The Citizendium [LWN.net]

The Citizendium

Posted Sep 19, 2006 17:14 UTC (Tue) by cventers (guest, #31465)
Parent article: WOS4: Quality management in free content

I definitely agree that there is a right to fork Wikipedia and use its
content; that much is encompassed in the spirit of the GNU Free
Documentation License that covers the work.

In the past, I've grown tired of severe misinterpretation and I've
personally blacklisted two publications for publishing blatant and
offensive attacks on Wikipedia. What worries about The Citizendium is
that this opens up further opportunity for the press to misunderstand
Wikipedia.

In essence, they are starting from the already excellent Wikipedia
content. I believe that the argument made by those against expertism is
that some of this content would not exist in the quality it expertism
took hold. So The Citizendium, then, would use Wikipedia content created
without expertism to uphold the idea of expertism, and then one-up
Wikipedia by using the good side of expertism to correct Wikipedia
blemishes. This may mislead people into believing that expertism is the
only operable strategy; when the bulk of the content appearing under the
headline that flies the expertism flag was created through a process of
evolution in a society where expertism is rejected.

I hope that doesn't happen, but I fear that it will.

to post comments

The Citizendium

Posted Sep 19, 2006 17:42 UTC (Tue) by trutkin (guest, #3919) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh, I wouldn't worry about it. Most efforts like these fail.

The Citizendium

Posted Sep 20, 2006 1:50 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Indeed. The problems with Wikipedia already largely derive from the fact
that its editors are all self-selected. This new project doesn't seem to
correct that in any way.

Forking Wikipedia content and tracking changes to those articles which
have *not* been edited by members of the forking project looks to me like
a recipe for mediocrity. Articles which are cleaned up by Citizendium
editors may look better for a short while, but it seems inevitable that

(a) interested Wikipedians (perhaps assisted by a daemon, or even the
same people as produce the Citizendium content) will promptly merge any
decent changes back into the parent project, so they may as well be made
there in the first place.

(b) the articles which suffer from a lack of informed attention on
Wikipedia will suffer even more so in an elitist environment. The worst
irrelevancies may be deleted, but then the articles will sit and rot.

Unless the editors of Citizendium want to review *every* change made to
Wikipedia for quality, they're bound to duplicate mediocre changes and to
overlook excellent ones.

The Citizendium

Posted Sep 19, 2006 20:21 UTC (Tue) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

I agree and think it would be useful if Citizendium would separate their expert viewpoints from the original, not necessarily separate places but maybe shaded/colored differently, with information on why they think the changes are needed.

The Citizendium

Posted Sep 21, 2006 4:04 UTC (Thu) by moxfyre (guest, #13847) [Link]

I personally think that the Citizendium idea sounds really neat, and can't wait to see how well it works in practice.

However, I believe there are major downsides to the Citizendium model: there are lots of Wikipedia articles that would never get created by "experts". For example, wikipedia has many articles analyzing "Simpsons" episodes in exhaustive detail. Who would be considered an "expert" for this type of article???

Wikipedia is filled with wonderful articles created by enthusiasts of things that have no recognized experts! Furthermore, in many technological fields the experts have no incentive to create and maintain free content. For example, I recently created the article "Lugged steel" on a method of bicycle frame construction. This article includes many links to resources for amateur bicycle frame builders. If an expert had written this article, I doubt those links would be there. Nearly all the true experts on steel frame building do it for a living, and many jealously guard their methods and tools!

It would be like asking Microsoft to write an article on C compilers... then wondering why there's no mention of GCC. Or asking Larry Ellison to write an article on database software, then wondering why there's no mention of MySQL. How will Citizendium ensure that it finds experts who don't have a vested interest in presenting the topic one way or another?