Slashdot Mirror
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."
... what will teh Interweb do?
Until now, Wikipedia was the first and last linke of research, and dismissed because it wasn't done by experts.
How will people now dismis this Citizendium?
Won't anyone think of the flamers?
Seriously, it can't be bad.
Another source is always a good thing.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I agree that a mirror is a bad idea. Start over and appeal to experts from the start. While the amount of content would be dramatically less, the quality should be much higher.
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts. Why should some bored 17-year-old be able to, without evidence, revert one of my changes? The edit process on Wikipedia seems to revolve around number of edits, too, and general popularity. If someone has edited 1,000 articles that doesn't make them more qualified to edit an article that is covered by my field of expertise just because it is my account's first edit.
I hope this new resource will keep editors and contributors separate. Let the experts contribute as much as they can and let the editors sort out how to present it.
haha, we'll see if it goes the way of Nupedia, eh?
I tried working on Nupedia for a while, and got fairly far through the process of writing an article before giving up on it. After that, I spent several years as a Wikipedia editor. This new project seems to fix some problems with Nupedia, while failing to fix others. It also seems to fix some problems with Wikipedia.
One problem with Nupedia was that articles were written by experts, but reviewed by non-experts. For example, I have a PhD in physics, and teach the subject for a living, but my article on physics was endlessly wrangled over by people who weren't physicists. Most of them were reasonable people, and made good comments; some weren't. The design of Citizendium seems to address this point by envisioning a community of experts on each topic, although it's not clear to me that they'll be able to attract the necessary number of people to have multiple experts per topic. It's also good that he states that everybody will be expected to give their real name, and a CV; in Nupedia, it was really annoying to have to deal with people who were set up as gate-keepers, but didn't give real names, and didn't seem to have any evident expertise.
A major problem with Nupedia was that the browser-based software didn't work, so everything was basically done via e-mail, and that was very clumsy and time-consuming. Sanger seems to be starting off Citizendium with exactly the same problem, and, as before, he seems to have no real plan as to how to solve the problem, except to hope that it will fix itself. It remains to be seen whether Citizendium will attract programmers with enough spare man-hours to volunteer to create the software; it doesn't seem like the kind of project that would be exciting to most OSS programmer types, but I could be wrong.
Citizendium's design does seem to address what I consider the main problems with Wikipedia: disorganized, low-quality edits by well-intentioned people. The design of Wikipedia basically wastes huge amounts of time. Most articles gradually rise to a certain level of quality, and then the pioneers lose interest in the topic because there's not much left to be done. After that, the article gradually decays in quality. You'll get hundreds of edits on an article, but the diff between the beginning and the ending version can be zero. The current system basically requires serious editors to have huge watch-lists, and check them vigilantly to keep entropy from having its way. That's no fun, and it's the reason why, after several years of heavy participation, I gave up on WP.
Find free books.