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."

Comments

Keeping things Web 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way. You can have my anonymity when you pry it from my cold dead hands!

Re:Keeping things Web 1.0

[mrbluze]

You can have my anonymity when you pry it from my cold dead hands! This is a good comment, it's not off-topic, and is indeed the reason why many experts will choose not to contribute to a wiki that reveals their identity.

Re:Keeping things Web 1.0

[Grandiloquence]

Just tell us who you are and where we can find you and we'll be right over with a crowbar!

Re:Keeping things Web 1.0

[owlnation]

I wholeheartedly agree. The fundamental problem with "experts" in the wiki-sense is that they are self-appointed. And invariably self-aggrandizing.

Citizendium has the advantage, perhaps, that it's clear from the start that there is a hierarchy. At least potential cabals are the more transparent.

Wikipedia is rife with cabal-ery, and in many cases admins are deeply involved in that. This has been exposed time, after time, after time, after time, after time, all the way to the top - and even then it's probably only the tip of the iceberg of the data manipulation that goes on. Nota bene -- I do NOT mean "vandalism". "Vandalism", like "terrorism" is an emotive abstract tool exaggerated to permit lock-down and control of information. "Vandalism" is not nearly as bad as the deliberate manipulation of data to service a political agenda, for example.

The best solution is to remove all, repeat ALL, admins. If you are truly interested in the goals stated in the wikipedia mission statement, if you are interested in truth -- not wikiality -- then that is the only thing that will give you that. For every other possible scenario involving admins you are compromising truth.

Anyone who trusts anything on an encyclopedia ruled by self-appointed experts deserves all that they get.

Anonymity, free speech, and freedom from wikinazis -- it's the path of truth.

Re:Keeping things Web 1.0

[Rakishi]

Interesting, you try to put value on his argument based on the fact that it's a popular blog. So much so that you mention it in your post. You want us to value his words not because they are right in their own sense but because of the person who wrote them (ie: popularity of a person makes what he says true).

Your very own post highlights why some people prefer anonymity online, it makes everyone equal and prevent counter-productive social safeties (ie: popularity) from clouding the arguments in play.

I already wrote in another post why his view on point 3 is silly. Apparently he doesn't understand the issue at hand or the reasons people do this, he doesn't even try to understand. Either that or he does understand it but purposefully doesn't show the arguments for one side as that would make his own claim weaker. See if you to understand an issue truly you have to be able to argue both sides, if you only portray one side you either don't understand the other side or are hiding it. In other words he's either ignorant or deceitful. Also his writing has an amazing lack of information content and argument value, just fluff (circuses and bread) to appease the public it seems.

Nonetheless you put value on his writing without understanding the issue yourself either simply because HE said it.

Re:Keeping things Web 1.0

[smilindog2000]

The reason I post as smilindog2000, rather than put my full name out there, is also not listed. My poorly thought-out opinions can be embarrassing, and I don't want it to rub off on my employer.

Anyway, I'm not allowed to be completely honest on Citizendium. I just tried to sign up for an account... it wont let me because my name is so common that someone else has already used it. This has been a problem for me since I started my career. The day I started working at National Semiconductor, fresh out of college, I was issued a subpoena that accused me of some serious wrongs, and told me that I was being sued for millions in damages. I had to call the lawyers and tell them they had the wrong guy. Just to add insult to injury, I shared a cube with a great then-young engineer, but the a-hole next door had just expanded his cube at our expense, and I had to crawl over my desk just to get into my chair. My chair had only 3 wheels, with the fourth missing, and the stuffing in the seat was long-gone, so my first task was rebuilding the damned thing. I was told I couldn't just go buy a chair, as it was against company policy (National was later sued into submission on this point, after some serious back injuries occurred). Later, while working at HP, another guy on the floor above me had the same name, and he had the obvious e-mail address that I should have had (first.last@hp.com). He was a serious a-hole who spammed the whole building with hate-mail, and I had a hard time being around co-workers simply because they thought I was him. My credit reports have been semi-trashed by at least three a-holes who happen to share my name. Retailers who get screwed will spam whatever credit report they can semi-match.

