change was accurate, any editor could review the "urgent request queue" and approve that particular change for publication, ensuring that the queue was checked frequently throughout the day and urgent updates would get pushed through quickly. Thus the site could keep pace with breaking current events without the kind of inaccuracies that plagued Kenneth Lay's Wikipedia entry when he died.

So there's a trade-off there, between displaying all the latest changes by default and motivating people to contribute but also running the risk of vandalism, versus displaying only the latest editor-approved page. Where there is not a trade-off, that I can see, is in the option of simply having an editor-approved version of a given page -- whether it's displayed by default, or only stored in the version history where people can look for it. To me, both of these steps seem to consist of pure gain for relatively little effort:

1. Verify credentials of academic professionals by poking their .edu address.
2. Allow them to give their "blessing" to certain versions of a page in the page history, so that users can rely on those specific page versions and even cite them as sources where appropriate.

So I hope that Citizendium will help bring more prominence to the idea, and that something similar might get incorporated back into Wikipedia. The approval of an identity-verified expert can improve an article's value so much, for such comparitively little extra effort, that it makes no sense not to have that option.

An anonymous reader writes "A growing number of people are concerned about where Wikipedia is heading. Some have left Wikipedia for Citizendium, while others are trying to change the culture of Wikipedia from within. A recent essay called Wikipedia is failing points out many of the problems which must be solved with Wikipedia for it to succeed in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work. How would you go about solving these problems?"

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes "I'm a Wikipedia junkie. There's nothing more fun than switching back and forth between reading about the history of human evolution, and following the latest speculation about the identity of the mysterious R.A.B. in the Harry Potter books, and Wikipedia is the best site to find it all in one place. But as a fan, it's always been frustrating for me knowing that Wikipedia could never improve beyond a certain point -- as it becomes more popular, it becomes more tempting to vandalize, and in turn becomes less reliable, a point that many have made already. That's why I'm excited that sites like Citizendium are approaching the same problem with a different model, one that could enable them to become what Wikipedia almost was, but which its intrinsic nature kept it from being: a central, reliable source of freely redistributable information about almost anything. The main difference is that Citizendium articles, after initially being built up through the same collaborative process that Wikipedia uses, will go into an editor-approved stage, at which point an editor (publicly identifiable on the article's history page) signs off on the accuracy of the article, and further edits also have to be approved by an editor."

Editor control over articles is controversial within the "radical collaboration" community; the Wikimedia foundation lists five "foundation issues that are essentially beyond debate", which includes "Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering". (In practice there are some safeguards in place to protect articles that are frequent targets of vandalism, like the George W. Bush entry.) But I'm fanatically results-oriented in my thinking, and I always ask: What are the purposes of this project, and how does this feature help achieve those purposes? It seems to me that a free online encyclopedia fills four main needs:

1. A source of information about pop culture that can be fun to read even without being 100% sure that it's accurate (like who R.A.B. is)
2. A source of information that can be freely and legally redistributed, e.g. by printing out copies for a class to read
3. A source of information on subjects where you need to be close to 100% certain that the information is reliable -- at least as certain, say, as you would be if you read the same fact in several books
4. A source of information that you can cite in a school paper as being reasonably authoritative and reliable

Anonymous authorship and real-time edits don't affect #1 or #2, and they actually hinder #3 and #4. Citizendium founder (and former Wikipedia board member) Larry Sanger said in a comment for this article, "There is no reason that [projects like Citizendium] even need be collaborative. What we're mainly interested in is reliable, independent/neutral, and free information." Such a statement -- "no reason that they even need to be collaborative" -- may be regarded by some Wikipedia devotees as heresy, but I think it hits the nail on the head. The purpose of such a project is defined by the quality of the information it produces. Collaboration is a possible means to that end, but collaboration itself is not the point.

