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A Look Inside Citizendium
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."
Duh. Net turnaround time from event to Wikipedia article chronicling said event is usually measured in seconds.
Does someone remember BBC's h2g2 ? It had some excellent articles (like the link in my sig).
I met Jimbo Wales recently, on his visit to India. He was very very clear about one thing - wikipedia is not a technical innovation. The technology for wikipedia has existed for the last 10 years, but it has come of age with the checks & balances recently. H2g2 died out because it didn't really focus on the editors, but on the content - Mediawiki is somewhat heavily editor oriented, with easy ways to watch pages, revision history and all that - which provides no value to the "user". Editing community is what makes wikipedia run.
Merely starting off with a copy of the current wikipedia does not automatically provide it with crowd of editors.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
That's one of the things we're aiming to change. Certified experts will have the power to "approve" sections or pages, and those pages will be shown to unregistered users even if there's a more current "unapproved" version. That, combined with the requirement that you log in to edit, should prevent the need to babysit pages.
Hi all, yep we've been making progress. The big news is that, after a few weeks of negotiation with many different possible hosts we've chosen one today and they instantly put up a server for the pilot project for us. We didn't exactly plan for this Slashdotting, but you should know that we will have a pilot project wiki up in a few days. There's lots of other news. We've got three very experienced sysadm/network admin guys making up the lead technical team, we've got a commitment of significant support from a foundation, we've formulated a Statement of Fundamental Policies, we're gearing up for a major recruitment drive, etc. I could go on but I'll save it for the press release which should come out Friday next week.
Did you bother to read the introduction linked from the top of the page you referenced?
'Slashdot: "20 hours a week at Best Buy; 6 units at the community college; we are qualified to have opinions on things!"'
Holy shit, this is dead on. Remember the days when most of the people on here actually knew what they were talking about? When maybe 1 in 5 people was an actual programmer? When guys like Alan Cox would occasionally post? Now everyone who can figure out how to run their own useless "blog" feels they're qualified to post their own useless input on technical discussions. I wish these people would go back to reading Wired and wondering what Apple's next move will be. I wish idiots who have never written a line of useful code in their lives would stop rattling on about "the open source community", like such a thing exists and, even more unlikely, they belong to it. Stop trying to sound informed. Stop trying to be important. Just go away.
He ran Nupedia, co-founded Wikipedia, and has worked with the Digital Universe Foundation. He's got the relevant experience to start and lead this sort of a project.
Not true. The NPOV policy has a specific section dealing with this, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_poi nt_of_view#Undue_weight, and it says "Articles that compare views need not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and may not include tiny-minority views at all." Where does Intelligent Design get equal treatment to the Theory of Evolution? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life doesn't even mention ID, as far as I can see.
Vaporware or not, it's not really clear when it'll actually launch.
Then there's stuff for which Wikipedia is just the wrong tool for the job. There are articles for a huge number of CDs, but they're not organized into a useful database like Gracenote. There are articles for musicians, actors, and movies, but they're not in a database like IMDB with all the proper connections. There are articles for books, but they're not catalogued as a library would catalogue them. There are articles for most US state highways, but they're not organized into a map or atlas system. It's an "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem.
This is an underlying design/usability problem with Mediawiki and not necessarily Wikipedia itself. Building a proper database framework to be more encompassing (if not all encompassing - damn close) is a Citizendium design goal.
Thanks for the perspective, it helps define the problem better (in a way I hadn't thought of yet).
-Jason Potkanski
Citizendium Core Technical Team
I wrote to Larry to voice my concerns about the name - hard to say, too long, hard to spell, overthought - and suggested something shorter such as "Citi" which could take on the character of the encyclopedia. His response:
"Exactly the same things were said about "Wikipedia," another name I coined."