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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."
This project was announced a month ago, and they still don't have a wiki of their own set up... not very fast movement for an Internet project. The only movement is a bunch of people talking about setting up a large scale wiki hosting infrastructure, and begging for free/discounted hosting.
What is interesting about citizendium is they don't even have anything actually running yet.
One of the nice things about wikipedia is that it has nearly 1.5 million articles in the english language version.
There a lot of knocks against wikipedia in the article, but the reality is that it is running and extraordinarily useful already to many people.
My impression is citizendium are going to copy wikipedia articles (and likely even use wikipedia's software), then edit them to be better and then try to stay in sync if they can with wikipedia.
I think it'll be worth checking back in 3 years to see how they've done, but at this point way way to early to tell. I personally am not to optimistic, but do wish them well.
As a Wikipedia admin, I wish Larry Sanger the very best of luck. Any new free content is a good thing, and hopefully Sanger gets his expert model working and we can import his peer-reviewed articles back into Wikipedia. Everyone wins!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I tend to think that a better development model could improve Wikipedia. A moderation system, like Slashdot's, could assign "reliability" ratings to edits, based on the quality of a person's previous contributions. It could rank the priority of changes up for review using the reliability of the person making the changes. Contentious articles that get locked down could only be locked down to people below a certain reliability score. The system could also keep track of contributor's quality as judged by topic. I'm interested in the collaborative plans they have. There are a lot of things I think could be done better.
But I wouldn't start over from scratch. Wikipedia's too far ahead. I'd copy the content of Wikipedia, and then let the copy diverge.
Aside from not having to start from scratch, there's also the benefit that people could do a careful analysis of various articles to see how they evolved, and see which system seems to be yielding the highest quality encyclopedia.
It is free to copy, redistribute, and modify Wikipedia, isn't it?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
This is the next step from wikipedia. It's like writing a paper, first you write down absolutely everything (wikipedia) and then you revise, (citizendium. What suprised me was at the very bottom of the page when Larry Sanger, the leader of citizendium responded Fred Bauder's attack. Sounded a little emotion-driven whereas I would want a critical thinker or thought-driven thinker founding this project. My intepretation might be wrong but does anyone know anything else about Larry Sanger's credentials?
I don't see this project taking off to become what its creators dream of. Having an overly broad encyclopedia written by numerous experts is going to be tough to sustain. A better idea is to follow the trail of eMedicine, a niche group of medical articles, written by doctors, for doctors. I could envision O'Reilly developing a similar system for computer users...
Equal time to unfair arguments is unfair to fair arguments.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Look at how meticulously researched and accurate the article on the Citizendium is. Read the first sentence: "Citizendium, whose name is a portmanteau of citizen and compendium, is a project proposed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on September 15, 2006, intended to begin as a "progressive or gradual fork" of the English Wikipedia.[1] The Citizendium project will be carried out under the auspices of the Citizendium Foundation.[2]"
Notice: A fancy french term, a nice quote, precocious diction, and TWO citations just in the intro.
This seems to be quite a little passive-agressive/bullying hint from the wikipedians.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Wikipedia isn't necessarily liberal, it just reflects a worldwide perspective. Internationally the United States is considered rather conservative; thus, Wikipedia, which is truly neutral, is perceived as being too liberal in the United States. And yes, other countries have the opposite perception. The Dutch, for instance, generally consider Wikipedia too conservative.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Wikipedia's anonymous editing is a huge headache. It takes the constant efforts of several hundred people just to deal with the vandalism and incoming junk. At least you now have to register to create an article.
Having 1.5 million articles is a bug, not a feature. There are several thousand articles on Star [Wars|Trek|Gate]. There's one for every Pokemon. There's one for every episode of South Park. There's one for every city alderman of Calgary since the city was founded. One for every station on most subway lines of the world. A sizable fraction of Wikipedia is dreck like that. It's so easy to add.
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.
In time, Wikipedia will either have to tighten up who can edit, or the thing will sink under all the dreck and vandalism. Actually, Wikipedia probably peaked in quality a while back. It's rare today that anyone adds an article that matters. Look at the last 50 new articles added; perhaps one or two actually belong in an encyclopedia.
Its going to be mostly academic, Larry has stated that it will start as a fork of Wikipedia and will be maintained by "Intellectuals". Frankly that is the primary reason why I dont see this amounting to much, maybe im alone but the "silly" articles on Wikipedia are part of the attraction to me. It's nice to have a place where I can lookup information about obscure pop culture and trivial bits, without that wikipedia would just be Encyclopedia Brittanica online and we already have that.
Wikipedia doesn't represent a worldwide perspective; it represents a perspective that is the sum of the perspectives of every country, weighted by number of internet users. That includes a significant bias towards the US + Europe.