So... I seriously recommend making up a name that has never been used, and sticking with it :-) You can just call me Smilindog2000 in public. Will that work on Citizendium?

Re:Keeping things Web 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

...Just to add insult to injury, I shared a cube with a great then-young engineer, but the a-hole next door had just expanded his cube at our expense, and I had to crawl over my desk just to get into my chair. My chair had only 3 wheels, with the fourth missing, and the stuffing in the seat was long-gone, so my first task was rebuilding the damned thing. I was told I couldn't just go buy a chair, as it was against company policy...

...so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...

Wikipedia

[nlitement]

Compare both wikis' articles on "tennis":

Tennis is a sport played between either two players ("singles") or 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. Citizendium

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.

Re:Wikipedia

[jd]

Both encyclopedias would be wrong if that is the only definition, as that only defines one form of Tennis. There are actually multiple variants of the game - no great surprise given that it's actually quite an old sport. One of the problems with any "flat file" article within an encyclopedia is that it cannot possibly include all of the relevant context. It can only include a small fraction and refer/link to related information in the hope that the reader compiles all of the important links in their mind into one meta-article. This rarely happens - very few humans have the memory or time to create a world-view perspective on something, then eliminate the extraneous.

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.

Real Names

[Rakishi]

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).

Re:Real Names

[Ed Avis]

That's exactly the point. If you're not prepared to stand by your contribution under your real name, and have it be part of the public record that you wrote it, then you can't add it to Citizendium. (You can of course post on thousands of other websites such as this one.)

IMHO, using your real name isn't so much about hard accountability, having someone to sue, or other legalistic FUD. It's more about setting an appropriate atmosphere for discussion, where you remember that the Internet is a part of the real world rather than separate from it, and that online discussion is a conversation between real people and not avatars or cyber-personalities. You'd use your real name if you were contributing code to Linux, or writing a letter to a newspaper; contributing to an online knowledge base should be no different.

Perhaps in some Office Space corporate environment having an online presence could lose you a job. I think it is more likely to help you get one. When I get CVs through for possible new hires I like to Google the candidate's name and see what he has contributed online. Someone who is a total nonentity with zero relevant hits doesn't impress me much.

Re:Real Names

[mgrivich]

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. http://www.xkcd.com/137/

Re:Real Names

[Rakishi]

Oh joy, someone who can't understand an argument based on possibilities and sees the world as only black or white.

First of all I never said I'd get fired but that I may lose a potential job or a potential promotion or a potential networking ooprtunity. Those weeding out employee resumes google their names and who knows why they may not like someone.

I gain pretty much nothing from using my real name in many online situations. Nonetheless I may lose quite a bit by doing so. Or I may not but I'm slightly paranoid.

If you want to use your real name for something then you are free to do so right now. If you don't want to then you're free as well. That's how I prefer things.

Re:Real Names

[Attila Dimedici]

Uhhh... I can't help but wonder what your hobbies are, that you think some "idiot policeman" is going to throw you in jail for. Bicycling? Parcheesi? Stamp Collecting? I can easily imagine a police officer under certain circumstances deciding that someone whose hobby is playing D&D (or other FRPG) is guilty of a crime. Or to take another example, I could see a policeman going: "You go to Renaissance Faires in costume (correct terminology would be garb). You wear a sword as part of that costume. One of your neighbors was killed with a sword. You must be the killer." Never mind that the sword that you wear as part of your garb is a never sharpened western style sword and the murder weapon was a sharp katana. There are many innocent hobbies that are publicly perceived as being the province of freaks and potential criminals.

Re:Real Names

[jjohnson]

I see: because perfect accountability is impossible, no attempt at accountability can ever succeed, even partially. It's just not possible for there to a cumulative effect that raises the overall level somewhat, even if there exist failures of its accountability scheme.

