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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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Duh. Net turnaround time from event to Wikipedia article chronicling said event is usually measured in seconds.
How long before we get a fanboy war between Wikipedians and, uh... Citizendoids?
Gamertag: WyleType
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 think that Wikipedia is good as it is. Most of the "vandalism" is pretty minor that I have seen, such as someone posting an unimporant history of forum drama and messsageboard wars on the entry on some website that has to be deleted. The quality of most academic articles is excellent, and I have been able to use them for researching some of my papers. But some like to say it is "Wicca-pedia" because it is "liberal."
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".
My server
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
Wikipedia with a New Bigger Fuller Ego!
Self-appointed editors; someone controlled / elected by the contributors at large?
If you read some of the high physics definitions then it gets very esoteric -not for the layman.
Example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
It would be nice if there were some translations.
If peer reviewed experts can't come up with a better name than "Citizendium," I think they are going to have troubles writing a whole encyclopedia.
I have freaks! I did something right...
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 am logged into the Vaporware(tm) Dedicated Box that was setup today.
:)
We are finally moving from "talk" to action. The Vapor you speak of will evaporate very, very quickly.
Dr. Sanger will be making an official announcement next Friday. I'll see you in a few weeks, not three years.
-Jason Potkanski
Member Citizendium Core Technical Team
Will there be silly articles about anything? For example, Wikipedia has pretty much every internet fad out there, and every restaurant that anyone has taken the time to look up. Is this going to be the same, or will it be more academic?
I think Wikipedia is pretty free and unbiased compared to the US media. As far as I can tell, it only preaches neutrality.
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...
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.
Equal time to unfair arguments is unfair to fair arguments.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, another competing group, the FSLN, was formally organised in 1961 by Tomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga and recent KGB recruit Carlos Fonseca Amador. According to Andrew, this was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked."
This is just completely bonkers and off the wall, and you find this sort of thing all over Wikipedia. I have many more examples as well. And the old canard "well, just change it" is BS. Wikipedia has been showing it's true colors as it's gotten more popular, and even progressives who got to be admins (172, Secretlondon) have begun getting persecuted, sometimes by Jimbo himself. Meanwhile, Jimbo tries to scuttle elections to ArbCom (which had so much opposition, he backed off), but after JayJG ran into too much opposition, he appointed him anyway. JayJG is anything but neutral, writing totally in a Zionist point of view, and the only reason to appoint him is to enforce that even more. As I said, Jimbo used to run the Ayn Rand mailing list, and has said that conservative icon Friedrich "Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project", which is probably the most self-damning things I've seen him say to date.
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
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.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
And what will they have over Scholarpedia? At least that site has some articles, and the way they produce content seems like it would be quite reliable, though slow.
I admit I haven't used that site very much, and it seems a crapshoot if a given subject will have articles right now, but will Citizendium even be worth looking at? Wikipedia already has tons of info on just about everything, though it could be inacurate. Scholarpedia will have highly accurate articles, but probably not on every possible thing. Where does this new site fit? I guess we will see...
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.
you can get all the pro-Commie rubbish you can stomach.
After the USSR tanked, the Stanford Bookstore had a sale: "All Communism 40% off". I still have a copy of Gorbachev's last address to the Central Committee. I regret not buying a copy of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English; that's now a collector's item.
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.
Well, apparently they've been exchanging some freaky kinky stuff, so a lot more people became interested really fast.
I think Wikipedia is a great tool, not only is it good for research but it has entertainment value as well. When Im looking for something to read about I can just go to the main page and read a featured article or a "did you know". Many times i have started off reading about something like Mexican tree frogs and ended up on a page about quantum physics just by following links in the text. Although, sometimes I've started off reading about quantum physics and ended up looking at something like a list of references to Finnish melodic death metal (wich I am not at all suprized to know actualy exists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Crew_Deathroll ) so I guess it works both ways. I hope Citizendium is a success just for the fact that we need all the free access to information we can get our hands on, and for the promotion of the exchanging of knowledge with everyone, even if some of that knowledge is contributed by someone who is an expert on "The Simpsons" at least that person is willing to share what they know with the rest of the internet community (It is part of our history after all). Who knows when half the "crap" poeple post will come in handy and if nothing else there is a record of it somewhere for future generations. After all, even if you may not use your Hydatid of Morgagni http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydatid_of_Morgagni at least you can know it is there in case you want to.
I think this will make it more sanitized and much less informative. They also are going against a lot of "mindshare" and name recognition. When I want to know who the heck someone was, and wha tis said about them, I do one of two things
1) Google (which generally finds the Wikipedia article)
2) Go directly to Wikipedia.
Will I now go to Citizendium itself? Only if I don't like what I see on Wikipedia, perhaps.
Wikipedia has achieved a "critical mass" of users/editors. Add a couple of self-important steps and you might not get anyone. Or worse yet, you might fragment the community into two sub-critical masses...
I wish them luck...but remember: "a house divided against itself..."
The good thing with such edits is that they encourage pople to add references for any controversial claim. Sometimes a comment too.
It is of course annoying not to be believed just based on your personal autority (like you would in a paper-Encyclopedia), but any true academic will understand and appreciate the need for references.
Any section dealing with religion, politics, and the environment should be a hoot!
After all, which experts are they going to determine are the real experts?
The one thing about experts is that are too many of them for a given subject and they rarely agree. Oh, a degree, PhD, or more doesn't mean your the expert they are looking for or the one anyone else wants.
Peer review == community bias.
