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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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?

[ta bu shi da yu]

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