For the reliability problem, I can't improve on this priceless sentence from Wikipedia's own "Citing Wikipedia" page:

For many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be considered an acceptable source. ^{[ citation needed ]}

Wikipedia has actually done much better than I would have expected -- a study done in 2005 found that Wikipedia averaged about 4 errors per article compared to Britannica's 3, which is pretty good for a site where anybody can write that Columbus sailed to the New World in ships named the Ninja, the Pinto, and the Santa Fe. But for a site that harnesses the efforts of volunteers all over the world, I think the goal should be to surpass what has been done before, not just to tie with Britannica. And even if Wikipedia's error rate someday beats Britannica's, under its current model Wikipedia can never have the key property that Britannica has, which is that you can cite it as an authoritative source without sounding silly.

Citizendium's model of editor-approved articles, and editor approval of further edits to those articles, can help to achieve the benefits of collaboration, harnessing the efforts of volunteers, without falling into Wikipedia's traps. Assuming you can verify an editor's credentials (and we'll get to this in a minute), having an editor manage an article means two things: (a) you know the page wasn't vandalized in the last five minutes, and (b) you ought to be able to cite the work as a reference in a paper if your teacher isn't a total Luddite and you can explain to them how Citizendium works. Meanwhile, volunteers can still contribute without their own credentials being checked out; they can write as much as they want for an editor-approved article, as long as it's approved by the editor before going live.

There are still loopholes, of course. Currently Citizendium asks people to edit under their real name, but says that "we will use the honor principle to begin with", so anyone could claim to be a professor or a lunar astronaut. But the key words are "to begin with"; the difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium is that Citizendium views this as a loophole and not an intrinsic "community value", and loopholes can be fixed. To make the reliability as airtight as possible, I hope that Citizendium will eventually implement some sort of verification system, such as checking a professor's contact information on a Web page in the "faculty" section of an .edu Web server. I'm not instinctively thrilled by the thought of checking out volunteers' contact information, but it seems like the only way to achieve goals #3 and #4 above, so if it's as simple as sending a verification e-mail to an .edu address, that's a lot of gain for little effort. (Remember, this only has to be done for editors who sign off on articles, not for all volunteers. A non-editor volunteer could still ask to have their credentials checked out, so that they can be cited by their real name in the "end credits" of an article that lists volunteer contributors. But impersonation among regular volunteers is not likely to be a problem, since the editorial approval process ensures that only value-adding edits will be allowed, and it's unlikely that Alice would pretend to be Bob so that Bob can take all the glory of Alice's contributions to the project!)

Besides verifying authors' credentials, the one change that I hope Citizendium considers in the future is to give authors and editors credit at the top of each article -- or, for articles with many contributors, perhaps editors would be listed at the top and the "end credits" would list all contributors, on a separate page if necessary. This is because credited authorship for an article can help improve the article's usefulness in two ways -- the article can be cited as a reliable source, and the "name up in lights" factor rewards people for contributing more and better articles. Having authors listed only on the history page of an article, as they are in the current model, achieves the credibility benefit but not the "name up in lights" benefit. Larry Sanger suggested that having authors listed at the top of each article might put off readers from submitting edits -- if an article is perceived as being "owned", then others might feel like it's rude for them to change it. For me personally, this could go either way -- on the one hand, I might not realize that I was welcome to edit an article, but on the other hand, I think I might be more inclined to submit edits if I knew there was an editor in charge to keep someone else from frivolously overwriting my edits later. But in any case, to address this problem, each article could carry a banner at the top saying "Readers are encouraged to submit edits and other suggestions", and each paragraph could be accompanied by an "Edit" link, similar to Wikipedia (except that edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by the editor instead of going live). This would address the ownership-intimidation problem without taking away from the "name up in lights" factor. Sanger says that the Digital Universe Encyclopedia -- comprising the Encyclopedia of Earth and an Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, under development -- has plans to join with Citizendium and will use the credited-author model on their version of the site.

