You're missing my point entirely, NetEsq. If Jimmy knew three months ago that Essjay had lied to the community about being a tenured professor, etc., and then hired him and put him on the ArbComm, what does that say about Jimmy's judgment?
Surely you're not saying that it matters only if Essjay used "real credentials to win a debate." Doesn't it matter even more if Essjay used his credentials implicitly to rise through Wikipedia's ranks?
NetEsq writes: "...now that Jimbo has found out the extent of Essjay's deception -- i.e., not a simple case of pseudonymity..."
Wait a second here. Of course Jimbo knew that "Essjay" was not Essjay's real name, since "Essjay" isn't a person's name. The point is that, if Jimmy's company, Wikia, hired Essjay last December or January, then Essjay had to come clean then about the fact that he wasn't a tenured Ph.D. theologian guy after all. That's heavy-duty deception that Jimmy presumably had to have learned about then. Indeed, Jimmy admitted that he knew as much The New Yorker: what else was "I don't have a problem with it" refer to? All that Jimmy says he learned this morning is that Essjay used his false credentials to win debates on Wikipedia. And he couldn't be bothered to check whether his employee had done this? And isn't it obvious, in any case, that Essjay must have risen through the Wikipedia ranks faster partly on the strength of his credentials?
These are legitimate questions, not "cheap shots."
Jimmy has more questions to answer. He makes no attempt to explain several fundamental points that got people worked up in the first place. What did he mean in telling The New Yorker "I have no problem with" Essjay's duplicity? When did he learn of that duplicity? (I think it was last January, since that's when Essjay got on the Wikia payroll.) And then why did he ignore the obvious moral implications of that duplicity--to the point of giving him a job and even appointing him to Arbitration Committee--until now? Jimmy needs to answer these questions convincingly, if he can.
There's something utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic, about Jimmy telling The New Yorker that he doesn't have a problem with Essjay's lies, and by essentially honoring Essjay after his lies were exposed. As Blogworld quite rightly said, "By his [Jimmy's] actions or lack thereof... and [by] his words he is endorsing fraud." I've become increasingly disillusioned with Jimmy's behavior, but this I simply wouldn't have expected. It's one thing to revise history self-servingly. But this new incident seems self-destructive on a level beyond previous incidents. Doesn't Jimmy realize that this could well blow up in his face-that it could well be picked up by the news media and severely damage not only Wikipedia's reputation, but Wikia's bottom line (since Wikia is, still, Essjay's employer)? The media is already making some noise (the story broke yesterday) and it's likely only to get hotter. The media now loves a good Wikipedia scandal. Since this one has such a compelling narrative line, and a "you can't make this stuff up" quality to it, how can tech reporters resist? And how can respected observers of the scene then fail to draw some obvious conclusions, as the blogosphere is already doing in its usual vigorous way? Doesn't Jimmy know that this has the potential to be even more damaging to Wikipedia than the Seigenthaler situation, since it reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia?
(More on my blog...)
As it happens, we don't use MySQL; we use Postgres, courtesy Greg Sabino Mullane, and that is helping. We're using PHP of course because Mediawiki is written in PHP, and rewriting it in any other language would take a while.
No marketing campaign that I know of; I certainly don't have any special deals with or personal friends at Slashdot. There have been two CZ-related stories on Slashdot that I know of. Maybe they just find the idea intriguing, that's all.
We will be launching as soon as possible
on
Is Wikipedia Failing?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Hey, we badly want to be open to the world! But it's expensive!
I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present. Quite frankly we have been holding out for an infusion of funds for sixteen servers. It's clear now that we can launch with less than that, with a number that we can afford with our very limited present budget. So we'll be bravely forging ahead with an only temporarily adequate number of servers!
The Citizendium wiki will be launching for public read access as soon as (1) we get a few new servers set up (it'll be a small enough number to be within our budget), and (2) we make a few technical changes (e.g., change the "Citizendium Pilot" namespace to "Citizendium"; and lots of other stuff).
