Citizendium

[ciphergoth]

Citizendum is Larry Sanger's new project to improve on Wikipedia by explicitly giving more weight to the voices of experts.

I'd like to write a celebrated, widely-linked blog entry that changes the direction of the project, but I'm too lazy to put that much work in, so I'm just going to write a few bullet points here.

• Sanger is right that there's a problem. I am an expert, and for the most part I can't be bothered to contribute my expertise to Wikipedia any more for precisely the reasons he outlines: I want to contribute but I don't want to fight, and on Wikipedia you have to fight all the time.
• He is also right that the solution is to have more hierarchy, to explicitly identify experts and give them more control. And he's right to start with a progressive fork of Wikipedia.
• However, he's dead wrong to try to use the existing, unaltered MediaWiki software to do it, because...
• The thing that will make it possible to maintain a progressive fork, and to allow all to edit without causing disruption, is explicit support for forking and merging in the page history.
• Anonymous users should be able to create new revisions freely, but these revisions would be on "branches" of the page, and not on the "trunk". Editors would be able to use powerful tools of their own choosing to identify and "cherry-pick" the useful revisions, merging the changes together into a single entry.
• It's a bad sign that he's started by creating a pile of moderated mailing lists. Start with one unmoderated mailing list, and introduce moderation, extra lists and so on as the need arises.

I wrote about this before in the trustmetrics journal, but I'm not advocating the full "giant leap" here - just that the tools that we rely on for software development be made available to the creation of a better encyclopaedia.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

"Though actually neither Subversion nor any of the above are a perfect fit. They all version entire trees, which is the Right Thing for source code, but actually a poor fit for a wiki. If I change page A and you change page B, there's no need for those changes to be merged. And the history of each page is independent from the history of the other pages."

I think you're dead wrong on this one. Much as the key insight of git is that the unit is the project rather than the individual source file, to a large extent the unit is the Wikipedia rather than the articles. In day to day editing, stuff gets refactored between articles all the time. I would like to see attributable "responsibility" (sounds nicer than "blame") on the sentence or even phrase level.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It's true that stuff gets refactored between articles. However, the unit of the atomic transaction on Wikipedia is the article. When people refactor between articles they do it as multiple transactions, so the information isn't there for a smart revision control system to make use of. So you might as well track each article separately, which makes it much easier to process edits in parallel.

If it were possible to represent these refactors in a single transaction things become a lot more interesting, but I'm trying to imagine the UI. I'm having a hard enough time imagining the UI for my branching-merging-Wiki...

That's not an insight of Git's, by the way - PRCS worked that way ten years earlier.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah ... a wiki interface (web page, text edit box) doesn't really give a feel for what's actually happened in a text move, or that it is a text move. Wikipedia nuts'n'bolts editors already talk about "cut'n'paste page moves" as undesirable compared to hitting "move page", as if the first wasn't the obvious thing to do given the interface.

My new nascent theory is that worse is better operates at the interface level. e.g. you'll never get a web board system as good as Usenet or really feasible to gateway both ways with an NNTP server. Even though I've mooted a web-based newsreader (as a project when I've learned AJAX) myself.

I should read up more on the history of version control systems. I'd be quite surprised if Wikipedia wasn't the best place to do so, and if it isn't then it almost certainly links to the best place. And I can say that without even looking.