You might say that editors having their "name up in lights" would be an ego thing for editors, and I think you'd be right -- but I don't think this would be a bad thing, inasmuch as ego would motivate more people to become editors and do their best work. Perhaps I'd be wrong about this. Maybe a limited experiment could be carried out with two sites that are similar in every respect except that one allows editors and authors to take credit for their work, as might turn out to be the case with Citizendium and Encyclopedia of Earth. The point is that I don't think such a suggestion should be judged by whether it goes against the "spirit" of the project (as it certainly does in the case of Wikipedia!), but rather whether it helps to achieve the projects goals, such as goals #1 through #4 listed above.

There are still some problems that Citizendium's differences from Wikipedia won't solve. Many schools discourage citing Wikipedia not because it's written anonymously or because it contains errors, but because it's an encyclopedia. Yale's guidelines for citing Wikipedia state:

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is written for a common readership. But students in Yale courses are already consulting primary materials and learning from experts in the discipline. In this context, to rely on Wikipedia -- even when the material is accurate -- is to position your work as inexpert and immature.

Presumably many academics would have the same objections to a student citing Citizendium. I understand what these teachers mean, but I think this is a case of not thinking in terms of results. If the purpose of an assignment is to collect and present information, then any means of accomplishing that goal should be valid, including the easiest method of looking up the information in an encyclopedia. To make a student look beyond the encyclopedia, an assignment can simply require depth of research that goes beyond what the encyclopedia would provide. (Students, if you're worried that your teacher will take this to heart and make your assignments harder, just be happy that your teacher is hip enough to be reading this in the first place.) Some things are hard, but they should only be hard if they're intrinsically hard, not because you handicapped yourself with arbitrary rules.

But there is another, more permanent problem -- even with verification of authors' credentials, how do we know that the information in Citizendium articles is accurate? How do we know the author didn't make a mistake, or lie? This gets into deeper issues because these problems exist no matter what source you're consulting. There are books in print that deny the Holocaust or the possibility of evolution, and they're printed on real paper, with ISBN numbers and everything. Some of them even make it into libraries. How skeptical should we be of we read in books? In January two advocacy groups presented a report to Congress in which many government scientists said they felt pressured by the Bush administration to downplay the global warming threat in their statements. Does that mean statements from government scientists are inherently suspect?

And almost anyone who has had more than two articles written about them, knows the feeling of reading the article and reacting, "Wow, I had no idea that I was a transgendered NRA member who volunteers with the Moonies!" The New York Times is hosting an article about me from 2000 claiming that I was fired from Microsoft, when I actually quit. I showed them a copy of my personnel file with "Voluntary resignation" printed on it, but they have still refused to change the article. (When I first wrote to the paper's "Public Editor" about the matter, created to restore "reader credibility" after the Jayson Blair scandal, they replied that they wouldn't change the error because it never appeared in the print version of the paper. Huh?) I put up my own webpage to tell my side of the story, but if you were a Wikipedia or Citizendium editor and you had conflicting information from different sources, who would you believe, the New York Times, or a Web site called PublicEditorMyAss.com?

And yet, I freely admit that even today, I would trust a fact from the New York Times more than a fact from Bob's Bait And Tackle Shop And Technology Blog. We instinctively trust sources because of their reputation; we figure that they must have gotten their reputation somehow. This is not a great algorithm for deciding trustworthiness, but it may be the best that we can do -- in a world where we can't verify every fact firsthand, what choice do we have but to rely on sources that have provided mostly-reliable information in the past? (Wikipedia vandals are able to hack this mental algorithm because we think of Wikipedia as "one source" with a high average reliability, when it's really comprised of many sources, some of whom are deliberately less reliable than others.)

So, I think the Citizendium model is a move in the right direction -- taking into account the limits of what we can know from third-party sources, and doing the best we can within those limits. The least we can do is to know who has signed off on the accuracy of an article, so we can factor that into our decision to trust it. Last month Citizendium released their first editor-approved article, a single article about Biology. It may not look like anything revolutionary right now, but the difference between that and the Wikipedia entry is that you can't change the title of the Citizendium article to LARRY SANGER IS A BUTT BRAIN HA HA. You have to go through an editor for that.

