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A Look Inside Citizendium

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rack-up-the-editing-cred dept.

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."

5 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Vaporware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Vaporware by Eivind · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Yes. But that still means they retain most disadvantages of a fork:

      • Their improvements are not back-ported to Wikipedia. (though if the licensing allows, I suppose they could be)
      • Once they touch an article, even in a trivial way (fix a single typo) they stop receiving benefits from improvements made on Wikipedia. (they could perhaps be *manually* integrated, but that's still a maintenance-nigthmare)
      • Over time, as more and more articles are touched by them, they'll have to maintain a larger and larger fraction of articles themselves. (since improvements on the WP side is no longer auto-imported after they touch them).
      • It puts them in a bind with regards to articles which are currently improving rapidly in WP. To not miss out on the improvements that will happen in the following weeks, they'll have to *deliberately* keep their hands off. (because move a single comma, and you stop benefiting from the work of the wikipedians.)

      I'd much have prefered a system where all contributions go to WP, and they merely maintain a system where they attach a quality-score to a certain version of certain wp-articles. That way you could have a view of wikipedia which included only those articles that are scored atleast "good", or atleast "excellent". This view would show only rated articles, and only the precise version that was rated.

      Wikipedia is already working on such a project though, blessed version. This will allow anyone to form a group, and approve certain versions of certain articles.

      Thus you could get together with a group of math-experts, review and bless a certain set of math-related articles, and then publish (automatically) a version of wp consisting only of those precise versions of those precise articles.

  2. As a Wikipedia admin ... by Ignorant+Aardvark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. It seems to me as if it's already begun... by Ruff_ilb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. What's wrong with Wikipedia by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.