Now, when will that be? Not sure; now it's a matter of getting and setting up the equipment and making those software changes, and it's impossible to predict how long it will take to do this, as we are mostly relying on volunteers (and one part-time contracter) to work on our software. But on the order of weeks, not months. If you want to help us with the software stuff, I bow to your geekiness and invite you to our forge.
You don't have to be an employee to be a shill. He treats your elitist, bureaucratic, censorious, top-down "collaborative" effort like it's the best damned thing since sliced bread.
The amount of sheer prejudice in the above rant is extremely revealing. You simply cannot conceive of a wiki with gentle expert oversight that is not "elitist, bureaucratic, [and] censorious." That's what's called a lack of imagination.
One of the wonderful things about CZ that I'm observing is the collegiality involved--among everyone, of course, not just editors. The sort of shrill, knee-jerk reaction the above so well illustrates, which is so common in so many Web communities (including/. and WP), is blissfully out of place on CZ.
Citizendium is doomed to never achieve critical mass, as any elitist endeavor in the Open Age never does.
Wishful thinking. If you simply take the time to look at Recent Changes on CZ, you'll see that one might very well make the case that we have already reached critical mass. We're growing very handily and this even while we're still a registered users-only pilot project.
Two points. First, Wikipedians will be too damn proud to replace their own hard work with the improved versions that CZ creates. Second, since we have unforked Wikipedia, there is an excellent chance that we will be using a CC license for all our new, non-WP-sourced articles. You may then debate among yourselves whether WP can then use those articles.
I am extremely puzzled why people think the author of TFA was "shilling for CZ." I'd never met him in my life when he came to us and started asking us questions, saying he was writing an article about us for/. He's working for/. or so he said--not for us.
Wikipedia will always, by nature, be more reactive to world events than Citizendium. Minutes after a major event occurs, the related wikis are updated. Once articles have been tied down and relegated to an editor, it falls to the editor to react to changes in content relevance.
Completely wrong and reflects an ignorance of what CZ is doing. Articles are not, they are in no way, "tied down and relegated to an editor." When we say that editors and authors work shoulder-to-shoulder on the website, we mean it! If you actually come to the wiki and do some work, you will find that it is very much like Wikipedia--only with a higher proportion of well-educated people, who are using their own real names, and who behave themselves like adults instead of self-important 17-year-olds. Editors have two main official roles: approve articles, and articulate article plans and make decisions about questions of controversy as they arise. Neither of these roles puts the kibosh on very active article development. They also have a helpful unofficial role of, well, showing the way--which they do, and which no one really credibly does on WP, in my opinion.
Therefore, I fully expect CZ's news backgrounder articles to be just as dynamic as, and probably considerably higher in quality than, WP's articles on the same topics--obviously, after we have grown some more. There is absolutely no reason at all that we cannot be just as dynamic as Wikipedia.
Also, we don't "lock down" articles. TFA is incorrect on this point. If you want to read our stable version of "Biology" (and you've joined the pilot project), then go here: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology If you want to work on the latest version of that article, in the same dynamic way you work on any wiki article, go here: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology/Draft
I'm also talking to a professional journalist, a retired major network producer; we're strongly considering the possibility of launching a wiki news summary project soon.
The parent comment here has several facts wrong. The Citizendium fosters collaboration in a very similar way to Wikipedia. It's a wiki. We use the same software and anyone can edit any page at any time (contrary to something TFA says)--unlike Wikipedia. Wikipedia locks down all sorts of pages. Since we will have slightly tighter controls on who joins the project, and because we take a no-nonsense approach to rules enforcement (for one thing, we don't have a rule that says "Ignore all rules"), we can afford to let any CZ author or editor work on any article. It's true that one cannot edit approved (stable) versions of articles, but one can edit the "/draft" page attached to that article. That's already happened in several cases with our approved articles.
CZ fills a need that Wikipedia does not. For this and other reasons, I'm increasingly optimistic about our prospects. I began the project as officially skeptical. I'm now in the "cautiously optimistic" category.