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes "I'm a Wikipedia junkie. There's nothing more fun than switching back and forth between reading about the history of human evolution, and following the latest speculation about the identity of the mysterious R.A.B. in the Harry Potter books, and Wikipedia is the best site to find it all in one place. But as a fan, it's always been frustrating for me knowing that Wikipedia could never improve beyond a certain point -- as it becomes more popular, it becomes more tempting to vandalize, and in turn becomes less reliable, a point that many have made already. That's why I'm excited that sites like Citizendium are approaching the same problem with a different model, one that could enable them to become what Wikipedia almost was, but which its intrinsic nature kept it from being: a central, reliable source of freely redistributable information about almost anything. The main difference is that Citizendium articles, after initially being built up through the same collaborative process that Wikipedia uses, will go into an editor-approved stage, at which point an editor (publicly identifiable on the article's history page) signs off on the accuracy of the article, and further edits also have to be approved by an editor."

Editor control over articles is controversial within the "radical collaboration" community; the Wikimedia foundation lists five "foundation issues that are essentially beyond debate", which includes "Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering". (In practice there are some safeguards in place to protect articles that are frequent targets of vandalism, like the George W. Bush entry.) But I'm fanatically results-oriented in my thinking, and I always ask: What are the purposes of this project, and how does this feature help achieve those purposes? It seems to me that a free online encyclopedia fills four main needs:

1. A source of information about pop culture that can be fun to read even without being 100% sure that it's accurate (like who R.A.B. is)
2. A source of information that can be freely and legally redistributed, e.g. by printing out copies for a class to read
3. A source of information on subjects where you need to be close to 100% certain that the information is reliable -- at least as certain, say, as you would be if you read the same fact in several books
4. A source of information that you can cite in a school paper as being reasonably authoritative and reliable

Anonymous authorship and real-time edits don't affect #1 or #2, and they actually hinder #3 and #4. Citizendium founder (and former Wikipedia board member) Larry Sanger said in a comment for this article, "There is no reason that [projects like Citizendium] even need be collaborative. What we're mainly interested in is reliable, independent/neutral, and free information." Such a statement -- "no reason that they even need to be collaborative" -- may be regarded by some Wikipedia devotees as heresy, but I think it hits the nail on the head. The purpose of such a project is defined by the quality of the information it produces. Collaboration is a possible means to that end, but collaboration itself is not the point.

For the reliability problem, I can't improve on this priceless sentence from Wikipedia's own "Citing Wikipedia" page:

For many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be considered an acceptable source. ^{[ citation needed ]}

Wikipedia has actually done much better than I would have expected -- a study done in 2005 found that Wikipedia averaged about 4 errors per article compared to Britannica's 3, which is pretty good for a site where anybody can write that Columbus sailed to the New World in ships named the Ninja, the Pinto, and the Santa Fe. But for a site that harnesses the efforts of volunteers all over the world, I think the goal should be to surpass what has been done before, not just to tie with Britannica. And even if Wikipedia's error rate someday beats Britannica's, under its current model Wikipedia can never have the key property that Britannica has, which is that you can cite it as an authoritative source without sounding silly.

Citizendium's model of editor-approved articles, and editor approval of further edits to those articles, can help to achieve the benefits of collaboration, harnessing the efforts of volunteers, without falling into Wikipedia's traps. Assuming you can verify an editor's credentials (and we'll get to this in a minute), having an editor manage an article means two things: (a) you know the page wasn't vandalized in the last five minutes, and (b) you ought to be able to cite the work as a reference in a paper if your teacher isn't a total Luddite and you can explain to them how Citizendium works. Meanwhile, volunteers can still contribute without their own credentials being checked out; they can write as much as they want for an editor-approved article, as long as it's approved by the editor before going live.

