Transparency in contradistinction to authority? I don't see the tension. Why isn't it possible to have a resource both transparent and authoritative? But anyway, the Citizendium won't claim authoritativeness.
"Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed 'facts', when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process." Just because something is "based on authority," it can't have been produced by a wiki process? CZ is going to be wiki of which expert editors have gentle, loose guidance.
"No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information." Precisely why can't experts have a key role in that process?
"The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name)"
So's "Wikipedia," another of my unfortunate coinages, apparently.
"threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of 'experts' (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to 'experts' is a huge step back." (I think you mean "closing it to all but 'experts'...") But CZ will not close the project to the general public. It's the Citizendium for a reason. The idea is to give the public that wants to work under the gentle guidance of experts a venue to do so.
"It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and 'forking' it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?" The big OSS projects all have groups of senior developers who weed through the submissions from the rank-and-file. Why doesn't anyone scream bloody murder about that? And how is that substantially different from letting editors make decisions when content disputes arise, and labelling some articles "approved"? It's just completely wrong to say that CZ is in any sense "closed source."
"If it's a reputation or moderation system, it might not be bad." None of the above. We'll have a list of objective credentials (degrees, number of publications in peer-reviewed journals, academic or senior research posts, etc.) for different disciplines, and let the themselves determine whether they are editors. Then they post the evidence of their qualification on their user page and proceed to do their (generally very benign) editor stuff. Everyone may consult the list of credentials and the cited qualifications.
The nice thing about this proposal (which I can't take credit for, by the way) is that it is relatively objective, i.e., not open to the politicizable individual judgment found in, for example, academic tenure committees. In a hugely distributed worldwide project like this, it's best to avoid the possibility of politicization. We will have to have a review workgroup of some kind, though, for oversight--to let people in who don't have the credentials but obviously have the ability, and to eject people who have the credentials but don't have the ability.
Besides, this sort of self-assignment seems somehow very well in keeping with the wiki way.
This is interesting, but upon analysis, not persuasive: "if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it."
It's going to be a progressive or gradual fork, which means that articles people haven't worked on in the Citizendium will be refreshed on a regular basis with the latest Wikipedia article. So, for the articles that aren't being worked on by CZ, the CZ copy will benefit from whatever WP work is done.
Eventually, who knows, maybe we'll change the color of links to pages that have been changed by CZ, so that people know to maintain and work on those copies (on CZ) more carefully. In the long run it'll be like a game: how many Wikipedia articles have you cleaned up and substantially improved? Here's my list...
We might have a rule, too: don't edit a WP-originated article unless you make some very substantial changes. Otherwise, if you change too little, then the CZ copy might become "stale," i.e., substantially worse than the corresponding WP article.
Generally, the number of articles from WP edited by CZians will be proportionate to the number of CZians. There's no reason to think we'll bite off more than we can chew.
More from the parent post: "Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census. A random article browsed there will be with a very high likelyhood just a copy of the wiki article." The former does not logically follow from the latter. Since the unchanged articles will be copies of Wikipedia articles, if the articles that CZ has worked on are better than the corresponding WP articles (and that's the hope), then the CZ will at least be better than WP to that extent. That's nothing to sneeze at, is it?
Finally: "So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user." Please, rtfw. Besides, we aren't going to try to make claims about reliability; our claims will be even more modest than Wikipedia's. We're going to call it a compendium, not an encyclopedia. We won't vouch for anything, even for the articles that editors have placed "approved" tags on.
Another project, the Digital Universe Encyclopedia (of which the also wiki-based Encyclopedia of Earth, not yet publicly launched, is the first installment), can have the fun of actually officially approving and "publishing" advanced-version CZ articles (if they want to, and if licensing doesn't get in the way).
Well, it will run MediaWiki, and editors will be expected to work shoulder-to-shoulder with authors. The process I describe in the proposal is of a bottom-up, bazaar type process. It just has people with special rights in the social system. Why shouldn't this be called a wiki?
According to my proposal, only people who arrive on the wiki and claim to be editors have to give a CV, or link to information that constitutes evidence of their credentials. See this discussion for more. For everyone else (called authors), it will be recommended but not required.
