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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."
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.
Citizendium *might* (and I do stress might) be able to get the balance right. Wikipedia has a lot of positives - but with one big negative. It burns through good editors... and there are endless bad editors and trolls.
Wikipedia is a fucking nightmare to work on unless you have endless patience with red tape, and/or friends who are admins, or you are working in some obscure area that no-one else cares about.
If Citizendium can add a *sensible* amount of respect for expertise to settle arguments and control a page... then it might well be a more balanced and rewarding Wikipedia.
We shall see.
Ideally, then, you'd want the encyclopedia to do this. 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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
Right, Citizendium should aim for "The Definitive Resource On Everything" niche instead of "The Usually Informative And Reasonably Accurate But Not Definitive, Although It Is Frequently A Useful Starting Point, Resource On Everything" that Wikipedia currently inhabits...
Yuval Langer.
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.
I remember I used to use Yahoo all the time and I never heard of something called Google.
Just saying.
And in this case, it's the same guy trying to kill his prior wikipedia.
It's basically the same shit, despite all the hype. At the end of the day, I don't think either are good formal sources of information, even if they are decent informal ones.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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 |
For the love of God and all that is holy, why does every story have to be about licenses?
In this case, it's because the inability to even pick a license suggests that the folks in charge don't know what the hell they're doing. You don't launch an open-content initiative without figuring out the basics of the project.
...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."
Because otherwise, how are people going to know how they can reuse the content?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.