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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."
Too bad the second link is not english - I can hardly rtfa ;)
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
I hate Anonymous Cowards!
Wikipedia members were not amused... ... and neither were Slashdot readers who don't speak German!
So, it's not really a fork of Wikipedia, because it's not really a wiki anymore. It's just...a controlled community database.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
... 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.
Looking at the concept (starting with a 1:1 mirror of wikipedia, adding all new articles from wikipedia, mirroring wikipedia changes in imported articles that havent been changed locally) it makes no sense.
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.
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. 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.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
There's no problem in having two free encyclopedias on the web and I want the option of having a moderated, somewhat accountable one. Wikipedia is just not reliable enough for certain topics.
Other than the usual "intellectual property" considerations of making a copy of the some of the images/other data currently in Wikipedia, what's the big deal with someone forking it for any reason?
The guy isn't using the information to crush opposing opinions, he's just offering a different filter, without destroying the original. That's creative, additive, not destructive. There are a lot of definitions of freedom - some of them involve having the capability to make informed decisions. It looks at the offset that having this new Wikipedia fork will increase at least that kind of freedom, rather than subtract anyone's freedoms.
Ryan Fenton
Germans are never amused.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Edit wars are going to take on a whole new meaning.
Wikipedia has gained a reputation for being a somewhat less than reputable source of information, due to edit wars, vandalism, and outright inaccuracies. But the intent is unquestionably been good, and while not a perfect source of information, for all non research uses, its usually good enough. And the way that the information is not controled by any one interest is seen as being good in that it prevents censorship.
Forking the project will cause alot of noise and debate, but in the end, I think the final result wont have any great signifigance. Forked or not, Wikipedia is probably not going to disappear.
END COMMUNICATION
If it's a reputation or moderation system, it might not be bad.
However, experts have also known to be wrong. In the sciences, there are great debates. Einstein turned the world upside down afterall, and none of the previous experts would have had it right. In history, there are debates, and theories that are hotly contested - such as the thought that Egypt didn't have iron tools to make the pyramids, even though iron has been found in the great pyramid insitu (in place).
And different experts have different biases.
How will different viewpoints get across? In the wiki, at least, as an informed user, I can look up the discussions and history of pages. I don't have to depend that the latest page is 100% correct nor do I expect it to me.
It seems to me that any furhter chase for perfection is like chasing a rainbow for that pot of gold.
I don't think so... they didn't even bother to vandalize the guy's wikipedia page!
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Considering it's probably virtually impossible to find any media or reference source upon which someone may not challenge its reliability, I've always wondered what the basis of the often ambiguous claims that are spewed around the net and other media on Wiki's supposed inaccuracies?
Personally, I think 99% of the claims are bullshit. You have political people out there who claim Wiki is bogus because the articles don't match up with their agenda. I think the majority of the claims probably have to do with subjective, delusional interpretations of that nature.
That notwithstanding, I've still never really found Wiki information to be significantly inaccurate. Maybe I am not looking in the right places, but even when an entry is defaced, it's pretty obvious and often it's quickly corrected. I still don't think there is any encyclopedic source anywhere that is as dynamic and comprehensive (and probably willing to be updated based on consensus discussion among a wide variety of participants).
So is this notion of Wiki being a questionable information source warranted? Or is this some ambiguous claim that seems to be passed on and on without much substance behind it?
I'm an outsider to the Wikipedia community. I read the site avidly - looking up everything from gas-turbines to the history of afghanistan - but I only rarely post to articles and when I do I'm generally just fixing typos. I do have an account on wikipedia, but I've never started my own entry or contributed significantly to one that already existed. Nor do I go to conferences, or know any of the serious wikipedia contributors.