Re:Real Names

[Reality Master 101]

My user name on Wikipedia (and Citizendium) is my real name. My first edits to Wikipedia were on neo-Nazis and Scientology.

Considering you can be put in jail for thinking the wrong thoughts in certain countries in Europe, I would be very, very careful what you write on those subjects.

This is not theoretical -- people can, and are, put in jail for writing the wrong things in supposedly free countries in Western Europe.

Re:Real Names

[Rakishi]

"Dangerous"? No I simply don't assume that people don't judge others for the most inane of reasons. We usually can't help it, how we perceive people depends on tons of essentially inane reasons. I support the war in Iraq, I oppose the war in Iraq, I support Bush, I oppose Bush, I support gun control, I oppose gun control and the same things on hundreds of other topics. Maybe you contribute to topics of competing companies? Maybe you contributed a lot to topics about bi-polar disease. Maybe it was bondage. Maybe it was pro-Palestinian topics. Did you edit that entry on LARPing? What about that one on furries (cue furries screaming about using that name for them)? Did you make a lot of gun related edits while living in a highly liberal area? Microsoft may not look too kindly on all those Linux edits.

See I try to be open minded which means if nothing else that I know at least some about a lot of sometimes odd areas. I'm not involved in many of them in any real way myself but I may know people who are or have stumbled upon it some other way. If you tell me you're a black polygamous homosexual fur suit wearer who loves bondage and supports themselves by prostitution, then I'd be amazed at you for being secure enough to tell me but not much else. Well not quite, I would always have that description attached when I think of you even if the topic isn't related. A lot of people would view someone quite negatively if they even had one of those characteristics.

A resume may be seen by many people and even more may influence your chances of promotion or networking opportunities. I don't need to work for such a person but simply be X degrees of association from him or her. These people may be perfectly pleasant and you wouldn't ever notice that little hidden bias unless you knew them quite well.

I admit that I am paranoid (not that much compared to some people) and that I may be wrong but that's my own bias. I have however seen first hand how people view certain people with disdain despite knowing little about them, people who otherwise are perfectly nice and rational. Likewise I have heard first hand what the government can do and what it can turn into in a single decade.

Re:Real Names

[McFadden]

Uhhh... I can't help but wonder what your hobbies are, that you think some "idiot policeman" is going to throw you in jail for.

How about going to watch soccer?

From the Observer (British Newspaper):

Tickets to a Manchester United game found during anti-terrorist raids sparked fears of a suicide attack on Old Trafford. But they were for an old match and had been kept as souvenirs by the suspects, who were fans of the club.

The revelation will lead to further criticism of the operation which led to the arrest of 10 people by armed Greater Manchester police in dawn raids last month. All have since been released without charge.

These men (I believe they were members of the British Iraqui Kurdish community) were arrested under suspicion of planning a terrorist attack on live television at a major British football (soccer) ground. Except they were just fans going to watch a game, and it turned out to be total bullshit.

Re:Real Names

[Rakishi]

It's more about setting an appropriate atmosphere for discussion, where you remember that the Internet is a part of the real world rather than separate from it, and that online discussion is a conversation between real people and not avatars or cyber-personalities. You assume that this makes a discussion better, I say it may make it worse. Historically a lot of writing has been anonymous or quasi-anonymous. Also there is reputation as within any single forum or discussion board or wiki (or across many in some cases) there are reputations attached to people's usernames. There is as a result accountability IF you value such a thing.

When I debate online I don't see names but only arguments. If I knew these people I couldn't help but be biased yet online I can't be. Likewise I don't need to triple think every thing I say to make sure I don't offend a particular person. As a result everyone is equal here, I have no reason to hold back or lie or not argue what I really think. I have no reason to hold back for fear that my actions in one context (discussion about say bondage) will negatively affect me in another context (job whose boss is say a conservative christian). I won't get fired or sued or sent to prison (well not with the same likelihood). Likewise what other people or me do outside a given context doesn't matter, someone being a high school drop out stripper doesn't matter if they know the subject absurdly well (and have demonstrated it).

