Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that his new knowledge sharing wiki project called Citizendium will launch at the end of this month or earlier. The defining characteristic of the site is that topic experts will have final, enforceable authority to “resolve” controversy and kick out trolls. Citizendium will be a progressive fork of Wikipedia, allowing its own community to change Wikipedia articles but also offering Wikipedia’s version of those that haven’t been edited in Citizendium. Sanger says the topic experts will function like village elders or college professors – they’ll simply make the wiki a civilized place.
I like variations on familiar models and the web 2.0 certainly isn’t set in stone; but there are a number of reasons I’m very skeptical of Citizendium.
Citizendium is not connected to Larry Sanger’s earlier work at the Digital Universe Foundation, whose press release still refers people interested in providing expertise to a similar project to an URL that ends in XXX and brings up a 404. Nor is Citizendium tied to the Sanger directed Text Outline Project, yet another very similar endeavor that Sanger now says he will come back to “in a year or two.” It is reminiscent of the predecessor of Wikipedia, Nupedia – which Sanger was the editor in chief of just like he will be for Citizendium. Nupedia allegedly flopped under the weight of its PhD requirements, software inadequacies, the superiority of the wiki model in general and Wikipedia in particular.
In other words, barring further information about Citizendium – it’s hard to take it seriously. The project does have some stuffy backing for its snoozer of a text-only web site so perhaps it will prove viable. I’m not holding my breath.
The project has not announced what its model will be for experts to gain editor status. Those criteria will be published in draft form in the next few weeks, the site says – though by that time Citizendium is apparently going to be live. The FAQ does say that a Ph.D. will be neither necessary nor sufficient for editorship.
Does Wikipedia need to be fixed? I’m not entirely convinced that it does, as the page history function makes an article (almost) impossible to destroy. The discussion tab on Wikipedia is a great place to point to your favorite version. Is that too noisy? Is it too common for people with valuable knowledge to be turned off from participating? Does the world need a Wikipedia for stick-in-the-muds? Maybe it does, but I’m not going to get too excited about it and this effort in particular seems unlikely to succeed.
Experts will use the ability to ban people as a way to push their point-of-view! This is much like how some admins misuse the Wikipedia to pursue their POV, however, on this new site it will be much more visual.
Also, page history makes pages nearly impossible, not impossible to destroy. Some of the Wikipedia’s most respected admins have powers to delete versions from history (but under very very strict policy).
The Wikipedia evolved from the Nupedia. This new site seems to be a devolution.
I think having experts is a good things, as it can steer things towards both correctness and completeness.
By the way, the feedburner button on TechCrunch looks odd today, you might want to double check it.
Alex
This sounds like a good idea, so I’m sure a lot of media will talk about it. I’ve heard people even call is wikipedia 2.0… That initial interest however overlooks very important details about implementation. Wikipedia is licensed under GFDL, and therefore Citizendium will be too if it’s a fork. In that case, if Citizendium ever creates anything of value it can be immediately reintegrated with wikipedia. If by some chance they do start drastically improving articles on art history (a somewhat weak area on wikipedia) there would be a wikipedia project to move that information back right away. I don’t see a situation where wikipedia would have less volunteers, and it only takes volunteers to move things.
So, the situation we’re forced with is Citizendium being a group of experts to correct and improve wikipedia articles. While this would be great for wikipedia, I don’t really understand where funding would come from. Maybe they wouldn’t need funding and there really are art professors burning with a desire to write encyclopedia articles yet terrified of having them edited and formatted by the unwashed masses. Seems unlikely. Even so, for the end user, you’re more likely to get the best version at wikipedia regardless of whether Citizendium people or wikipedians wrote it.
Larry Sanger hates the idea that a PhD in physics might have to explain their writing to a 15 year old, which happens on wikipedia. In my experience the 15 year olds on wikipedia who are editing physics articles are more than happy to listen to a PhD in the field, and most professors and researchers who want to write in a freely available encyclopedia do so to educate. When these educators are presented with a precocious young person interested in their field most don’t react with the disgust that Sanger seems to expect.
cool app: a diff function so that you can specify an article and see where the two differ
obviously its a way to generate more revenue
phd arent all as smart as ordinary people
way to go to screw up wiki
As long as Stephen Colbert is a topic expert this has a great chance at working and dethroning Wikipedia.
Interesting take on variations of wikipedia.
Question:
Are there any city/town/county historical societies using wiki’s to build an online multimedia history of their city/town/county? Most historical societies have a board of locals (experts?) that oversee the accuracy of associated material. We are exploring this idea as an associated project to our citizen journalism effort (i.e. http://prattnews.com ) .
Cool. How much do I get paid for contributing?