It does seem to me, however, that this is an overreaction to some of the bad press that Wikipedia has gotten over the last year or so. If you listen to the news media, wikipedia is an untrustworthy haven for trolls, flamers, liers, Colbert-elephant vandals, and so on. While it is true that Wikipedia isn't perfect and no one should base a research paper on it, in my experience the quality of information has actually been quite good. So I don't think there's really a huge problem to be addressed. Which means there's not much to gain by forking it. (I assume by "fork" they mean "we're going to steal all the hard work that's been denoted so far so that our new product doesn't have to start from scratch.")
On the other hand, what do we have to lose with the new version of wikipedia? To my mind, the most important aspect of Wikipedia was transparency in contradistinction to authority. Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed "facts", when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process. You see the front page, the article itself, but also have access to the discussions that go into that page. If something is controversial you see the controversy. This affords a kind of meta-information every article that opened up a whole new kind of information from enyclopedias. No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information.
The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name) threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of "experts" (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to "experts" is a huge step back.
It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and "forking" it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?
If you only care about a good OS (or, by analogy, a good encyclopedia) then I guess there's no reason to be worried. But if you care about the open source movement, then this is cause for grave concern indeed.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
Maybe you could call it Scholarpedia?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
yet another example of "open" failing....
Completely the opposite. The openness allows someone with a "better idea", yet to be proven, to attempt to prove it better, without having to start from scratch.
Nupedia was the Newton.
Now that Wikipedia has put the PDA market in the palm of everyone's hand,
someone with clout can come along and try to make it a trio of products.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Um, no. Yet another example of "open" creating choice for us. One or the other may become the most popular choice for people looking for information, but that's their problem. For us users, it's all good.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
In the land of the edited, the anonymous coward is king.
The tone of the comments so far are quite amusing - for quite some time, people have been saying "the beauty of GPL is that you can fork - if you don't like the Wikipedia, fork it!". Now that someone is doing so - all the comments revolve around why it's a bad idea to do so.
Wikipedia doesn't work like a regular encyclopedia. Stephen Colbert is making fun of us. The modern media hates us because we're not Encyclopedia Britanica.
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. On top of being an incredible source for information, it's an excercise in damage control and chaos theory. Wikipedia works, not despite page defacers and fact monglers, but *because* of them. Without the constant controversy surrounding things like politicians changing their own wiki entries, innacurate or false information would tend to sit in the pool and stagnate.
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. It's not meant to be one. It's not meant to work like one. Trying to treat it like one is foolish. Trying to base a traditional encyclopedia off of Wikipedia is foolish.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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.
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I would expect an expert to respect another experts view and add his own view after the original
Obviously, the "experts" you know are a lot more polite than the ones I'm familiar with. I think that if anything, someone who thinks of themselves as an expert is more likely to wipe out information which they perceive to be 'incorrect;' intellectual debates can get pretty heated, after all.
I think the only way that an expert system could work is if edit rights are restricted to certain individuals, allowing each person to basically have their own article about a particular controversial topic. For instance, if you looked up string theory or evolution, there would be several different articles to choose from on string theory, written by several distinct "experts," each with different backgrounds and expressing a different perspective on the issue. It's a big mistake to let one expert have edit rights on content written by someone else whom they disagree with, and expect them to just play nice.
Maybe the string theorists would get along and let each others' work be; perhaps the evolutionarians would as well. But how do you think the article on Islam is going to work? I could think of people who might both be well-described as "experts," who nonetheless might have little tolerance for the opinions or work of the other. People kill each other over philosophical disagreements, where religion and politics are involved -- do you really think that they wouldn't revert each other's stuff online?
I think it's a mistake to try to cram too many different viewpoints into one article. This is the trademark of an encyclopedia, to be sure -- one article per entry -- but it's one of the reasons why encyclopedias traditionally aren't used for real research. It's just not possible to have one monolithic article for each topic and still preserve the context and flavor of each argument; to have an honest discussion of a contentious issue requires that you give each of the different viewpoints a separate space in which to express their argument, and then read them each in context.
