Slashdot Mirror
Citizendium After One Year
Larry Sanger writes "Citizendium, 'the Citizens' Compendium' — a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts — has just announced that it's celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether 'we've made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.' We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we've still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."
Tennis is a game played between two players (singles) or between two teams of two players (doubles). Players use a stringed racquet to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Wikipedia
Just an interesting note. Also, Wikipedia had started out as Nupedia, based on the same idea as Citizendium. In the end, it's really up to the end-user to weed out bad information.
uhhhmm...how about no.
Are you going to require SS, driver's license or passport numbers as well? After all my high school alone had 50 Chans in it, for example. I mean if you want people to be accountable you need to tie their identity to a person and a name does not tie to a person. A name ties to many people quite often.
However if you're not blessed enough to have a generic name that means that anyone can find everything you ever did under your real name. Anything online (and often even not online) you use your real name for is possibly tied to you, irrevocably and forever. This is the real world, not some fantasy world where everyone is nice and happy and non-prejudiced. People are petty and selfish and biased. I don't want to lose a potential job because some HR person decided they don't like my hobbies. Neither do I want to find myself in jail because some idiot policeman or prosecutor decided that my hobbies make me guilty of some crime (lots and lots of cases of innocent people getting shafted for being in the wrong place or time).
Mmm, catchy!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I don't mean to be a grammar Nazi here, just pointing out something that's illogical and repetitive.
Am I the only one annoyed by the frequent use of the word "year" when mentioning anniversaries? I wouldn't be surprised if it were only on blogs and web sites without editorial control. I also see it often in traditional news media like newspapers, TV news, etc. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary an anniversary is "the annual recurrence of a date marking a notable event". So there's no need to mention years, it's built-in, so to speak (from the Latin annus = year + versus = "to turn").
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
My name is Anonymous Coward, I'm just posting anonymously.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
The whole point of wikipedia was to create a large body of knowledge, and putting everyone on equal footing did just that. Being able to take the "large body of knowledge" and give it expert vetting is going to be a slower process, but
Care about privacy? Read this!
Citizendium: Wikipedia
/stzndim/ "a citizens' compendium of everything") is an English-language online wiki-based free encyclopedia project spearheaded by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia.[1][2] The project aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring all contributors to do so with their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behaviors, and by providing what it calls "gentle expert oversight" of everyday contributors. A main feature of the project is its "approved articles", which have each undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic-experts and are closed to real-time editing. The project was first (late 2006) envisioned as a complete "fork" of the English Wikipedia,[3] but the project abandoned that idea prior to its March 2007 public launch to emphasize its own original articles. As of October 2007, the project had over 3,000 articles.[4]
Wikipedia is a peer-directed project to create a group of online encyclopedias in every major language. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia grew exponentially in its first 4 to 5 years. It is the world's largest encyclopedia project and one of the most popular sites on the Internet.[1] The English-language Wikipedia is the world's largest single wiki and contains more than two million articles.
========
Wikipedia: Citizendium
Citizendium: The Citizens' Compendium
The Citizendium homepage in Firefox
URL http://en.citizendium.org/
Commercial? No
Type of site Internet encyclopedia project
Registration Optional (Required to edit pages)
Available language(s) English
Owner Larry Sanger
Created by Larry Sanger
Launched October 23, 2006 (pilot)
March 25, 2007 (public)
Current status Beta
Citizendium (pronounced
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
... In the end, it's really up to the end-user to weed out bad information. ...
A lot of the wikipedia's success is because it's a lot easier to revert or delete than to create.
And because there are more people who want it to be right than want it to be wrong.
In addition, Wikipedia now has enormous scope. On almost any topic, I can feel confident that Wikipedia will have something to say. In spite of what many detractors will say, Wikipedia is usually informative and reasonably accurate. It should not be= seen as definitive, but it ia frequently a useful starting point. Citizendium has a long way to go before it can make such claims.
Whilst writing this, I could not help thinking about the fictional comparison between the entries for alcohol in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the Encyclopedia Galactica. That led me to check what each of the sources had to say about Hitchhikers itself. See for yourself:
- Wikipedia on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Citizendium on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I think we have a clear winner!Don't get me wrong. Citizendium sounds like a great idea and I hope it is successful. It may be that they would be better off not trying to compete so directly with Wikipedia and to aim for a different niche. In that case, I think it's a shame that the article spent so much time addressing the inevitable comparisons.