I was going to reply to this, but then I found this reply, which pretty much says what I would say:
http://www.stra...nd-the-abusers/
The point I would underscore is that there is something seriously wrong with where people’s heads are at, these days, if they think that making room for experts in an encyclopedia project, and adapting the proven OSS developments to content wrangled very gently by experts, is backwards or for “stick-in-the-muds.”
I’m going to write another essay soon that will explain this.
–Larry Sanger
I’m with Larry on this one.
As someone who has attempted to contribute to several articles about/involving politics on Wikipedia, I am very excited about the prospect of “The Citizendium.” Anyone who has tried to look up any such articles only to find large warnings about point-of-view neutrality, dispute moderation or a plain lock on editing of the article because of “revert wars,” oh, and of course the garbage contributed by the people responsible for these problems, should be excited as well. Also, I hope that the Citizendium will not suffer from the problem of having a list of pop culture references to a particular person/event longer than the rest of the article about that person/event. Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I don’t care that episode #4523, Season 3, of Smallville made a reference to Alexander the Great. If you care, good for you. Wikipedia is probably your place. I want to contribute to something that I won’t be embarrassed to reference later.
The obvious problem is: who decides who is an “expert” on contentious topics? Is Rush Limbaugh a suitable expert on gay rights? How about Robert Fisk on Islamic extremism?
This is practically guaranteed to be completely slanted either to the left (almost any college liberal arts faculty in the country) or the right (almost any ‘talk radio’ station) depending upon who is picking the “experts’.
I have no problem with using experts on topics which are not politically loaded, but otherwise you are guaranteed to get extremely slanted views due to the almost total bifurcation of the country into Bushites and Lefties. There is very little rational middle ground any longer. The only question is the direction of the slant.
My only problem with Citizendium is that it’s homepage is 5,000 words long. Sorry, but how can you stretch “It’s Wikipedia with appointed topic experts and a requirement that users sign in with their real name in order to edit” in to a 5,000 word document?
Mr. “wtf bbq” – this is not screwing up wiki. Wiki is a class of software. If someone trying to compete with Wikipedia screws up wiki, then someone posting crap comments without moderation on a blog screws up the blog… oh, wait…
Vladimir: Citizendium is a fork of Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s faults – real or imaginary – come with the dump. I see no reason to edit out factually true – if not useful to you – references (all these little things that are seen as trivial are often very useful for researchers on a topic – if one were writing on, say, how the media/popular culture represents history on television, being able to see a list like that is actually useful – but you cannot predict whether that it will be useful – an encyclopedia should contain both useful and useless information so long as it’s true).
A lot of people will look forward to “the expert’s last word” until that expert doesn’t agree with them. The problem with this evolution is that it doesn’t address the central potential problem– the problem of administration– and it makes a seriously flawed assumption about the binary nature of reality– that there is one, Truth with a capital T to be uncovered and privileged above all the rest. Sometimes that’s true… most often it is not.
I’ll watch this project with interest, but I don’t see how it can be much better– only different– and like a lot of forks in the OSS community, the odds that it will cause harm are greater than it causing any good. In the abstract, I’d rather have long discussion pages with a lot of back and forth that we can see than a univocal end product determined by an expert, who by virtue of being human– has to have a position, if not an agenda.
Vladimir: an encyclopedia is about knowledge. You may operate on a higher plane of existence and be more noble and literate than others, but Smallville references are knowledge just as surely allusions in classic literature and they all belong. Why should you be ashamed at referencing a resource that is about *inclusion* given that most repositories are found on– and include– far too many characteristics of exclusion? Let 1000 flowers bloom.
Mike Arrington: if you are afraid to make an edit on Wikipedia it’s amazing you survive using the web at all… maybe you should find a different line of work. Or maybe a therapist. If there are errors, make a change– enlist the community to help. All anyone can do otherwise is charitably assume you are telling the truth with no evidence and no way to make things better. Sniping from the sidelines is even less productive than forking…
btw– my “therapist” reference is a joke… it’s just that I belong to mailing lists of poets that are a lot more vitriolic and intimidating than people editing the Wikipedia…
Joe: Yes, we all have points of view. Having a POV is not tantmount to lying or fostering an agenda. Experts are as liable to push their own agendas as the rest of us, but it seems to me that the one thing more useless than a wiki entry by an expert-with-an-agenda is a wiki entry by someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The very notion of expertise implies that a minority of people know more about a given subject than the rest of us. Are you, instead, suggesting that the general public can fact-check any expert in any field of knowledge?
Isn’t it true that the percentage of experts willing to lie and deceive to advance their own agenda is the same as the percentage of the general population inclined to do the same? Or, are you suggesting that expertise itself increases our willingness to manipulate?
I don’t get it. If according to the article linked by Larry in this thread the purpose of appointing experts is to increase accountability, why not just allow experts to endorse certain wikipedia articles? You add one link to the bottom of a page and get a list of zero or more names of people and their credentials related to the article. Simple.