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.
More trollishly false comments here. "Sanger was paid by Wales to edit Nupedia, and when Wales decided to shift focus to Wikipedia, Sanger's job became editing Wikipedia." I had both jobs in 2001.
"The instant he stopped being paid, he left and never returned---" Totally false. I worked a full month without any pay at all. And I did return, briefly on the wiki.
"he even unsubscribed from all the mailing lists," Please stop lying, or saying what you want to be true without actually knowing anything about the subject. If you look at the archives from 2002 you will see I was quite an active participant in spring and fall of 2002. I made my permanent break with Wikipedia at the beginning of 2003, nearly a year after my resignation.
"As far as I can tell he's still bitter about being fired or something," Not in the slightest. That's the first I've heard that. Here's an idea: you could take seriously what I actually say about why I left, since, in case you didn't notice, I've explained it many times.
"because he has shown absolutely zero interest in involving himself with Wikipedia or providing constructive feedback or suggestions since the day he stopped being paid to do so." My Kuro5hin article and other writings are nothing if not constructive feedback, of course. Perhaps you don't regard it as constructive, but I do.
"Nobody prevented him from signing up to the mailing lists or making proposals, but he chose not to." Simply because I would constantly be cleaning the augean stables, as I am doing here with you.
The parent comment here is wrong in every single statement it makes. Sometimes I really wonder how people get such things into their heads--when, I suppose, it's pretty obvious, it's just wishful thinking. They don't want even to consider the possibility that the very person who came up with the system for Wikipedia now criticizes some aspects of that system.
"Sanger has been skeptical from the beginning of letting ordinary folk edit an encyclopedia." Complete and utter rubbish. I was strongly in favor of letting ordinary people write articles on Nupedia, and so of course by extension also on Wikipedia! That was the whole idea of Wikipedia!
"Wales came up with the idea of letting anyone edit an encyclopedia as an experiment to sit alongside Nupedia," Jimmy and I both were well agreed that there needed to be another project to supplement Nupedia. I don't know who had the idea first. Since I was the point man on Bomis' encyclopedia projects, it was probably me, not Jimmy.
"and Sanger has admitted that this was not his idea, and that he didn't particularly promote it." Again, totally and completely false--where do you get this stuff? What I have said is that it was Jimmy's idea to create a free encyclopedia anyone could edit. That was the idea for Nupedia. I was the originator of the idea for, and many of the core policies of, Wikipedia. Not Jimmy. This was the official line of Wikipedia itself until 2004, you know, if you look at the archives. Jimmy was busy being CEO of Bomis while I started Nupedia and then Wikipedia for Bomis. That was my job. Jimmy was, as he is now, a very hands-off manager and pretty much said yes to whatever I suggested, with only a few exceptions.
"He does appear to have suggested the specific use of wiki software for the experiment, although Wales disputes that Sanger was the first one to suggest wikis to him." But Jimmy never told anyone that (certainly not me) until 2005. And Jimmy himself said the idea to use wiki software was mine, back in 2001.
"Sanger was then hired as an editor of sorts for Wikipedia, and stopped contributing to it once he stopped being paid to do so." This is confused as well. I was already working as editor-in-chief of Nupedia. Wikipedia was my responsibility because I was Bomis' encyclopedia guy, and because I proposed it and drove it. Anyone who tells you differently wasn't there, or is lying.
Hi Axel, it's a pleasure to hear from you, it's been a long time indeed. (Axel and I worked together on Wikipedia quite a bit in its first year. He's a perfect example of an "expert" type who is comfortable working in a wiki environment.) The question you raise is just the sort of thing we would talk about on Citizendium-policy. My view, which I could be disabused of, is that the process of publishing stable versions of articles should not be part of the wiki itself, but a separate process altogether. The simplest way forward is to put the approval on the article itself, which will then raise the quality bar and level of attention given to the article (I think--well, that does happen with featured articles on WP after all).
