February 01, 2007

Citizendium pilot opens. Sometime last week, with not much fanfare, the first open pilot for Larry Sanger's Citizendium project (think: Wikipedia with standards) commenced. Unlike the earlier closed pilot, anyone can now register as an "author" at Citizendium without having to petition the cabal (subject to certain conditions, of course).

Larry hopes that by the time the site accumulates such a critical mass of articles that search engines such as Google begin to point to it as a matter of course that it will have produced a free encyclopedia worthy of the name. That is, it will be better than the useless rubbish and episode guide that anyone can edit. This is non-trivial, because, as you may recall, Citizendium is not a fork of Wikipedia any more: they are starting from scratch. Larry seems optimistic about his project. It has already attracted about 150 "editors", that is, contributors who have editorial control over articles in their domain based on their demonstrable expertise. On 12 December 2006 they unveiled their first "approved" article, Biology (now up to version 1.2). An "approved" article is meant to be reviewed by workgroups of expert editors, and thus be comprehensive, well-annotated, and, most importantly, stable. No more having to rake through the muck of indefatigable POV-pushers and idiots who delight in reducing hundreds of kilobytes of text to Pilinha. Granted, Citizendium's process of collaboration and approval hardly gleams of technical polish, but even from the earliest instant the product of approval was clearly superior to the equivalent Wikipedia-brand product (at the time). Moments after approval, some anonymous user did what the Internet does best: shamelessly cut-and-paste parts from one to the other with no attribution whatsoever (who didn't see this coming?). Needless to say, the Citizens weren't jubilant about it. (This "copyvio" has now been purged from Wikipedia's history. It should also be noted that not everyone considers this exchange of material to be terrible.) Can we really start trusting what we read on the internet now? Sadly, no. The Citizendium Foundation and the participants in the Citizendium project make no representations about the reliability of [an approved article] or, generally, its suitability for any purpose. Yeah, yeah, just a legal CYA... or perhaps the gist of the grand delusion in black and white straight from the horse's mouth (to use a confused metaphor). Just who are these knights in shining WikiArmor who are making the Internet suck even less than Wikipedia made it not suck? Disgruntled ex-Wikipedians? Refugees from the so-called expert rebellion? Just your average run-of-the-mill tenured faculty? That's great for the natural sciences, but a modern encyclopedia, especially one that exists in a continuum with the grand Wikipedia tradition, has to cover much more. Who, I wonder, is the credentialled expert in the hundreds of episodes of the anime series Naruto, or the weapons and items from Zelda? (Probably the same person.) (By the way, if you find the mere mention of Wikipedia causes your love juices to flow, remember that Wikipedia hates us. They taunts us and calls us names.)

