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."

Comments

Mangled by the mob....

[CTho9305]

From TFA:
Sanger (and others) believe this atmosphere alienates many academics and experts who find their contributions mangled, reverted, or trivialized by a clueless, faceless mob...

It's definitely frustrating to have technical edits reverted or messed up by someone who doesn't understand the subject matter as well as you do. There are many cases where there are just too many people who believe something with no evidence to keep it out of the article for long. Wikipedia is great for finding out what most people interested in a field think, but it's not always a good way to get facts or for more in-depth explanations and finding less well-known facts, especially when they're contradictory to "general knowledge".

Slashdot AFD

[Stalyn]

Slashdot trolling phenomena is up for deletion for dubious reasons. For those of us that have been around /. for a long time, it is hard to separate Slashdot's infamous trolling past from Slashdot itself. And also this type of article is what makes Wikipedia great. It's just in-depth secondary knowledge about an online community that would be excluded from a paper encyclopedia.

However several wikipedians believe that the information is not notable or such claims are unverifiable. When it's obvious that the source is Slashdot itself which keeps a written oral history. It would be silly to delete an article about Beowulf* because the sources are dubious or self-referential.

Anyway this just highlights one of the problems of the Wikipedia community. They have self-knighted themselves to be the guardians of knowledge. Anything that does not fit their worldview of what is "Wikiesque" will be removed. The official Wikipedia policies are malleable and can be interpreted to fit their conclusions. It reminds me of what happened in Bolshevik Russia; whatever does not fit the Party line does not exist.

*Yeah I know it's silly to compare Beowulf to the hot grits guy but you get the point.

Re:Slashdot AFD

[WWWWolf]

Remember, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with specific goals. It doesn't intend to be a catch-all repository of facts. Think for a second: Would this be a good topic in an encyclopedia? Yes! Would Britannica take this article as it is? Heck no, no, no.

And the most important question of all: Is Wikipedia the end of all knowledge? Can't we do some stuff outside of Wikipedia too? Heck, Wikipedia seems to quote a lot of stuff from outside, don't they...

Instead of "My favourite topic doesn't fly with Wikipedia, their methodology apparently sucks, therefore Wikipedia sucks", you didn't think of doing the constructive thing: "My favourite topic doesn't fly with Wikipedia, as it conflicts with their goals and policies; How could we rebuild this article in a way that it doesn't conflict with their goals and policies, and generate an external source that could benefit not only Wikipedia, but Slashdot community as well?" It's entirely understandable to get mad if you get slapped. It's prudent to get up and think of what to do to repair the damage.

The reason the article is up for deletion is not "dubious" at all.

This article (and other Slashdot culture articles that were up on AfD lately) was basically formed like this: A bunch of Slashdotters visit Wikipedia, someone gets the bright idea "hey, it would be cool if we had an article on Slashdot trolling." They begin working on the article, adding random bits of troll-lore.

Which is all fine with regular Slashdotters. They know it's right. They won't challenge a single word. I mean, I wouldn't.

But then comes the problem: Someone who's a bit skeptical. Someone who's probably new to Slashdot and don't know a lot about what's going on here. They want to know if this stuff is really true. They can come to Slashdot and read (Score: -1, Troll) comments all day; They can conclude that the article may be basically right, but they can't find an authority that says so. They can't tell if all these people who have been editing the article are "authorities" or not. Other articles have sources that can easily be used to verify that stuff. Stuff written by experts and journalists. Good enough.

I can't remember if I edited this particular article, but I think I edited the "recurring jokes" article (how silly of me, considering I was in favour of deleting it): A curious user can check that "Hmm, User:Wwwwolf added something about Evil Bits;" (pokepokepoke) "Yep, this is WWWWolf (#2428) on Slashdot, he's probably been there long enough to remember the pain and blood and suffering of that fateful April Fools Day, 2003." But can they do the same research on all "experts"? Even the ones behind an IP addy? (As a side note, I really hope Citizendium folks have an answer to this problem!)

The article doesn't point to three-digit-UID user's peer-reviewed work that explores the trolling in a conclusive way.

That's what Wikipedia demands; It doesn't demand the users to be experts, it demands the users quote or paraphrase or summarise an expert's work, as "expert" is defined by society at large. If you're an expert of some field and editing Wikipedia, that does help, because you probably have a good idea on who taught you.

[I'm supposed to be an "expert" on computer science, and I can easily say: "I'll write something about some design pattern. Hmm, didn't Martin Fowler write something about this?" ...or "Hmm, someone doesn't have a good source on this claim about shell sort. Hey, Knuth's TAoCP had something about this..."]

Don't get me wrong: The way this article was built was marvellous. I like it a lot. However, it's not a good way to build a good Wikipedia article according to Wikipedia's policies. It's a good demonstration on how wiki concept can accumulate information. It's a bad example of an article according to Wikipedia's standards of research.

So what's my recommenda

Re:What's wrong with Wikipedia

[Animats]

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.

For most of the categories mentioned, the obvious tool for the job is a relatively conventional forms-driven database. Most proper names belong to some well understood category (people, places, companies, books, movies, songs, audio recordings), and those should be handled by some form-based input mechanism which captures the appropriate information for the category. In some cases, it may be possible to obtain data sources to populate or check the database entries. Such entries might also have an associated wiki-type free comment area, but the finding and linking mechanism would be more structured than that of a general wiki. As with IMDB and Gracenote, it should be possible to ask questions like "what films was this actor in" and get a useful result.

From the reader perspective, the output could look much like Wikipedia with subject matter templates. But from the editor perspective, it would be form-based for common article types. This allows for much more input validation. Disambiguation and spelling problems can be caught and corrected during input validation, rather than after the fact by someone else.

With proper names handled separately, the main less-structured wiki space becomes focused on more general concepts. This should reduce clutter substantially.

I'd definitely encourage a division between proper names and other material as a basic organizing concept. It's an easy to understand distinction.