One thing that I think a lot of Wikipedians have forgotten, or never learned, since I left, is that Wikipedia works as well as it does because it is simple. There has been way too much feature creep. Keep the thing the way it is, and if you want to publish, then come up with a system specifically designed for publishing. Use the right (and simplest effective) tool for the job. Don't try to build everything into the wiki software.
Again, just my view, which needs debate and I could easily change my mind on the particular question you raise.
I'm not sure how complicated the system is. Probably not more complicated than Wikipedia's current system, in fact. Anyway, there will not be hard-wired "privileges" in the wiki. Everyone will have all the same privileges, as far as the software is concerned (except for constables who will have "administrator"-type privileges). There will be a shared understanding, however, that when an expert is writing about his area(s) of expertise, he is (among) the ranking member(s) and may make final decisions when "final decisions" need to be made. This does not mean that editors may lord it over everyone, squat on articles, fail to engage in debate, etc. They won't have to put up with as much c**p, but they will have to put up with some--in the interests of keeping the project genuinely collaborative and open. Of course, when two experts land on a page and proceed to disagree, the escalation path is different. I propose that a vote of some collection of editors in the relevant discipline decides the matter, but I'm not wedded to that solution.
Whether it can work the way I describe, we won't know until we try. What I am fairly confident of is that we can eventually with creativity find and settle on some set of policies, not hard-wired into the software (that inevitably creates bottlenecks and inefficiencies) but soc-wired into the community, that will work. If you're interested in discussing such matters then join Citizendium-policy.
They cannot. They can go to Wikipedia, import the Citizendium article, and work there. That's why I think it's important that Wikipedia stay in business no matter how successful the Citizendium becomes.
First, thank you, Slashdot, for giving this story your usual lively attention. I've commented in several places above.
Second, if you're interested, may I suggest (maybe after you look at the long or short version of the introductory essay and/or the FAQ) that you sign up to a project mailing list, and especially (since there are so many geeks reading this) the Citizendium-tools list?
You see, I have this crazily optimistic deadline of September 30 for actually setting up the servers and wiki. I can set up and manage a wiki myself that doesn't get slammed a lot, but I know I can't set up Citizendium's wiki (and server(s)). So I need your expert advice!
Well, we'll use virtually the same neutrality policy (not surprising since I drafted it for Wikipedia). If Michael Moore starts banging away at the George W. Bush article, rest assured there will be other experts (wait...MM is an expert?) ready to pounce. Or, if there aren't, people who disagree with Moore will go and ask Republican (or at least not so left-leaning) expert types (well, if they can be found!) to participate.
Not saying you haven't put your finger on a problem. If the only available expert on a specific topic is an ideologue, that puts the authors working on the article in a tough spot. They need some recourse. Well, there will be. There will be subject area workgroups they can appeal to, and then cite the neutrality policy.
Citizendium couldn't work without being open. That's why it will be open. The only ways in which it will be any more closed than Wikipedia are: (1) you'll have to use your own real name (on the honor principle); (2) you'll have to support the project charter and thus defer to the judgment of editors when necessary. Do those policies make the project somehow closed?
Nope. Just like Wikipedia, anyone will be able to come to a page, decide they don't like this page, and start editing away. We can't use the slogan "You can edit this page right now" (I think I came up with that...) but we'll be able to say "You can be editing this page in one minute."
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you're not saying that it matters only if Essjay used "real credentials to win a debate." Doesn't it matter even more if Essjay used his credentials implicitly to rise through Wikipedia's ranks?
Wait a second here. Of course Jimbo knew that "Essjay" was not Essjay's real name, since "Essjay" isn't a person's name. The point is that, if Jimmy's company, Wikia, hired Essjay last December or January, then Essjay had to come clean then about the fact that he wasn't a tenured Ph.D. theologian guy after all. That's heavy-duty deception that Jimmy presumably had to have learned about then. Indeed, Jimmy admitted that he knew as much The New Yorker: what else was "I don't have a problem with it" refer to? All that Jimmy says he learned this morning is that Essjay used his false credentials to win debates on Wikipedia. And he couldn't be bothered to check whether his employee had done this? And isn't it obvious, in any case, that Essjay must have risen through the Wikipedia ranks faster partly on the strength of his credentials?