Who forms their community will be interesting.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I don't mind so much that it's vaporware, but I don't like the way Wikipedia is slammed in the article.
It really sounds like someone's got a bit of a microchip on their shoulder to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I really don't see why you have a problem with that particular entry. It is marked that this is according to a Cambridge scholar. Not stated as a fact, but it is qualified as a statement by someone else.
I don't see why it is impossible that the KGB used the same tactics as the CIA did in supporting certain factions within countries that it found favorable to their cause.
As to your previous entry about free press.... I now lived under both communism and capitalism, and I say give me US capitalism any day. Free press is definitively here. You're just complaining that YOUR point of view is not as popular as you'd like it to be. You are welcome to change that fact, as you are doing now on Slashdot.
TANSTAAFL
Actually, pretty sure that Wikipedia leverages the collective foresight of humanity to write the articles BEFORE the event happens... and if you don't believe me, I'm sure I could stick that 'fact' in the Wikipedia article on Wikipedia... creating a paradox in the space-time continuum and destroying the universe... don't make me do it!
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
Oddly enough, Wikipedia is always getting lambasted for perceived "liberal" bias by right-wingers, too.
I'm fairly left-wing, and I've never noticed overt bias in Wikipedia (at least, none that's not obviously quickly-removed vandalism). OTOH, I've heard legions of very, very left- or right-wingers complaining that Wikipedia is "clearly biased" against them.
It's always remember that "neutral" means the (absolute) middle of the scale - it's not relative to your position.
If you're left-wing and the majority of the articles are right of you, that's because "neutral" is to the right of you. Equally, the majority of articles should be left of a right-winger.
"Neutral" is "in the middle of the scale", not "wherever I am on the scale" as most people seem to instinctively believe.
Do you think:
Or, perhaps:
Because (in the extreme case) who's going to put down their publishing company's money on a book that says the Russian Revolution was financed by gay martians acting through the Masons as a front organisation?
Your interpreatation obviously differs from the mainstream. Therefore you should either look for other non-mainstream media (vanity publishers, self-published books or blog-rantings on the internet, for example) or just accept the fact that if 99% of people disagree with you, then you'll disagree with 99% (or more!) of things you read.
Claiming an opinion is being repressed simply because it's unpopular is both ridiculous and annoyingly popular these days. Again, unless you can point to a specific entity (and no, vague statements about "big media" or "the military-industrial complex" doesn't count - they have to be entities you can point to) who's repressing an idea, it's almost certain that the idea is simply too ridiculous for the majority to take seriously.
Dismissal of a daft idea != Repression/Censorship/Conspiracy.
and the whole point of a free press is that you can read alternative, non-mainstream views on it. Just don't scream "censorship" because they aren't published by "mainstream" outlets. Duh.
Yes, it is.
You can disagree with the mainstream position all you want, and nobody will seriously censor you for it. They might not listen, and they might not give you airtime on their TV/radio station or printing press, but that's their perogative.
You can say and do what you like, and they can say and do what they like
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
... you can actually say it.
Cit-i-zen-di-waherr????
F
Hah! Pwned.
What is it with actually researching opinions these days? Has it gone out of fashion or something? Did I miss the memo?
What's the point of weighing in with a baseless opinion that's easily-verifiable, only to be made to look stupid in front of the whole internet when an Anonymous Coward shoots down your entire thesis with one link?
I mean, it happens such a lot there must be some upside to it, or you'd think people would learn and stop doing it... <:-/
(And no, this isn't entirely directed at 140Mandak262Jamuna - it's a general thought that was sparked by this example, that's all).
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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."
I think my time and money are better spent on wikipedia; just like I didn't appreciate the rashness with which enciclopedia libre forked off wikipedia.
I vote for you to be the decider on what amounts to a "fair argument". Oh wait, no I don't, I'm not American, so I don't vote for the local fauna.
I hate printers.
The Slashdotter reply: I'm going to have to do some work collecting information and reading about this word "research" to which you refer.
I hate printers.
There is really no need for this. Wikipedia works. It isn't perfect, but nothing will be.
They should use the resources to work on Wikipedia v1.0 for those who need a stable source of information.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Where do these people get off deciding what we will remember, and why is it all useless information?
I agree. The Kofi Annan article is a useless waste of bits. It's just a fluffy biographical sketch that repeats information available in numerous print encyclopedia and on the UN's web site. Read five newspaper articles about the UN, and you could glean all the information that's in the WP article.
The stuff about Knuckles, however, is more useful. It's not covered in any print encyclopedia, it's not background information you can pick up from reading the news, and the primary sources are inaccessable to most people because they either don't own every Sega system ever made or don't read Japanese!
0 1 - just my two bits
All he said that was a lot of people know what a wiki is. Not that Wikipedia invented the wiki.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
No, that is centrist. Neutral is not taking a bias. e.g.
Neutral:
Political Party A is a political party in Elbonia that was formed by Joe Average. It's platform includes x and y, with a strong opposition to z. It is generally considered a reltist party in Elbonia, although from a worldwide perspective it is more light of center. It currently holds 40% of the Elbonian legislature.
Centrist:
Political Party A is an okay party, with some disagreeable views. It has good policies in areas x and z, although they are a tad extreme, but its y policies are less than desirable. It has made some good laws, but others were less satisfactory.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I was using "left" and "right" in terms of "directions of bias", not literally as political metaphors.
;-)
I was trying to explain that if you aren't leaning in any particular direction, that's neutral... as opposed to "wherever I stand, that's the unbiased position", which seemed to be the parent's assumption.
But have ten pedant-points anyway.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself