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

[foibey.livejournal.com]

The points you're making here sound a lot like what saved indymedia to some degree (well, it's not great, but on at least a few of the indymedia sites, there's a "front page view" and an "all the articles view" and crank theories about zionist conspiracies are relegated outside of the main view so that it can actually be a useful space for activist news etc).

I think the idea of forking and having an editor/author divide sounds like a good idea at least for some subjects. On the other hand with some political topics where measuring expertise is far from a clear process and open debate about it is really important for impartiality in WP, organising that hierarchy between people with editorial rights and people without could be a big problem.

[brad.livejournal.com]

Funny timing.... I started researching/work on a Subversion-backed wiki last weekend. I totally agree about the need to fork sometimes.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

On the other hand, who's going to bother spending time writing a bunch of content if it might just get thrown away because the guy with merge access doesn't like it or can't be bothered to merge it? I had a discouraging time having to pester people at length to get some documentation added to Ruby. If I had to do the same for Wikipedia changes, I just wouldn't bother.

My problem with Wikipedia isn't that I don't want to fight, it's that I don't want to spend time writing something only to have it thrown away. Your suggestion of "throw it away by default" makes Wikipedia's problems worse, from my point of view.

[reddragdiva]

Politics starts with two people; when you have a few thousand people in one place, you're going to get your skills at working with others tested to the utmost. I'm not at all convinced this is a problem for experts as much as it is a problem for people. Lots of people don't have the patience or stomach to be required to work productively with complete idiots, which is a non-optional skill on Wikipedia, and I wouldn't expect them to.

Wikipedia has lots of academic experts. You and I know lots of them. All the claims I've heard of Wikipedia being anti-expert fail to explain the present exper continued presence. Unless expert-neutral (which I think it more is) is taken to be the same as "anti-expert."

I predict Citizendium - if it ever gets past vapourware - will attract those experts who don't like playing well with others. I'm sure it'll be marvellous to watch.

(What I'd like to see is somewhere encouraging this variety of expert to put up quality text under a GFDL-compatible licence which Wikipedia could then use, or not. I'm not sure what would work, or how it would somehow attract less dickheads than Wikipedia presently attracts, or why qualified expert dickheads would somehow be better to volunteer to work with than regular dickheads.)

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

It's annoying having to fight, though I find the problem often isn't that I doubt the other person's qualifications or expertise, rather it's issues such as how best to express the information, or whether something counts as unverifiable or original research. Though I guess many will be willing to argue when they don't fear the other person is a random 12 year old, and they can see what that person's qualifications are.

I would be curious to see what credentials are needed for the less academic subjects - what makes someone an expert of "goth" or "BDSM"?

Ultimately you have two competing concepts of "an article which can be contributed to by a large number of people" and "an author who wants to write on a subject matter without having to argue about it with other people". Perhaps your tree idea could be useful even for "experts", not just anonymous users, in that they are free to write their own version, leaving other people to do the debates of what should make it to the final article.

I've also come across http://www.scholarpedia.org - another one "written by experts", but each article seems to be written mostly by one author. (Also there appear to currently be very few articles, and when they call it "free", they only mean as in beer.)