posted by fuyugare 17 years ago
  • The Citizendium will have a set of persons of mature judgment specially empowered to enforce rules, called (at least tentatively) "constables." I hope they pronounce it correctly.
  • Nice post. The wikipedia bio on Larry Sanger still describes Citizendium as a fork, but I guess that's to be expected.
  • Citizendium will probably fail, and not just because of the horrible name. It is just elitism of the worst hind. "Oh no, the commoners can change things! How will we compensate for our inferiority complex now?" Call me crazy, but it might be better if all these so-called "experts" were to oh, I don't know, change the mistakes they see in wikipedia instead of saying, "See! It is wrong! Anyone can change it!" People really need to get over, "But anyone can change it!" Such a mentality is premised on the assumption that we can trust ANYTHING without being critical of it. If you are using an encyclopedia for anything more than satisfying your own curiosity, then you are already giving any encyclopedia be it wikipedia or britanica too much credit. I don't trust everything I read in the newspaper, why should I trust everything I read in wikipedia, citizendium, or britanica?
  • (By the way, if you find the mere mention of Wikipedia causes your love juices to flow, remember that Wikipedia hates us. They taunts us and calls us names.) So I take this 'Citizendium' will have a Monkeyfilter article? Somehow I doubt it.
  • I do like the debate on the Wikipedia page, though. Reminds me of one of our threads.
  • I do think that expert only editing will lead to problems. Especially because if the Citizendium article does end up being better, somebody from Wikipedia will take it, fix the mistakes and post it. Whereas if it ends up being worse, well the smaller the group the greater the echo chamber effect. I admit I'd prefer a skilled neurologist to someone basing his/her cranial sawing technique on a wiki though.
  • I don't trust everything I read in the newspaper, why should I trust everything I read in wikipedia, citizendium, or britanica? Surely there is a question of degree here. I'd question the wisdom of giving as much credence to wikipedia as to a professional journal or encyclopedia, even bearing in mind the "don't believe everything you read" philosophy. Not to mention that Wikipedia articles only remain "clean" if they're constantly policed. Allowing expert-only editing means you get more stable articles from knowledgable sources with less internet babysitting. Not that I don't enjoy long debates about Skeletor. I really do.
  • a Monkeyfilter article? I just searched for Monkeyfilter on Wikipedia and got: Results 1-18 of 18 Dave Rat Relevance: 1.6% - - The I Can Eat Glass Project Relevance: 0.9% - - MetaFilter Relevance: 0.6% - - I think we should leave it that way.
  • I've contributed tons to Wikipedia, and I think here the make-or-break factor is what this project means to contributors, rather than to the end users. In my case, writing is a recreational effort. With an academic wiki, I worry about the demand for more time, more attention to detail, and being subject to more oversight that will probably involve the inevitable power trips, micromanagement, and turf wars. That turns it from recreation into work. I can appreciate the need for an academic Wiki but I don't want to be the one editing it unless it radiates quality and makes me feel like it's worth my time. I think Wikipedia critics like to trot out examples like the vandalized George Bush page and dubious nature of South Park episode lists, but Wikipedia really excels with its more obscure info. Look at DeCSS, Devon Island, grenadine, and Salekhard-Igarka Railway. There is some truly great stuff there that will probably never be ecliped.
  • I agree that the vandalism issue is really overhyped. They have made reverting vandalism nearly as easy as committing the vandalism itself. You just go the history page and you can see the exact changes made to an article. Wikipedia has such an overwhelming number of articles on an overwhelming number of topics that something like Britanica could never match it. Does Britianica have a summary for nearly every episode of Doctor Who, for example? If the Citizenium really isn't a fork, and is starting fresh, they are never going to be able to catch up because by the very nature of have "qualified" writers, you are never going to have as many people contributing to it as the number of "unqualified" people who contribute to wikipedia.
  • > they are never going to be able to catch up Do they need to catch up? Wikipedia is fine for summaries of Doctor Who episodes, but there's a more limited body of knowledge that's worth covering in a more formal way, isn't there?
  • Several misconceptions here. First, CZ allows contributions from anyone, not just credentialled people. This is the basic "author" level. The difference from Wikipedia is that these contributions by authors will be subject to scrutiny by credentialled "editors". Second, you people just have no idea how huge a deal vandalism is in Wikipedia. There are multiple anti-vandalism bots and legions of people who do nothing but monitor Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages for vandalism. And they are losing. Only the most overt kind of vandalism actually gets reverted in a reasonable amount of time. A dedicated user can surreptitiously add plausible junk to an article that won't be reverted until weeks or months later. Almost every cleanup project is impossibly backlogged. CAT:CSD overflows routinely. Merge and move requests are so impossibly backlogged that no one even bothers with them. Worse, the quality of articles in WP is not monotonic. Articles begin their life with a climb to respectability, but once they reach a plateau, they then begin the long descent into eroded garbage. The low barrier to entry makes it almost a certainty that correct information will be replaced with incorrect information by well-meaning people with severe misconceptions. And then there are the crackpots, loons, usenet trolls, fanboys, disgruntled ex-wikipedians, partisans, and paid consultants who are thriving in the WP ecosystem. And the cesspools that are AfD and RfA, where the worst of the lot with overblown god-complexes hang out. Play in this muck too much, and you start to hate it. What Larry and the Citizens are betting on is that increasing the barrier to entry just a tiny bit—requiring real names and some verifiable qualifications to assert editorial control—will get rid of the septic bathwater without jettisoning the baby. It is too early to tell if they are completely wrong about this, and no reason to simply assume that they are. After all, Wikipedia is not the first grand user-contributed information compendium to succeed—look at DMOZ or Mathworld, for example—just the most egalitarian.
  • The point of all this is: we are unworthy. FTP is good, we fuck it up with porn collections on university computers and worse. Newsgroups are good, we fuck them up with flame wars, spam, and much, much worse. Chat is good. Well, actually, no. E-mail is good, we fuck it up with spam. The web is good, we fuck it up in ways far too numerous to mention. Napster was good, actually too good. Napster clones were good, but fucked themselves and us with spyware. Google Earth is good, except when those pesky terrorists find the embassy. Wikipedia is good, and read the above. I could go on. Actually, already have.
  • you people?
  • There are multiple anti-vandalism bots and legions of people who do nothing but monitor Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages for vandalism. And they are losing. A good point. Continuing to speak from only the contributor perspective, I have to say if vandalism and edit wars began corrupting the articles I work on, I would definitely make the move elsewhere rather than waste time fighting it. Fortunately I've never seen my obscure stuff vandalized, except by the occasional poopy-pant 5th graders, and I've had great rapport with some of my obscure co-editors in our remote little part of Wikipedia.
  • (I was going to start a new thread on this, but probably no one will care.) The recent buzz about Wikipedia is that an administrator with the pseudonym of Essjay managed to fool a large number of people, including aparently The New Yorker, about his academic credentials. This would normally mean nothing because academic credentials don't necessarily mean anything in WP, but several people have wondered whether Essjay has been keeping up the charade with ulterior motives. There is also the fact that he is an admin's admin, having all sorts of sekrit powers and being personally appointed to WP's arbitration committee by WP's God King, Jimbo Wales himself, not to mention his being hand-picked for Jimbo's other wiki-based venture, Wikia. Among Wikipedia folk, he's practically royalty. I really don't know what to think about Wikipedia any more. As long as the negative press about Wikipedia was about rubbish contributions from anonymous nobodies, there was some plausible deniability. But now we see questionable judgement at the very top of the chain. I remain deeply dubious of Citizendium's chances, but Sanger at least seems to understand that anonymity is the sine qua non of unreliability.
  • News update: the outed fake doctor, Essjay, has "retired" from Wikipedia. His talk page is full of laudations text written by admins. Normal users are not allowed to edit that page.
  • make that "laudatory text".
  • Conservapedia, not the definitive collection of jam-related information that I was looking for, but A conservative encyclopedia you can trust. Read why Wikipedia is 6 times more liberal than the American public: Examples of Bias in Wikipedia. Six times people. Six. Times.