Also, if you read the FAQ (OK, I know it's long), you'll see that there is too a plan to solve the "problem" of organizing work via mailing lists. Citizendium will be a wiki! The hope and plan is to have the wiki and whatever network of servers might be necessary set up by Sept. 30. I hope we'll be able to attract support for this from any of a number of sources.
I'll be very curious myself to see what sort of uptake this has among academics and scientists. As a natural skeptic myself, I don't know if it will work. But I think they'll probably have a more active interest than you had in Wikipedia precisely because they're empowered to make content decisions about their areas of expertise.
First, you are 100% on the money when you say that Wikipedia and the DU will occupy different niches. Vive Wikipedia and vive la differance!
Second, again, it's incorrect to say that the DU encyclopedia (which will be just one part of the DU) will be "simply an online traditional encyclopedia." It will be edited using a wiki, and have other groovy, but quite nontraditional, features. And, unlike a traditional encyclopedia, it will invite edits from the public--that portion of the public that is comfortable working under the direction of experts. But frankly, I think that's a big portion of the sort of people otherwise inclined to work on Wikipedia. When I was a college student, I'm sure I would have jumped at the chance to work on a collaborative project under the direct supervision of my professors. It would have been a great opportunity. So, anyway, the DU will offer just such an opportunity.
"And I bet the average article will contain 3 errors per entry just like Encyclopedia Britannica which has expert reviewers as well."
Why assume that? Basically, we're going to use a big distributed (souped-up) wiki, just like Wikipedia. It'll just be run by experts. Unlike EB, the DU encyclopedia will have many expert eyes running over it. If an expert was able to catch a mistake for the Nature study article, the same sort of expert will catch mistakes in the DU articles!
I think the DU encyclopedia can aim at 100% accuracy in representing expert opinion. Of course, it can't aim any higher than that--I mean, all it can do is represent expert opinion. And then hope that that approximates the truth.
Look, the reasons for the failure of Nupedia are actually complex, and hardly anyone who likes to flog the Nupedia horse understands them. If you want my full perspective, see my memoir. Among other things, you'll learn that Bomis had almost no money to pay for anything other than my salary. The financial situation at ManyOne and the DU is quite different. Also, Nupedia was started by just one guy--me--doing all the organizational work. (I did have a helper for a while, though.) And I was a nobody working on a project no one had ever heard of. The situation now is totally different. People have heard of Jane Goodall, Robert Corell, Joe Firmage, and me, and there are a lot more than one guy at work on the project. Suffice it to say that our profile is higher. Finally, boy have we ever learned from the mistake of Nupedia's overly complex system. The systems set up for the DU will be simple and based on experience--including that of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
This is really a practical question. Coalitions of professional, academic, and other expert organizations and highly peer-respected individuals will be in charge of matters of content and the selection of Stewards. So, for example, it is up to the Environmental Information Coalition to decide who is a Steward for the Earth Portal. They determine what their own standards are; but so far anyway, the leaders of the portal--the Stewards--really do have to be well respected in their fields to be involved.
But bear in mind, please: that doesn't mean, of course, that many other people can't be very active and have a say.
Here's a slogan for you: expert leadership doesn't mean only experts get to play.
Sorry to say that the statements here are pretty much uniformly incorrect. The DU's wiki-based encyclopedia will be licensed by an open content license (very probably some variant of a Creative Commons license) and so, free. Also, according to the plan I've helped develop, the public will be able to edit the encyclopedia if they use their own real names and if they behave within guidelines of civility they agree to in advance. In other respects, it will be very much like Wikipedia: once you're in the system, if you want to edit an article, go right ahead. Finally, since it will be wiki-based, on what possible grounds do you claim that it will be edited according to "the old model of encyclopedia authoring"?
I'm just going to correct some items of fact in some of the posts here.
"So is it an encyclopedia? Or a new search engine?" Neither, exclusively. It will be a comprehensive web portal that will include an encyclopedia. It has been loudly billed as an encyclopedia (not by us) for reasons that might be obvious. But it will be more than that.
"...someone can actually sue a corporation with money that has a static location..." Well, the Digital Universe Foundation has filed for nonprofit status, so it's a little misleading to call it a corporation. But you're right that it will have a static location. Or rather, several static locations, because the so-called information coalitions (each devoted to a different branch of knowledge) will be more or less independent of the DU.