Another thing I don’t get. It should be common knowledge that insiders to an area of knowledge tend to represent it to the outside world as monolithic and decided when to outsiders it appears anything but.
And finally, unlike a commenter above who thinks experts can be just as politicized, allow me to disagree. Experts on average are more politicized and less objective because they have a vested interest in their point of view.
Well for all that might be squirrely about thi fork – one thing I can tell you is that after two-and-a-half-years and overseeing over 27,000 article postings on Visual Editors – a real names policy works.
It’s the reason our community not only engages journalists working in the world’s newsrooms to read us – but to also submit content for no charge. You have to have a ‘troll patrol’ on board too. A group of 30 moderators who watch out and set the tone for collegial, socratic debate. But the real names policy brings a level of accountability second to none. It is amazing the quality of the contributions and discourse you can have when the expectation is that you will use your real name and tell everyone else where you are from.
Robb Montgomery
Visual Editors, Not-for-profit.
http://www.visualeditors.com
I think is interesting. I will be waiting to see how this turns out, Wikipedia, I guess, has become a victim of its own success.
Hey all,
Are there other existing wiki technologies that allow a ‘moderator’ to manage the information posted to the wiki itself. Is the technology of what I understand this wiki to present, itself unique, or is it the concept?
Re #12: Most academics, even the left-leaning, at least have the decency to fairly summarize opposing viewpoints. In contrast, in my travels to the US, I’ve heard radio show hosts talk about the psyho-pathology of the liberals who think we puny humans can actually influence something as big as the Earth’s climate.
That’s how you decide who an expert is. Not on their opinion, but on whether they can stick to facts, and fairly represent differing viewpoints.
NPOV doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion. If Citizendium can stick to NPOV with very opinionated editors, it will do us all a huge service. Even wikipedia can win, by re-incorporating articles.
JG- a moderated wiki, if it doesn’t exist already, can’t be very difficult to implement on top of existing open-source wikis.
“Citizendium: a more civilized Wikipedia?”
Why the question mark, you are reminding me of Fox News. They are famous for the usage of the question mark when pushing a point and not really a question.
Wikipedia is made so anyone can have access and modify code. Thats whats so unique about it. If Citizendium modified that to only select users, they are essentially just another CMS/blog, and we have too many of thoughs. Thank you Citizendium, but bugger off.
I think hostility towards this is not necessary- the worse that can happen is Citizendium is a failure, the best that can happen is it is a success and these improvements are then incorporated into Wikipedia. I think the project is likely to fail, as with the rest of Larry’s projects, and one can’t help but feel that his reasons for starting it up are more about anger with Wikipedia than anything more positive (read his WP problems page if you need to see the anger that he has, and as usual, some complaints about Jimmy Wales.
I find Jimmy rather annoying (his childish ‘correction’ of the article about himself showed how little he really ‘gets’ Wikipedia), and Larry is also frustrating – Wikipedia, however, is an amazing success, and I’ll be putting my effort into improving that, but as I said at the start, good luck Citizendium – I’d be happy to help copy accross improvements.
I feel Grupus is providing a much better way to experts to create trustworthy information.
On the site, like-minded people can form exclusive groups (a maximum of only 12 members per group) which are viewable to everyone but can be maintained and edited only by group members to provide expert information in the field they specialize in.
For another perspective on Citizendium and on Larry Sanger’s policies, please visit http://www.kalital.com, where there is a lively discussion taking place about Sanger’s policy of excluding Ethnic and Gender studies from the Citizendium category system.
Despite its claim to Enlightenment principles and neutrality, Sanger has clear political biases which are expressed in his stated policies about Citizendium. Ethnic studies and Gender studies scholars have been repeatedly challenged by Sanger to prove that their disciplines have worth, and they are subject to a level of scrutiny not visited upon scholars in disciplines Sanger considers to be legitimate.
As a result, an entry like “African American Literature” is subject to political manipulation: African Americanist scholars who attempted to engage in revision of the original Wikipedia article were challenged on such basic notions as the existence of an “African diaspora”.
In the field of African American studies, the fact of the African diaspora is well-established, though the nature of that diaspora is subject to lively debate. Sanger’s declaration that the scholars who represent majority opinion in the field are “biased” or “political” is suspect, especially when the claim of bias is visited primarily on disciplines in which women and people of color make up the majority of scholars. The biases of scholars in fields that are made up of a majority of white, male scholars are emphatically not a concern to Sanger.
You are welcome to stop by my blog and read a lengthier analysis of the problem, along with the substantive comments that have been posted.
Luogo interessante, buon disegno, lo gradisco, signore! =)
For another perspective please visit http://www.kavandeo.com
Luogo interessante, buon disegno, lo gradisco, signore! =)