I don't know if it is just me, but I get turned off the moment I come across any reference to "Web 2.0". For some reason, this raises the snake-oil and marketeerspeak warning flags in my mind.
Anonymity is about writing and, as the above poster points out, it's as old as writing itself. In fact, in the older literatures, specifically in early Chinese, it was considered low class and arrogant to sign ones name to a work of literature.
The people who get upset about anonymity tend not to be those who are not really interested in the text itself but rather in the politics of the text.
Let me provide a topical example that doesn't speak directly to annonymity but can be seen as a lesson on this topic. If J.K. Rowling's name was not synonymous with her writings then her comments about her character Dumbledore would be irrelevant since there is little evidence of them in the text itself. The lack of annonymity of the author makes this seem interesting but only to those who are in to the politics of the text as opposed to the text itself.
If your main concern is the text itself and you have respect for literary tradition then you should certainly have no problem with anonymity.
What I find astonishing is the fact that Citizendium still hasn't figured out what license(s) they're using. The bigger it gets, the bigger a crisis it's going to face when it comes time to relicense all of that content under whichever open-content license(s) they choose.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The problem with citizendium is the basic premise that the masses aren't "qualified" to contribute. This is what made the wikipedia so much fun-- all of us dilletantes had a place to put in our smattering of knolwedge about history, geography, or punk rock. But only a minority of the population graduates college, and an even smaller minority have the advanced degree in place to be a qualified 'authority' to speak authoritatively on a given subject. Citizendium depends on this minority, and frankly wikipedia is migrating the same direction.
As a result, the masses are moving toward what they know: TV shows, pop culture, and fictional universe wikis. The Lyric wiki is 6th on the http://wikindex.com/, and the TV wiki is 13th overall. World of Warcraft, Star Trek, and Battlesar Galactica are bigger than many non-european language wikipediae.
People go where they feel smart. When citizendium makes things tough, only the tough will remain.
davejenkins.com |
I thought it said "Circumcision after one year!"
"Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements"
This seems like the quickest way to kill off any Web 2.0 venture.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
A lot of the sort of negative comments above were anticipated and shown to be myths in TFA, right here.
Also, hey, think of this. On the one hand, (1) I have nothing whatsoever against anonymity online; there is a right to anonymity online. But (2) I also think that certain projects--like encyclopedia projects--can greatly benefit by requiring people to identify themselves. If you bring yourselves to realize that (1) and (2) are compatible, maybe you anonymity advocates won't be so hostile to CZ.
In short, I don't think that the right to anonymity requires that you have the right to be anonymous everywhere. You have the right to have sex with other consenting adults, too, but you don't have the right to have sex with other consenting adults everywhere. (Hey! Get off my car!)
In the beginning there were two operating systems: Hurd and Linux. Both weren't big enough to be useful yet but each could be if it could attract developers. We know what happened. Linux took off because Linus took a pretty relaxed attitude to contributors.
One of the reasons Wiki works is because it takes a pretty relaxed attitude to contributors. Usually it works pretty well. In fact, there is no reason to think that anonymous contributions are less reliable than those of people with a reputation to defend. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/17/2249246
I have corrected a typo in a Wiki article about Morse code. The article had it right in one place and wrong in the other so I fixed the wrong one. I probably wouldn't have bothered if I had to sign up and log in.
The comments in the link posted above indicated that there are many people, who are experts in their field, who will make the occasional edit of obvious typos and mistakes. Overall, permitting those people to do so without creating an account would seem to be a net benefit.
Anyway, my guess is that Citizendium will get not much more traction than Hurd.
So do you have to be a citizen to contribute to this project? I take it illegal aliens aren't welcome. What about legal aliens who have yet to become citizens?