These are legitimate questions, not "cheap shots."
Jimmy has more questions to answer. He makes no attempt to explain several fundamental points that got people worked up in the first place. What did he mean in telling The New Yorker "I have no problem with" Essjay's duplicity? When did he learn of that duplicity? (I think it was last January, since that's when Essjay got on the Wikia payroll.) And then why did he ignore the obvious moral implications of that duplicity--to the point of giving him a job and even appointing him to Arbitration Committee--until now? Jimmy needs to answer these questions convincingly, if he can.
There's something utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic, about Jimmy telling The New Yorker that he doesn't have a problem with Essjay's lies, and by essentially honoring Essjay after his lies were exposed. As Blogworld quite rightly said, "By his [Jimmy's] actions or lack thereof ... and [by] his words he is endorsing fraud." I've become increasingly disillusioned with Jimmy's behavior, but this I simply wouldn't have expected. It's one thing to revise history self-servingly. But this new incident seems self-destructive on a level beyond previous incidents. Doesn't Jimmy realize that this could well blow up in his face-that it could well be picked up by the news media and severely damage not only Wikipedia's reputation, but Wikia's bottom line (since Wikia is, still, Essjay's employer)? The media is already making some noise (the story broke yesterday) and it's likely only to get hotter. The media now loves a good Wikipedia scandal. Since this one has such a compelling narrative line, and a "you can't make this stuff up" quality to it, how can tech reporters resist? And how can respected observers of the scene then fail to draw some obvious conclusions, as the blogosphere is already doing in its usual vigorous way? Doesn't Jimmy know that this has the potential to be even more damaging to Wikipedia than the Seigenthaler situation, since it reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia?
(More on my blog...)
Updated approved version of "Biology" just uploaded (accessible from the main page).
As it happens, we don't use MySQL; we use Postgres, courtesy Greg Sabino Mullane, and that is helping. We're using PHP of course because Mediawiki is written in PHP, and rewriting it in any other language would take a while.
No marketing campaign that I know of; I certainly don't have any special deals with or personal friends at Slashdot. There have been two CZ-related stories on Slashdot that I know of. Maybe they just find the idea intriguing, that's all.
Hey, we badly want to be open to the world! But it's expensive!
I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present. Quite frankly we have been holding out for an infusion of funds for sixteen servers. It's clear now that we can launch with less than that, with a number that we can afford with our very limited present budget. So we'll be bravely forging ahead with an only temporarily adequate number of servers!
The Citizendium wiki will be launching for public read access as soon as (1) we get a few new servers set up (it'll be a small enough number to be within our budget), and (2) we make a few technical changes (e.g., change the "Citizendium Pilot" namespace to "Citizendium"; and lots of other stuff).
Now, when will that be? Not sure; now it's a matter of getting and setting up the equipment and making those software changes, and it's impossible to predict how long it will take to do this, as we are mostly relying on volunteers (and one part-time contracter) to work on our software. But on the order of weeks, not months. If you want to help us with the software stuff, I bow to your geekiness and invite you to our forge.
Hope that clarifies our situation anyway.
You don't have to be an employee to be a shill. He treats your elitist, bureaucratic, censorious, top-down "collaborative" effort like it's the best damned thing since sliced bread.
/. and WP), is blissfully out of place on CZ.
The amount of sheer prejudice in the above rant is extremely revealing. You simply cannot conceive of a wiki with gentle expert oversight that is not "elitist, bureaucratic, [and] censorious." That's what's called a lack of imagination.
One of the wonderful things about CZ that I'm observing is the collegiality involved--among everyone, of course, not just editors. The sort of shrill, knee-jerk reaction the above so well illustrates, which is so common in so many Web communities (including
Citizendium is doomed to never achieve critical mass, as any elitist endeavor in the Open Age never does.
