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

Hmmm...

[GammaKitsune]

How long before we get a fanboy war between Wikipedians and, uh... Citizendoids?

Re:Hmmm...

[Das Modell]

Future generations will come to know the coming struggle as The Great Edit Wars.

Or something.

Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Vaporware

[Eivind]

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.

As a Wikipedia admin ...

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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!

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".

Re:Mangled by the mob....

[ZachPruckowski]

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.

Remember h2g2 ?

[Gopal.V]

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.

Update

[Larry Sanger]

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.

Re: But neutrality is unfair sometimes

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The neutral point of view advocated by Wikipedia gives undue prominance to nutcase theories. For example giving Geocentric Universe Theory and Heliocentri Universe Theory equal weightage is completely unfair to HUT. Everyone agrees with this. But then why should everyone agree that Intelligent Design Theory should get equal treatment compared to the Theory of Evolution?

Equal time to unfair arguments is unfair to fair arguments.

It seems to me as if it's already begun...

[Ruff_ilb]

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.

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

What's wrong with Wikipedia

[Animats]

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.

Re:What's wrong with Wikipedia

[Electrawn]

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

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.