There are still loopholes, of course. Currently Citizendium asks people to edit under their real name, but says that "we will use the honor principle to begin with", so anyone could claim to be a professor or a lunar astronaut. But the key words are "to begin with"; the difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium is that Citizendium views this as a loophole and not an intrinsic "community value", and loopholes can be fixed. To make the reliability as airtight as possible, I hope that Citizendium will eventually implement some sort of verification system, such as checking a professor's contact information on a Web page in the "faculty" section of an .edu Web server. I'm not instinctively thrilled by the thought of checking out volunteers' contact information, but it seems like the only way to achieve goals #3 and #4 above, so if it's as simple as sending a verification e-mail to an .edu address, that's a lot of gain for little effort. (Remember, this only has to be done for editors who sign off on articles, not for all volunteers. A non-editor volunteer could still ask to have their credentials checked out, so that they can be cited by their real name in the "end credits" of an article that lists volunteer contributors. But impersonation among regular volunteers is not likely to be a problem, since the editorial approval process ensures that only value-adding edits will be allowed, and it's unlikely that Alice would pretend to be Bob so that Bob can take all the glory of Alice's contributions to the project!)

Besides verifying authors' credentials, the one change that I hope Citizendium considers in the future is to give authors and editors credit at the top of each article -- or, for articles with many contributors, perhaps editors would be listed at the top and the "end credits" would list all contributors, on a separate page if necessary. This is because credited authorship for an article can help improve the article's usefulness in two ways -- the article can be cited as a reliable source, and the "name up in lights" factor rewards people for contributing more and better articles. Having authors listed only on the history page of an article, as they are in the current model, achieves the credibility benefit but not the "name up in lights" benefit. Larry Sanger suggested that having authors listed at the top of each article might put off readers from submitting edits -- if an article is perceived as being "owned", then others might feel like it's rude for them to change it. For me personally, this could go either way -- on the one hand, I might not realize that I was welcome to edit an article, but on the other hand, I think I might be more inclined to submit edits if I knew there was an editor in charge to keep someone else from frivolously overwriting my edits later. But in any case, to address this problem, each article could carry a banner at the top saying "Readers are encouraged to submit edits and other suggestions", and each paragraph could be accompanied by an "Edit" link, similar to Wikipedia (except that edits would go into a queue to be reviewed by the editor instead of going live). This would address the ownership-intimidation problem without taking away from the "name up in lights" factor. Sanger says that the Digital Universe Encyclopedia -- comprising the Encyclopedia of Earth and an Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, under development -- has plans to join with Citizendium and will use the credited-author model on their version of the site.

You might say that editors having their "name up in lights" would be an ego thing for editors, and I think you'd be right -- but I don't think this would be a bad thing, inasmuch as ego would motivate more people to become editors and do their best work. Perhaps I'd be wrong about this. Maybe a limited experiment could be carried out with two sites that are similar in every respect except that one allows editors and authors to take credit for their work, as might turn out to be the case with Citizendium and Encyclopedia of Earth. The point is that I don't think such a suggestion should be judged by whether it goes against the "spirit" of the project (as it certainly does in the case of Wikipedia!), but rather whether it helps to achieve the projects goals, such as goals #1 through #4 listed above.

There are still some problems that Citizendium's differences from Wikipedia won't solve. Many schools discourage citing Wikipedia not because it's written anonymously or because it contains errors, but because it's an encyclopedia. Yale's guidelines for citing Wikipedia state:

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is written for a common readership. But students in Yale courses are already consulting primary materials and learning from experts in the discipline. In this context, to rely on Wikipedia -- even when the material is accurate -- is to position your work as inexpert and immature.