Wishful thinking. If you simply take the time to look at Recent Changes on CZ, you'll see that one might very well make the case that we have already reached critical mass. We're growing very handily and this even while we're still a registered users-only pilot project.
Two points. First, Wikipedians will be too damn proud to replace their own hard work with the improved versions that CZ creates. Second, since we have unforked Wikipedia, there is an excellent chance that we will be using a CC license for all our new, non-WP-sourced articles. You may then debate among yourselves whether WP can then use those articles.
I am extremely puzzled why people think the author of TFA was "shilling for CZ." I'd never met him in my life when he came to us and started asking us questions, saying he was writing an article about us for /. He's working for /. or so he said--not for us.
Wikipedia will always, by nature, be more reactive to world events than Citizendium. Minutes after a major event occurs, the related wikis are updated. Once articles have been tied down and relegated to an editor, it falls to the editor to react to changes in content relevance.
Completely wrong and reflects an ignorance of what CZ is doing. Articles are not, they are in no way, "tied down and relegated to an editor." When we say that editors and authors work shoulder-to-shoulder on the website, we mean it! If you actually come to the wiki and do some work, you will find that it is very much like Wikipedia--only with a higher proportion of well-educated people, who are using their own real names, and who behave themselves like adults instead of self-important 17-year-olds. Editors have two main official roles: approve articles, and articulate article plans and make decisions about questions of controversy as they arise. Neither of these roles puts the kibosh on very active article development. They also have a helpful unofficial role of, well, showing the way--which they do, and which no one really credibly does on WP, in my opinion.
Therefore, I fully expect CZ's news backgrounder articles to be just as dynamic as, and probably considerably higher in quality than, WP's articles on the same topics--obviously, after we have grown some more. There is absolutely no reason at all that we cannot be just as dynamic as Wikipedia.
Also, we don't "lock down" articles. TFA is incorrect on this point. If you want to read our stable version of "Biology" (and you've joined the pilot project), then go here: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology If you want to work on the latest version of that article, in the same dynamic way you work on any wiki article, go here: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology/Draft
I'm also talking to a professional journalist, a retired major network producer; we're strongly considering the possibility of launching a wiki news summary project soon.
The parent comment here has several facts wrong. The Citizendium fosters collaboration in a very similar way to Wikipedia. It's a wiki. We use the same software and anyone can edit any page at any time (contrary to something TFA says)--unlike Wikipedia. Wikipedia locks down all sorts of pages. Since we will have slightly tighter controls on who joins the project, and because we take a no-nonsense approach to rules enforcement (for one thing, we don't have a rule that says "Ignore all rules"), we can afford to let any CZ author or editor work on any article. It's true that one cannot edit approved (stable) versions of articles, but one can edit the "/draft" page attached to that article. That's already happened in several cases with our approved articles.
CZ fills a need that Wikipedia does not. For this and other reasons, I'm increasingly optimistic about our prospects. I began the project as officially skeptical. I'm now in the "cautiously optimistic" category.
"It doesn't sound like a baby word (Yahoo, Google, Wiki, EBay)." That's a bad thing? Besides: "Citi."
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.
"The instant he stopped being paid, he left and never returned---" Totally false. I worked a full month without any pay at all. And I did return, briefly on the wiki.
"he even unsubscribed from all the mailing lists," Please stop lying, or saying what you want to be true without actually knowing anything about the subject. If you look at the archives from 2002 you will see I was quite an active participant in spring and fall of 2002. I made my permanent break with Wikipedia at the beginning of 2003, nearly a year after my resignation. "As far as I can tell he's still bitter about being fired or something," Not in the slightest. That's the first I've heard that. Here's an idea: you could take seriously what I actually say about why I left, since, in case you didn't notice, I've explained it many times. "because he has shown absolutely zero interest in involving himself with Wikipedia or providing constructive feedback or suggestions since the day he stopped being paid to do so." My Kuro5hin article and other writings are nothing if not constructive feedback, of course. Perhaps you don't regard it as constructive, but I do. "Nobody prevented him from signing up to the mailing lists or making proposals, but he chose not to." Simply because I would constantly be cleaning the augean stables, as I am doing here with you.