Any 'expert system' which lets one 'expert' overwrite another is probably going to have just as many revert wars as the layman's Wikipedia; the only difference might be the grammar level used in the ad hominem attacks in the discussion pages. Being an 'expert' doesn't instantly make people respectful of dissenting views; if anything, my experience has taught me the contrary. The more developed someone's opinions on something are, the less likely they are to accept the dissenting point of view as valid. There are exceptions to this, but they're somewhat rare.
My ideal system would be one where I could go to a topic and see a consensus-based general introduction, which would be publicly editable and have a tracked history. This would allow me to get an idea of the "man on the street" perspective -- it might not be correct, and it might be totally at odds with what scientists or experts think at the same time, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value. (E.g., it would be helpful to know of the wide gap today between the scientific consensus on global warming and the hoi polloi; the latter is important even if it's wrong, just because it's widely held.) Separate from this would be the 'expert articles.' The expert pages would each have a single author (which might be a real person, a psudeonymous entity, or a group of people acting as author -- for example a committee), and express a particular viewpoint. I would be free to agree or disagree with these, and they might contradict one another. That's the nature of knowledge.
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I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts.
This really sums up 95% of the opposition to Wikipedia. (The other 5% comes from people who actually contribute to Wikipedia and whose opinions, therefore, actually count for shit.) It's petty egotism.
The contents of any given article are either factually correct, well-organized, and well-written, or they are not. And as far as Wikipedia goes, there are some really excellent articles and some really awful ones, and a bunch of relatively mediocre articles in between. There are some areas -- the physical sciences and European history, for example -- which are generally pretty good, and there are some areas -- biographical articles in general -- which are of much lower quality overall. Some articles, like the ones on quantum chromodynamics, are mostly maintained by people who have the necessary expertise, but who seem to think they're writing for people who already have expertise in the subject.
The bottom line, though, is that a good article is a good article whether it is written by a PhD or a "bored 17-year-old". The expert is more likely to be able to write an article off-the-cuff, while the 17-year-old is going to have to do more research to write the same article, but either way, the end result stands or falls on its own merits. There is such a thing as expertise, but there is also such a thing as a well-informed layman. Arguably, encyclopedias are written for laymen and other non-experts: a professional particle physicist isn't ever going to look up fermions in an encyclopedia.
The sad part is that experts could make a significant contribution to Wikipedia (and many, in fact, do), but that's only possible if they don't stomp in the door with raging egos expecting lay users to just roll over because some random netizen claims to have an advanced degree -- a claim that often made falsely anyway. That's appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. If you are an expert and you are interested in educating the public then you should be willing to take the time to back up your arguments with evidence and, most importantly, do so calmly and politely even when not everyone else is. If you're not interested in educating the public -- and doing whatever it takes to accomplish that task -- then Wikipedia doesn't need you. Neither does anyone else, in fact. Go masturbate with your ego somewhere else.
Wikipedia is as successful as it is because it invites active public participation, and simply being able to participate as a peer is the incentive that drives contributors. Encyclopaedia Britannica is as successful as it is because it pays experts to participate. Citizendium offers neither money or treatment as a peer. It doesn't take an expert to see that Citizendium will be authoritative... and very nearly devoid of content.
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If one is required to have a degree in the field they're posting on, where will the expertise on the implications of the 264th Rule of Aquisition of aquisition or the glitches in the newest Pikachu Digital Pet?
"When I wake up in the morning I piss cryptographic excellence." - Bruce Schneier
I'd prefer if they improved the current Wikipedia by implementing an (optional) reputation system to identify experts in particular fields. That way the data would all stay in one place where all the people are and that all the people are using for research already, yet we'd accomplish the same thing of having known experts have more influence on an article.
All they'd need to do is create a verification system where you could submit your credentials and identifying information (if you wished), then tag your user id with an "expert" tag that linked to your areas of expertise. They wouldn't necessarily even need to give those experts more power, just identifying them in the revision history would cause their version to survive (sometimes being reverted back to) unless it was too radical or misinformed (which can still happen even with experts).