Thursday night Larry Sanger of the expert-driven wiki encyclopedia Citizendium spoke at Eastern Michigan University. Larry was a co-founder of Wikipedia, but left the due to ideological differences about how the project should be maintained.
Sanger began by addressing his main concerns that web 2.0 hasn’t solved yet: high quality and high relevance. Even though there are 1.2 billion people online now, he argued that simply increasing the number of people in an online community won’t solve these problems. He claims that Citizendium can work to address these concerns in the following ways:
- By finding meaningful roles for experts
Larry says that the intelligent use of experts in collaborative projects like Citizendium can help improve the quality of the output. He says that experts can be chosen online the same way they are chosen offline–through a demonstration of knowledge on a particular subject. He said that in order to get contributions from experts (like we see in really good Wikipedia articles, he admits), we need to make sure experts feel comfortable working within an open system. Finally, he argues that just because great things can be created without expert advice (Wikipedia) doesn’t mean that greater things can’t be created with expert input.
- By requiring contributors to use their real-world identities
Sanger says that it is sensible to require real names for membership in some, but not all Internet communities. He does agree that there are legitimate privacy concerns that sometimes require anonymity. However, he argues that attaching real names to contributions (like is done on Citizendium) improves credibility, makes effective rules enforcement possible, and makes people behave better.
- By establishing a rule of law by committing contributors to a social contract that makes them full partners in the project
Larry suggests that online communities should adopt constitutions just like offline communities do–he says this might take the form of some sort of online bill of rights. By doing this, he claims that contributors are compelled to agree to the rules as a condition of participation, thus giving them a more tangible and viable stake in its governance.
Sanger ran through the current stats on Citizendium, reporting that the site now has about 2000 authors and 250 expert editors. He says that there are over 5200 articles under development and that 5 million words were added in its first year (which he claims is over 6x larger than Wikipedia after its first year).
I entered the talk a skeptic of Citizendium, and remain one still. I was waiting to hear two things from Larry–of which I only got in scattered pieces: (1) Citizendium works to provide a better and more accurate resource than Wikipedia and (2) the process by which Citizendium is built is better.
I feel that neither of these pieces are particularly well-addressed. Instead, Citizendium seems like a reactionary project that only seems to address the thugs on Wikipedia. Larry says that the Citizendium community is a “friendly open country fair” while the Wikipedia community continues as a “street fight between rival gangs.” Is this really the point to Citizendium–to make collaborative knowledge production more civil? I agree, there are problems on Wikipedia–defacing and deletion of articles, skewed political rants, plain cruft. But these things can and will be worked out. Articles can be flagged for non-neutrality, incompleteness, and spam. As is central to the wiki form, more information and more transparency can work to help solve these problems. While there are some problems to an anonymous system, Sanger also ignores the enormous benefits to an informal system of usernames and identities. Just because I don’t use my real name on Wikipedia doesn’t mean a useful and positive community has not emerged–and one that respects individual users, develops social norms and fosters positive community relationships.
Citizendium attempts to use revolutionary tools like the wiki, but misses the mark because it relies on old frameworks for knowledge production and maintenance. When Larry speaks about his staff reviewing experts’ CVs before they’re accepted as Citizendium contributors, I can’t begin to understand how this process will be neutral, equitable, scalable, or particularly desirable. Sanger doesn’t see this process as carrying an prohibitively high barrier to contribute, but how can we ignore it?
Larry concludes, “Wikipedia will always be disrespectful of expertise.” I do not agree, and I think Wikipedia will continue to lead the way as a truly remarkable, inviting and accurate collaborative knowledge community.
