Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-07-30/News from Citizendium

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

< Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost | 2007-07-30

News from Citizendium

By johnsonmx, July 30, 2007

Hello Wikipedia—this is Mike Johnson, casual Wikipedian,^[1] and member of Citizendium's Executive Committee. Before I start talking about what's been going on at Citizendium (unofficially and with a healthy dose of personal opinion), I'd like to thank Sage Ross and Michael Snow for the invitation to write this piece for the Signpost. Once we start our own community newsletter I'll be happy to extend the same courtesy.

Citizendium at a glance

A quick primer: Citizendium is a wiki encyclopedia everyone can edit, but

Users must log in under their real names to edit;
Experts (e.g., professors, experienced professionals, or equivalent) are empowered to arbitrate disputes over matters of content within (and only within) their field of expertise;
Experts vet and approve excellent-quality, 'stable' versions of articles, though progress can continue on 'draft' pages;
The governance structure is more explicit than that on Wikipedia, with arguably firmer^[2] and clearer laws and an editorial framework designed to better focus effort.

If I had to summarize Citizendium into a sentence, it'd be this: Wikipedia was concerned with making a working online encyclopedia; Citizendium is concerned with making a community that, if it works, will make a really good online encyclopedia.

So, is it working? I think there are many hopeful signs. We've got 2400 articles, 31 approved articles, and over 2000 users (265 of whom are editors). What do these numbers mean? Well, nobody really knows. But I think the health of our project can also be judged by what 'meta' projects we've done or are in the process of doing (more on that later).

Our main project bottleneck has been registration, as Sage Ross briefly alludes to in his sister article. Geni from Foundation-l has a pretty good take on this: "Trying to fight off our smarter vandals without having our antivandal people tends to result in people having to make registration hard which kills the project."

Such has been a uniquely challenging ecosystem to jump into, and our participation numbers, though good, haven't been as good as they could have been due to our relatively hard registration system. As I'm writing this, though, our tech guys are implementing a semi-automated registration system based on a MediaWiki plugin, which allows users to more easily apply, and allows us to approve applications with a single click should they meet our basic identification requirements. While it still requires users to jump through a hoop before they edit (something I personally still have qualms about), I expect that an easier application system combined with quicker responses will greatly benefit our numbers, and it'll also allow us to start doing serious academic recruiting.

How good is Citizendium's content?

Sage Ross takes a look at this question, and though we appear to come out fairly well in his analysis, I'm not sure how fair it is to have either Wikipedians or Citizendians attempt to publicly critique each others' content. Andrew Keen notwithstanding, clearly both models can create good content. I'm certainly optimistic that the Citizendium model will tend to produce markedly better content than the Wikipedia model (else I wouldn't be volunteering there), and I do think our approved articles are simply great (examples: Biology, Wheat, Northwest Passage).^[3]^[4]

Still on the issue of content, both projects have borrowed a bit of content from the other without attribution, and sorting out how to handle things (and how irritated to get) when this happens will be an ongoing process.^[5]^[6] Generally speaking, our projects' relationship will be many things to many people, but the one which has always made the most sense to me is that we're fundamentally sister projects working toward basically the same goal, albeit with some occasional good-natured sibling rivalry (see also: David Gerard's and my positions on project rivalry and cross-criticism).

Other exciting things happening at Citizendium

Governance

I think most Wikipedians would agree that project governance really does matter. We're committed and laying the groundwork to be a new sort of 'online republic', with

A binding community charter: in addition to setting out rights, duties, and expectations very clearly, a charter allows a community to have some explicit control over how it evolves. Without a constitution or charter, governance just happens. That can be a strength, but governance also just happens down the path of least resistance, and there's no central, credible process by which to make fundamental changes.
Four branches of government: Executive, Legislative, Enforcement (our "constabulary"), and Judicial.^[7]
Separation of power between the branches, via various checks and balances, term limits, and the rule that no one may be a member of more than one governing body.

It'll be interesting to see how such formal governance structures will work out. Clearly there is a nuanced hierarchy on Wikipedia (in mirrorshard's words, a "very flat official hierarchy, and [a] very steep, complex, multidimensional unofficial one". I think more formal governance has the potential to be a lot "saner", but also higher friction. We're doing what we can to prevent that, but sometimes friction can only be gauged by trial-and-error and we'll have to adjust things as we go.

