Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia

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."

Comments

Not a wiki?

[AWhiteFlame]

So, it's not really a fork of Wikipedia, because it's not really a wiki anymore. It's just...a controlled community database.

Re:Not a wiki?

[Larry Sanger]

Well, it will run MediaWiki, and editors will be expected to work shoulder-to-shoulder with authors. The process I describe in the proposal is of a bottom-up, bazaar type process. It just has people with special rights in the social system. Why shouldn't this be called a wiki?

Scholarpedia

[benhocking]

Maybe you could call it Scholarpedia?

Re:Sprachen sie Deutsche?

[mindriot]

Here you go:

Wikipedia Founder plans Competing Project

In 2001, Larry Sanger helped creating the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Now, at the conference "Wizards of OS" in Berlin, he presented a competing project: The "Citizendium" is to be more reliable and correct than its great role model.

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a success: Only five years ago, Jimmy Wales and Lartry Sanger set up the website that every Internet user could contribute to - in the illusory hope that the website would turn into an encyclopedia. This illusion has for the most part come true: Today, Wikipedia is among the 20 most visited websites on the Internet. More than five million articles in over a hundred languages have already been accumulated by unpaid volunteers.

But that isn't enough for Larry Sanger. He sees Wikipedia only as a prototype of what could be accomplished. "I am still a great fan of Wikipedia," Sanger ensures, "but at some point one has to have the courage to start a new project." He criticizes Wikipedia because in his eyes, the project is too focused on amateurism, leaving no room for experts. Sanger knows what he is talking about: He was the first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia but left the project after disputes.

Dispute Over Contents

In the recent months, the question of quality of the Wikipedia articles has come under discussion more and more: Indeed, the volunteer project was considered only marginally worse than the old Encyclopedia Britannica in a comparison in the science magazine "Nature" at the end of last year. But in the recent months, Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales complained about the quality of its content more and more often.

Among the reasons were several mishaps. Last year, a jokester created a scandal when he implied the esteemed US journalist John Seigenthaler as being involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy - for several months, the lie could be read in Wikipedia, undiscovered. Similarly, Wikipedia made the headlines on several occasions during US election campaigns: US politicians tried to denigrate their opponents in their Wikipedia articles, or to make their own biographies look better.

A Race Against Wikipedia

Wales is trying to counteract these developments. In the past months he has been increasedly campaigning for the involvement of scientists in the encyclopedia. But these efforts have stagnated. For months, Wales has been announcing the creation of "stable" article versions which should be more reliable than normal articles. The implementation is still not there. At the end of this year, initial experiments are set to start in the German Wikipedia.

Sanger acts optimistic about reaching the goal earlier than his former employer: "I will show them how to do this," Sanger said in Berlin.

Experts Instead of Amateurs

The main difference to Wikipedia: There will be no anonymous contributions in the new project. Every participant is expected to sign up with their real name - in Wikipedia one usually does not even have to sign up to help writing articles.

Another difference: Sanger wants to spend more time campaigning for experts in his online encyclopedia and give them more authority. Qualified editors are to decide authoritatively on open questions while in Wikipedia, some discussions and disputes last for months or even years.

"You don't need a PhD to be accepted as an expert in Citizendium," Sanger says. On the other hand, the title alone does not suffice to attain the privileged Expert status. Whoever wants to apply for an Expert position in the Citizendium needs to present a resume on his user page. But people will be able to write articles even without special qualifications.

Funding Still Unclear

It is still unclear how exactly the project aims to obtain funding. Sanger is counting on potent sponsors. Years ago he had been hired for US millionaire Joe Firmage's "Di

Re:Nupedia

[Larry Sanger]

According to my proposal, only people who arrive on the wiki and claim to be editors have to give a CV, or link to information that constitutes evidence of their credentials. See this discussion for more. For everyone else (called authors), it will be recommended but not required. Also, if you read the FAQ (OK, I know it's long), you'll see that there is too a plan to solve the "problem" of organizing work via mailing lists. Citizendium will be a wiki! The hope and plan is to have the wiki and whatever network of servers might be necessary set up by Sept. 30. I hope we'll be able to attract support for this from any of a number of sources. I'll be very curious myself to see what sort of uptake this has among academics and scientists. As a natural skeptic myself, I don't know if it will work. But I think they'll probably have a more active interest than you had in Wikipedia precisely because they're empowered to make content decisions about their areas of expertise.

Re:Strange logic

[Larry Sanger]

This is interesting, but upon analysis, not persuasive: "if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it."

It's going to be a progressive or gradual fork, which means that articles people haven't worked on in the Citizendium will be refreshed on a regular basis with the latest Wikipedia article. So, for the articles that aren't being worked on by CZ, the CZ copy will benefit from whatever WP work is done.

Eventually, who knows, maybe we'll change the color of links to pages that have been changed by CZ, so that people know to maintain and work on those copies (on CZ) more carefully. In the long run it'll be like a game: how many Wikipedia articles have you cleaned up and substantially improved? Here's my list...

We might have a rule, too: don't edit a WP-originated article unless you make some very substantial changes. Otherwise, if you change too little, then the CZ copy might become "stale," i.e., substantially worse than the corresponding WP article.

Generally, the number of articles from WP edited by CZians will be proportionate to the number of CZians. There's no reason to think we'll bite off more than we can chew.

More from the parent post: "Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census. A random article browsed there will be with a very high likelyhood just a copy of the wiki article." The former does not logically follow from the latter. Since the unchanged articles will be copies of Wikipedia articles, if the articles that CZ has worked on are better than the corresponding WP articles (and that's the hope), then the CZ will at least be better than WP to that extent. That's nothing to sneeze at, is it?

Finally: "So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user." Please, rtfw. Besides, we aren't going to try to make claims about reliability; our claims will be even more modest than Wikipedia's. We're going to call it a compendium, not an encyclopedia. We won't vouch for anything, even for the articles that editors have placed "approved" tags on.

Another project, the Digital Universe Encyclopedia (of which the also wiki-based Encyclopedia of Earth, not yet publicly launched, is the first installment), can have the fun of actually officially approving and "publishing" advanced-version CZ articles (if they want to, and if licensing doesn't get in the way).

Re:Nupedia

[Larry Sanger]

Well, we'll use virtually the same neutrality policy (not surprising since I drafted it for Wikipedia). If Michael Moore starts banging away at the George W. Bush article, rest assured there will be other experts (wait...MM is an expert?) ready to pounce. Or, if there aren't, people who disagree with Moore will go and ask Republican (or at least not so left-leaning) expert types (well, if they can be found!) to participate.

Not saying you haven't put your finger on a problem. If the only available expert on a specific topic is an ideologue, that puts the authors working on the article in a tough spot. They need some recourse. Well, there will be. There will be subject area workgroups they can appeal to, and then cite the neutrality policy.