Like I said people can't help but be biased, even if they try not to be they will perceive you differently depending on what they know about you. They may not even realize that they do.

I see real names as an ugly hack for accountability, using a more limited system (real life) instead of designing a proper way of doing what you want. You seem to want experts, a fluid way of defining (and levels of them) and maintaining experts. Instead you add a kludge system based on stuffing everything a person is into a single identity. You try to not define someone as a good source for a topic because of their history or knowledge but because others perceive all those biases attached to his name in a positive way. If Bill Gates was editing a topic on model airplanes do you think it would matter how much or little he knew on the topic or would it matter more that he is Bill Gates (and everything non-model airplane related attached to that, good or bad)?

We are social animals and have evolved a lot of inane irrational systems to help us cope with that. Instead of trying to find a way to bypass those limitations of evolution the idea seems to instead be to magnify them. Instead of knowledge alone mattering, now all the social attachments matter. Wikipedia is a mess because of all those things yet instead of trying to fix it the answer proposed is to make them even worse.

You'd use your real name if you were contributing code to Linux, or writing a letter to a newspaper; contributing to an online knowledge base should be no different. I may not use my real name for those things, it really depends on the subject in question and if I care.

When I get CVs through for possible new hires I like to Google the candidate's name and see what he has contributed online. Someone who is a total nonentity with zero relevant hits doesn't impress me much. My online real name identity is quite positive, lacking in recent activity but my field does not require me to maintain one.

And....

[djupedal]

Citizendium: Wikipedia

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 /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]

no, not yet anyway

[wizardforce]

Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."

That doesn't have any more of a chance than Slashdot doing that. The only thing that I can see causing the entirety of the "Web2.0" projects adopting such a system is through new restirctive laws passed by many governments across the world. Proably under the guise of preventing terrorism or some other nonsense.

Re: Wikipedia/Nupedia/Citizendium

[nil0lab]

... 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.

Re:"...year anniversary"

[mrami]

People started doing this after certain other people started using phrases like "two month anniversary". I tried to push the word "mensiversary", but everyone thought I was talking about menstrual poetry.

Who? What?

[allcar]

I'm afraid I had never heard of "Citizendium" until I RTFA. And that, it seems to me is the biggest problem that it faces: Wikipedia is ubiquitous, whilst Citizendium is obscure.
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.

Re:Who? What?

[cow_2001]

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.

Re:Who? What?

[interiot]

Heck, of the top 20 most viewed articles on Wikipedia, the following are missing from Citizendium:

• #3: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
• #4: Naruto
• #5: Guitar Hero III
• #9: Harry Potter
• #10: Halo 3
• #11: Transformers (film)
• #12: Heroes (TV series)
• #13: Vanessa Hudgens
• #14: Luciano Pavarotti
• #15: Bleach (manga)
• #17: 50 Cent
• #18: Sex positions
• #19: World Wrestling Entertainment
• #20: Sex (PC terms like homosexuality, AIDS, contraception, etc. are mentioned, but any sort of anatomy isn't there... possibly due to the family friendly policy)

Granted, popularity isn't the metric that academians should necessarily go by, but the avoidance of certain types of anatomy is a bit weird.

Web 2.0

[Chicken_Kickers]

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.

people's knowledge is shallow

[davejenkins]

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.

Myth debunkery

[Larry Sanger]

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!)

Re:Licence?

[MicktheMech]

For the love of God and all that is holy, why does every story have to be about licenses?

Oh please

[svunt]

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!)

You have built a hotel with a sign out front saying "NO FUCKING", and now there are bugger all guests. Now there's a surprise.

Re:Licence?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Because otherwise, how are people going to know how they can reuse the content?