Just a correction: I did not raise $10 million for new Stewards, as The Register quite absurdly reported. Rather, something like that is the amount that mainly Joe Firmage raised (or himself gave) toward the development of the platform. Moreover, I am working as just one member of pretty big team; it's hardly just my project. Please, please, wait a couple of weeks and we will be in a position to talk a lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
"Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed 'facts', when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process." Just because something is "based on authority," it can't have been produced by a wiki process? CZ is going to be wiki of which expert editors have gentle, loose guidance.
"No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information." Precisely why can't experts have a key role in that process?
"The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name)"
So's "Wikipedia," another of my unfortunate coinages, apparently.
"threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of 'experts' (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to 'experts' is a huge step back." (I think you mean "closing it to all but 'experts'...") But CZ will not close the project to the general public. It's the Citizendium for a reason. The idea is to give the public that wants to work under the gentle guidance of experts a venue to do so.
"It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and 'forking' it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?" The big OSS projects all have groups of senior developers who weed through the submissions from the rank-and-file. Why doesn't anyone scream bloody murder about that? And how is that substantially different from letting editors make decisions when content disputes arise, and labelling some articles "approved"? It's just completely wrong to say that CZ is in any sense "closed source."
The nice thing about this proposal (which I can't take credit for, by the way) is that it is relatively objective, i.e., not open to the politicizable individual judgment found in, for example, academic tenure committees. In a hugely distributed worldwide project like this, it's best to avoid the possibility of politicization. We will have to have a review workgroup of some kind, though, for oversight--to let people in who don't have the credentials but obviously have the ability, and to eject people who have the credentials but don't have the ability.
Besides, this sort of self-assignment seems somehow very well in keeping with the wiki way.
It's going to be a progressive or gradual fork, which means that articles people haven't worked on in the Citizendium will be refreshed on a regular basis with the latest Wikipedia article. So, for the articles that aren't being worked on by CZ, the CZ copy will benefit from whatever WP work is done.
Eventually, who knows, maybe we'll change the color of links to pages that have been changed by CZ, so that people know to maintain and work on those copies (on CZ) more carefully. In the long run it'll be like a game: how many Wikipedia articles have you cleaned up and substantially improved? Here's my list...
We might have a rule, too: don't edit a WP-originated article unless you make some very substantial changes. Otherwise, if you change too little, then the CZ copy might become "stale," i.e., substantially worse than the corresponding WP article.
Generally, the number of articles from WP edited by CZians will be proportionate to the number of CZians. There's no reason to think we'll bite off more than we can chew.
More from the parent post: "Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census. A random article browsed there will be with a very high likelyhood just a copy of the wiki article." The former does not logically follow from the latter. Since the unchanged articles will be copies of Wikipedia articles, if the articles that CZ has worked on are better than the corresponding WP articles (and that's the hope), then the CZ will at least be better than WP to that extent. That's nothing to sneeze at, is it?
Finally: "So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user." Please, rtfw. Besides, we aren't going to try to make claims about reliability; our claims will be even more modest than Wikipedia's. We're going to call it a compendium, not an encyclopedia. We won't vouch for anything, even for the articles that editors have placed "approved" tags on.
Another project, the Digital Universe Encyclopedia (of which the also wiki-based Encyclopedia of Earth, not yet publicly launched, is the first installment), can have the fun of actually officially approving and "publishing" advanced-version CZ articles (if they want to, and if licensing doesn't get in the way).
Well, it will run MediaWiki, and editors will be expected to work shoulder-to-shoulder with authors. The process I describe in the proposal is of a bottom-up, bazaar type process. It just has people with special rights in the social system. Why shouldn't this be called a wiki?
According to my proposal, only people who arrive on the wiki and claim to be editors have to give a CV, or link to information that constitutes evidence of their credentials. See this discussion for more. For everyone else (called authors), it will be recommended but not required. Also, if you read the FAQ (OK, I know it's long), you'll see that there is too a plan to solve the "problem" of organizing work via mailing lists. Citizendium will be a wiki! The hope and plan is to have the wiki and whatever network of servers might be necessary set up by Sept. 30. I hope we'll be able to attract support for this from any of a number of sources. I'll be very curious myself to see what sort of uptake this has among academics and scientists. As a natural skeptic myself, I don't know if it will work. But I think they'll probably have a more active interest than you had in Wikipedia precisely because they're empowered to make content decisions about their areas of expertise.