"Sanger has been skeptical from the beginning of letting ordinary folk edit an encyclopedia." Complete and utter rubbish. I was strongly in favor of letting ordinary people write articles on Nupedia, and so of course by extension also on Wikipedia! That was the whole idea of Wikipedia!
"Wales came up with the idea of letting anyone edit an encyclopedia as an experiment to sit alongside Nupedia," Jimmy and I both were well agreed that there needed to be another project to supplement Nupedia. I don't know who had the idea first. Since I was the point man on Bomis' encyclopedia projects, it was probably me, not Jimmy.
"and Sanger has admitted that this was not his idea, and that he didn't particularly promote it." Again, totally and completely false--where do you get this stuff? What I have said is that it was Jimmy's idea to create a free encyclopedia anyone could edit. That was the idea for Nupedia. I was the originator of the idea for, and many of the core policies of, Wikipedia. Not Jimmy. This was the official line of Wikipedia itself until 2004, you know, if you look at the archives. Jimmy was busy being CEO of Bomis while I started Nupedia and then Wikipedia for Bomis. That was my job. Jimmy was, as he is now, a very hands-off manager and pretty much said yes to whatever I suggested, with only a few exceptions.
"He does appear to have suggested the specific use of wiki software for the experiment, although Wales disputes that Sanger was the first one to suggest wikis to him." But Jimmy never told anyone that (certainly not me) until 2005. And Jimmy himself said the idea to use wiki software was mine, back in 2001.
"Sanger was then hired as an editor of sorts for Wikipedia, and stopped contributing to it once he stopped being paid to do so." This is confused as well. I was already working as editor-in-chief of Nupedia. Wikipedia was my responsibility because I was Bomis' encyclopedia guy, and because I proposed it and drove it. Anyone who tells you differently wasn't there, or is lying.
One thing that I think a lot of Wikipedians have forgotten, or never learned, since I left, is that Wikipedia works as well as it does because it is simple. There has been way too much feature creep. Keep the thing the way it is, and if you want to publish, then come up with a system specifically designed for publishing. Use the right (and simplest effective) tool for the job. Don't try to build everything into the wiki software.
Again, just my view, which needs debate and I could easily change my mind on the particular question you raise.
Whether it can work the way I describe, we won't know until we try. What I am fairly confident of is that we can eventually with creativity find and settle on some set of policies, not hard-wired into the software (that inevitably creates bottlenecks and inefficiencies) but soc-wired into the community, that will work. If you're interested in discussing such matters then join Citizendium-policy.
They cannot. They can go to Wikipedia, import the Citizendium article, and work there. That's why I think it's important that Wikipedia stay in business no matter how successful the Citizendium becomes.
Second, if you're interested, may I suggest (maybe after you look at the long or short version of the introductory essay and/or the FAQ) that you sign up to a project mailing list, and especially (since there are so many geeks reading this) the Citizendium-tools list?
You see, I have this crazily optimistic deadline of September 30 for actually setting up the servers and wiki. I can set up and manage a wiki myself that doesn't get slammed a lot, but I know I can't set up Citizendium's wiki (and server(s)). So I need your expert advice!
I am looking for advice on this issue. I gathered from an acquaintance that this is a solved problem, but I wasn't entirely convinced by what he said.
Not saying you haven't put your finger on a problem. If the only available expert on a specific topic is an ideologue, that puts the authors working on the article in a tough spot. They need some recourse. Well, there will be. There will be subject area workgroups they can appeal to, and then cite the neutrality policy.
One thing Jimmy Wales has done right is not to buckle under to the Chinese government on censorship. I completely support that policy.
Nope. Just like Wikipedia, anyone will be able to come to a page, decide they don't like this page, and start editing away. We can't use the slogan "You can edit this page right now" (I think I came up with that...) but we'll be able to say "You can be editing this page in one minute."
Fast enough for openness.