I am sorry but slashdot is probably the only place I actually read the word "citizendium", one year later I only find wikipedia links everywhere, and no single citizendium link. And I browse the web a lot.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
When I was born, it was back during the summer of love, so to speak. The guy who chose to side with my mom was a Catholic, and vis a vis he changed my name to his own. Except, because of Social Security's recent revisions, I cannot even live by the name I grew up with. Yet because of this, I cannot chose a job or what have you, because I'm essentially forced to live by the name I was born with.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
...is that while the purpose of the project is a valid critique of Wikipedia, it's too extreme, what with locking down accounts and disallowing anonymous posting. The Wikipedia way of random anonymous people contributing works fine. And the "all knowledge is important!" aspect letting the comic book geeks in at least generates a ton of people who cruise the site and fix vandalism. The problem with Wikipedia - though I should add I am not an expert on its Administrator debates - isn't so much disrespecting the experts as respecting too much the cranks and trolls. Seriously, if Wikipedia would just ban people spreading their own crazy cult or psuedoscience or obscure on sight, it'd be much better off. This arbitration case I recently found seems a pretty good example of Wikipedia not at its finest; an admin banned a crank who'd been spreading their psuedoscience for two years with a solid number of other people saying "ban him," and got dragged into a messy dispute with arbitrators and all as his reward. That's not good. Nothing frustrates actual experts more than having to defend themselves and an article from cranks.
But aside from that niggle, Wikipedia is pretty much fine. "Ban the cranks" would work better and keep a larger user base than "scare away everyone but the experts."
They still haven't decided on the license of their original articles:"All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined.".
If they will go the oh-so-common route of choosing a license with "non-commercial" clause (hey, we're soo anti-commercial and soo "free"), they really won't be a competitor to Wikipedia since the reusage possibilities of Citizendium's material drops dramatically.
I would guess they will choose some free license, and choosing any other than GFDL (without invariant sections / covers) is going to be a big pain for them since they would need to handle the fact of license changing from article to article. But since they _still_ haven't chosen anything, I'd take that as a sign they really don't a) understand, b) care or c) want their material to be freely usable.
Thanks to the wonderful English language (lacking "libre"), we already have eg. Scholarpedia, "the free peer reviewed encyclopedia", "like Wikipedia" (just don't put any material on anything you're selling, oh and btw don't take more than 100 copies). I would hope for real competition from Citizendium, rather than fooling people with "free" sites and luring eg. professionals to write to them like Scholarpedia does.
Citizendium claims 3300 articles. After a year, only 39 of these are "approved" articles ... expert approval being their unique selling point. Far from exhibiting accelerated growth, Citizendium's own statistics shows a year's worth of uniformly flat growth.
... only four entries, to four articles that do not exist.
After one year, Wikipedia - which did not have the distinct advantage of being able to lift content wholescale from, err, wikipedia, had 21,000 articles.
Again, despite it's touted experticity, it still has barking mad articles such as Jake the Explainer, that looks like little more than a homespun essay; Cows in popular culture, deleted from Wikipedia for being just too barking mad, massively incomplete in Citizendium; Common student exercises in computer science - random drivel. I could go on: Joan of Arc, memory of (WTF), Choosing a dog - decent enough article but encyclopaedic? And their Catalog of Cajun and Creole cuisine - one of a number of similar catalogues
Even with the very best will in the world, it is difficult to see Citizendium progressing in any meaningful way before its funding expires.
Who dares to publish criticism of Scientology with their real name?
Basically ANY sufficiently controversial topic will be unreliable when anonymity is lost.
Religion, believes and cults are the obvious examples, but there's a lot more topics that stupid people get aggressive about.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
If the future of the internet is watching crappy videos on youtube while reading half arsed articles on wikipedia and being spammed by "friends" on all the major social networks while Digg telly you what the "news" is, then I want out! Where is the quality? Web 1.0 was good enough for me.
Not trolling, honest, just stating a fact.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Wikipedia is useful to get a first idea of what we are looking for, and then go to an expert's site and read the real stuff. If Citizendium can be of the latter, it's good.
Well that was unexpectedly funny. Thank you very much. Choosing a dog, indeed.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
At least, that's the perception one gets. Looking at their main page, there are no non-English articles. And what about their name? "Citizen" is English. Yes, "Wiki" is Hawaiian, but it has been adopted by other languages as well. Wiki is "wiki" in Finnish as well, whereas "Citizen" is "kansalainen". "Wikipedia" is a lot more universal word languagewise than "Citizendium" is. Not to mention it being a lot easier to pronounce. Again: Wikipedia is "Wikipedia" in Finnish, what would Citizendium be? I have no idea. What I do know is that "Citizendium" would seem totally alien to someone who speaks Finnish.
Starting from their name, Citizendium has adopted a policy of "English-only!". Maybe it's deliberate, maybe it's not. But that's just how things are. That is one of the biggest reasons I really don't see Citizendium surpassing Wikipedia anytime soon.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
You'd specify what you want to know and some information about what sort of context would matter. This would mean a system with far smaller article fragments, which could be compiled into actual articles on demand. It would also mean a system with far more sophisticated natural language processing ability and superior weak natural language AI than currently exists, so don't expect a meta-encyclopedia any time soon.