Presumably many academics would have the same objections to a student citing Citizendium. I understand what these teachers mean, but I think this is a case of not thinking in terms of results. If the purpose of an assignment is to collect and present information, then any means of accomplishing that goal should be valid, including the easiest method of looking up the information in an encyclopedia. To make a student look beyond the encyclopedia, an assignment can simply require depth of research that goes beyond what the encyclopedia would provide. (Students, if you're worried that your teacher will take this to heart and make your assignments harder, just be happy that your teacher is hip enough to be reading this in the first place.) Some things are hard, but they should only be hard if they're intrinsically hard, not because you handicapped yourself with arbitrary rules.

But there is another, more permanent problem -- even with verification of authors' credentials, how do we know that the information in Citizendium articles is accurate? How do we know the author didn't make a mistake, or lie? This gets into deeper issues because these problems exist no matter what source you're consulting. There are books in print that deny the Holocaust or the possibility of evolution, and they're printed on real paper, with ISBN numbers and everything. Some of them even make it into libraries. How skeptical should we be of we read in books? In January two advocacy groups presented a report to Congress in which many government scientists said they felt pressured by the Bush administration to downplay the global warming threat in their statements. Does that mean statements from government scientists are inherently suspect?

And almost anyone who has had more than two articles written about them, knows the feeling of reading the article and reacting, "Wow, I had no idea that I was a transgendered NRA member who volunteers with the Moonies!" The New York Times is hosting an article about me from 2000 claiming that I was fired from Microsoft, when I actually quit. I showed them a copy of my personnel file with "Voluntary resignation" printed on it, but they have still refused to change the article. (When I first wrote to the paper's "Public Editor" about the matter, created to restore "reader credibility" after the Jayson Blair scandal, they replied that they wouldn't change the error because it never appeared in the print version of the paper. Huh?) I put up my own webpage to tell my side of the story, but if you were a Wikipedia or Citizendium editor and you had conflicting information from different sources, who would you believe, the New York Times, or a Web site called PublicEditorMyAss.com?

And yet, I freely admit that even today, I would trust a fact from the New York Times more than a fact from Bob's Bait And Tackle Shop And Technology Blog. We instinctively trust sources because of their reputation; we figure that they must have gotten their reputation somehow. This is not a great algorithm for deciding trustworthiness, but it may be the best that we can do -- in a world where we can't verify every fact firsthand, what choice do we have but to rely on sources that have provided mostly-reliable information in the past? (Wikipedia vandals are able to hack this mental algorithm because we think of Wikipedia as "one source" with a high average reliability, when it's really comprised of many sources, some of whom are deliberately less reliable than others.)

So, I think the Citizendium model is a move in the right direction -- taking into account the limits of what we can know from third-party sources, and doing the best we can within those limits. The least we can do is to know who has signed off on the accuracy of an article, so we can factor that into our decision to trust it. Last month Citizendium released their first editor-approved article, a single article about Biology. It may not look like anything revolutionary right now, but the difference between that and the Wikipedia entry is that you can't change the title of the Citizendium article to LARRY SANGER IS A BUTT BRAIN HA HA. You have to go through an editor for that.

Raindance writes "I've posted an in-depth look at Citizendium, Larry Sanger's new project and Wikipedia's new competitor. In a nutshell, Citizendium isn't just about building a better encyclopedia (though that is their goal) — it's also a pilot project for a new model of expert-guided radical collaboration with implications for things from open peer review to genome wikis. If you'd like to help out, they need both volunteers and donations."

Raindance writes "I've posted an in-depth look at Citizendium, Larry Sanger's new project and Wikipedia's new competitor. In a nutshell, Citizendium isn't just about building a better encyclopedia (though that is their goal) — it's also a pilot project for a new model of expert-guided radical collaboration with implications for things from open peer review to genome wikis. If you'd like to help out, they need both volunteers and donations."

tmk writes "Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, plans to fork the project. In Berlin he announced the start of Citizendium — the citizen's compendium. Main differences: no anonymous editing, and experts will rule the project. Members of Wikipedia were not amused."