What indeed? Nothing, except their own reservations, it appears.
First, you are 100% on the money when you say that Wikipedia and the DU will occupy different niches. Vive Wikipedia and vive la differance! Second, again, it's incorrect to say that the DU encyclopedia (which will be just one part of the DU) will be "simply an online traditional encyclopedia." It will be edited using a wiki, and have other groovy, but quite nontraditional, features. And, unlike a traditional encyclopedia, it will invite edits from the public--that portion of the public that is comfortable working under the direction of experts. But frankly, I think that's a big portion of the sort of people otherwise inclined to work on Wikipedia. When I was a college student, I'm sure I would have jumped at the chance to work on a collaborative project under the direct supervision of my professors. It would have been a great opportunity. So, anyway, the DU will offer just such an opportunity.
Why assume that? Basically, we're going to use a big distributed (souped-up) wiki, just like Wikipedia. It'll just be run by experts. Unlike EB, the DU encyclopedia will have many expert eyes running over it. If an expert was able to catch a mistake for the Nature study article, the same sort of expert will catch mistakes in the DU articles!
I think the DU encyclopedia can aim at 100% accuracy in representing expert opinion. Of course, it can't aim any higher than that--I mean, all it can do is represent expert opinion. And then hope that that approximates the truth.
Look, the reasons for the failure of Nupedia are actually complex, and hardly anyone who likes to flog the Nupedia horse understands them. If you want my full perspective, see my memoir. Among other things, you'll learn that Bomis had almost no money to pay for anything other than my salary. The financial situation at ManyOne and the DU is quite different. Also, Nupedia was started by just one guy--me--doing all the organizational work. (I did have a helper for a while, though.) And I was a nobody working on a project no one had ever heard of. The situation now is totally different. People have heard of Jane Goodall, Robert Corell, Joe Firmage, and me, and there are a lot more than one guy at work on the project. Suffice it to say that our profile is higher. Finally, boy have we ever learned from the mistake of Nupedia's overly complex system. The systems set up for the DU will be simple and based on experience--including that of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
This is really a practical question. Coalitions of professional, academic, and other expert organizations and highly peer-respected individuals will be in charge of matters of content and the selection of Stewards. So, for example, it is up to the Environmental Information Coalition to decide who is a Steward for the Earth Portal. They determine what their own standards are; but so far anyway, the leaders of the portal--the Stewards--really do have to be well respected in their fields to be involved.
But bear in mind, please: that doesn't mean, of course, that many other people can't be very active and have a say.
Here's a slogan for you: expert leadership doesn't mean only experts get to play.
Sorry to say that the statements here are pretty much uniformly incorrect. The DU's wiki-based encyclopedia will be licensed by an open content license (very probably some variant of a Creative Commons license) and so, free. Also, according to the plan I've helped develop, the public will be able to edit the encyclopedia if they use their own real names and if they behave within guidelines of civility they agree to in advance. In other respects, it will be very much like Wikipedia: once you're in the system, if you want to edit an article, go right ahead. Finally, since it will be wiki-based, on what possible grounds do you claim that it will be edited according to "the old model of encyclopedia authoring"?
I'm just going to correct some items of fact in some of the posts here. "So is it an encyclopedia? Or a new search engine?" Neither, exclusively. It will be a comprehensive web portal that will include an encyclopedia. It has been loudly billed as an encyclopedia (not by us) for reasons that might be obvious. But it will be more than that. "...someone can actually sue a corporation with money that has a static location..." Well, the Digital Universe Foundation has filed for nonprofit status, so it's a little misleading to call it a corporation. But you're right that it will have a static location. Or rather, several static locations, because the so-called information coalitions (each devoted to a different branch of knowledge) will be more or less independent of the DU.
Just a correction: I did not raise $10 million for new Stewards, as The Register quite absurdly reported. Rather, something like that is the amount that mainly Joe Firmage raised (or himself gave) toward the development of the platform. Moreover, I am working as just one member of pretty big team; it's hardly just my project. Please, please, wait a couple of weeks and we will be in a position to talk a lot more.