You don't want an encyclopedia. You want a teacher.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the whole encyclopedia idea is just for control freaks anyway. The map is not, and can never be, the territory. Things like Wikipedia are useful and fantastic but the search for a state of encyclopedia-like reliability and academic authority can have no other end than strangling these projects and reducing them to dead matter, skeletons of once living things, perfecty mapped and defined and verified, and therefore useless in terms of their original purpose as a dynamic, democratic entity. I've seen this happen in several sites (naming no names but I'm sure users of this site can think of at least one example) - forums, pseudo-encyclopedias, etc - where the pedantic, authoritarian types take over from the creative, anarchic types and run the site into an insular, arcane quagmire from which it never emerges.
It's worth noting that Paine's Common Sense was written anonymously! See also many of the newspaper editorials of the day written under names like "Demophilius." Our revolution relied on anonymity.
Sorry, i am out of points, so i cannot do it myself.
Larry has invested so much clout in this project he will defend it till the end, no matter much much it sucks.
German wikipedia had a very similar case: Mr. Fuchs, an ex-moderator and oppinion-troll (is main idea was "TOO MANY ARTICLES! DELETE DELETE DELETE". To explain his idiocy: For him, the only notable movies are those who won academy awards...). Well, his wikiweise looks the same like this now: After 2 (or so) years, 50% of the edits are now done by 4 persons, one of them himself.
But you will never hear him accept any kind of misstake, even now. And he still has a blog where he rants about how poisoned the wiki is by bad information...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Furthermore, the problem with bias is more a problem of psychology. There's been a few studies recently (some linked on Slashdot, I believe) showing that someone actually has to have a certain depth of understanding in a subject to evaluate their own competency correctly: people who know nothing, or moderate to significant amounts, about a subject usually accurately rate their own knowledge, but people who know a little about a subject tend to overestimate their knowledge. Couple that with the ability in modern times to read a whole lot of articles that each show a surface understanding of something people get passionate over -- Marxist theory, the gold standard, 9/11 -- and it's easy for people to become absolutely sure about the "truth" of talking points that they've come across time and time again without really understanding that they're hearing one half-truth that's undergone intense amplification in an echo chamber. And Wikipedia's system makes it hard to identify these and even harder to remove them: why, of course this is true, because there are multiple independent links I can give as reference! Well, if all those links are alarmist articles that, if you dig far enough, come from the same source whose understanding of what they're raising the alarm over is incorrect (or just incomplete), maybe they really shouldn't be given that much weight.
I use Wikipedia and I don't know that Citizendium is going to solve these potential pitfalls. But I think it's important to understand that "harnessing the collective intelligence of the masses" really does have potential pitfalls. It's good to profess question authority, but the problem with it -- and this is something I see outside Wikipedia, of course -- is that it often fails to distinguish between authority that's been granted (ilisten to him, he's a CEO!) and authority that's been earned (listen to him, he's been studying this field for two decades and is a recognized expert). At the extreme, this gets a little perverse: I have more than one friend who seems less likely to trust someone who's presented as an authority than someone who's just an interested layman.
While I've been trying to avoid giving examples that would cause arguments in and of themselves, I think this is really important when it comes to "controversial" issues, and those are probably precisely the issues where Wikipedia's style can lead to the most confusion. When push comes to shove, I would rather have articles on evolution vetted by evolutionary scientists, on the gold standard vetted by economists, and on climate change vetted by climate scientists. This doesn't mean that there's no place in an encyclopedia to talk about drawbacks to "fiat currency" and criticisms of prevailing climate models, but it does mean that you don't get equal time just because you're a contrarian. When the overwhelming bulk of study on a given topic supports one viewpoint, that's the viewpoint that an encyclopedia article -- which is, after all, meant as a quick overview of the topic in the first place -- logically should spend the bulk of its time on.
Wikipedia isn't as bad for this as its critics make it out to be, but ultimately, its distrust, and sometimes active snubbing, of experts is probably its most serious drawback, and there's no way to address that without doing a lot of re-examination of the Wikipedia "culture" -- and from what I understand, self-appointed editors there are very, very resistant to that notion. I think Citizendium is an interesting experiment with a different organizational model.