Citizendium 2.0

We're taking advantage of Citizendium's editorial infrastructure to push through some interesting side-projects under the "Citizendium 2.0" title, namely,

Collecting a rich set of related reference content on clearly-organized subpages (example: the right-hand panel on our Biology draft).
Eduzendium, where "The Citizendium invites graduate seminar instructors to include the crafting of a Citizendium article as an assignment" (we'll be running at least one Eduzendium pilot project this fall);
Various other initiatives (check the blog for more): personally, I'm most excited about the concept of a Citizendium-refereed free content brokerage.

Why should Wikipedians care about Citizendium?

I'd offer three reasons.

The first is the most obvious. We're an alternative to Wikipedia, and we have a lot of good and interesting things going on. You might consider editing here. We welcome Wikipedians, and a lot of you may appreciate how we do things and what problems we don't suffer from (e.g., vandalism).
The second follows the saying, 'let a thousand flowers bloom': it becomes easier to understand and improve your wiki once your sample size rises above 1.
The third may not be intuitive, but I think it's very real: I suggest that Wikipedians should be deeply invested in Citizendium's success since having a viable competitor is invaluable for the long-term health of any organization. I won't make the full argument here, but it could be that if 10% of Wikipedians left and joined Citizendium, it'd be better for Wikipedia in the long run. It's just a thought—but do think about the value of having a strong competitor.

I don't want to play up the competitor angle too much, however, since I think we're ultimately on the same side: that of making more and better free content available to the world.

Notes and digressions

^ I have a lot of respect for what Wikipedia is, what it's accomplished, and what it might become (I have no idea what Wikipedia will look like in five years, but—speaking as someone who uses Wikipedia almost every day—I'll be interested to see it). And I don't want to damn Wikipedia with faint praise: Wikipedia has many bright and shining spots, and taken as a whole it's simply amazing. However, as time goes on, the core practices of the Wikipedia model may prove themselves very inefficient, quality-limiting tools for the task of making an encyclopedia that is consistently great and correct. So I see Wikipedia and Citizendium ultimately filling different niches: our philosophy to explicitly empower experts may more elegantly lend itself to producing many types of encyclopedic content, whereas Wikipedia's radically egalitarian philosophy may be particularly suited to topics outside of the traditional academy, being a uniquely powerful search engine-slash-web directory, and being a massively collaborative newsroom. Just thinking out loud here.
^ Perhaps the primary difference in 'legal' outlook between the two projects is that Citizendium is committed to weeding out cranks and trolls. Kyle Gann explains, "The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool's errand. ... And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article's usefulness." Obviously excluding people from a knowledge project must be done very, very carefully (it'll only be done in clear instances of bad faith or repeatedly assertive cluelessness), but it should help with expert retention as well as user retention in general.
^ My personal theory is there'll be a quality differential between Wikipedia and Citizendium depending on the type of content: articles on inherently ambiguous topics, such as history and society, articles on controversial topics, and articles which are introductions to a topic may benefit the most from Citizendium's collaborative model of explicitly empowering expertise (e.g., those are the sorts of articles I think of as benefiting the most from a "guiding hand" and "lucid expert narration", or on the flip-side, being hurt the most by edit wars, over-compromising, and cranks).
^ I think Citizendium's workgroup structure also lends itself better to the important task of fleshing out often-disjoint content into a lucid encyclopedia. As Matt Britt notes, "I finally came to realize that Wikipedia’s attitude is not set on creating an encyclopedia by means of a freely editable wiki, but on creating a freely editable wiki and calling it an encyclopedia."
^ E.g., see this blog entry and Sage Ross's article for examples.
^ As noted in Sage Ross's article, we haven't settled on a free content license yet- essentially, we're still waiting for more community buy-in on the discussion. People know it's important in the abstract sense, but it takes a little while to realize that content licenses actually matter. The leading candidates are CC-by-sa, CC-by-nc, the GFDL, the upcoming GNU Wiki license, and various dual-licensing options.
^ I'm 26 with "just" a BA, and though I've never felt marginalized because of this while working at CZ, I do plan on pushing for explicit author representation within the CZ governance structure, perhaps within the Editorial Council or via an ombudsman system.