As posted on way too many blogs to count, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has decided to fork Wikipedia in to a new project called Citizendium. I know, I had no idea what it was either. Luckily, their "website" provides the gist of the project:
The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.
We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.
So essentially, it's an expert regulated version of Wikipedia. Real people with names, not IP addresses, supply the content and actual experts work as editors in their respective fields to validate and mediate the content. Good idea? No, great idea.
In recent years, Wikipedia's dominance in SERPs and popular culture has created a so-called "Wikiality effect" -- if enough people believe it to be true, then it must be. Who can blame novice internet users for believing that a site with the phrase "free encyclopedia" in its title is accurate? After all, nobody in their world is telling them anything otherwise.
I love being internet savvy and working in the same industry, but the general public has very little understanding of the internet's function and is oblivious to nearly all of its inner workings. They don't read the Google blog or know what Web 2.0 is. To them, AJAX is that stuff you use to clean your sink. They operate in their world and we operate in ours. But communication between the worlds does happen: through production and consumption. We produce products and they consume them. So when an internet product is bad, rarely does the general product notice or care -- there isn't anything new to consume. I takes a new and improved product to come along and make everyone realize there is a better way. It happened with Firefox vs. IE, and it can happen again with Wikipedia.
Thus, Citizendium's biggest strength isn't the expert editors or the catchy name -- it's the fact they're not Wikipedia. They should make it a point to show people why they're different. Curious users, and a few lost ones I'm sure, will stumble upon Citizendium. And if they take a few moments to see the differences, I'll guarantee you it will change the users their minds on Wikipedia. Not because to them Wikipedia is bad, but because Citizrendium is better.
Yes it is... oops! although I think I will keep "Citizendiality" and claim it is my own when it appears on national television!
great post, thanks
One overriding question is, will Citizendium be any more accurate or trustworthy than Wikipedia with the added "gentle expert guidance?" Given instructions that direct users to "go to the wiki, place a link to their CV on their user page, and declare themselves to be editors," surely there's a chance this venture could spawn Citizendiality. This could be scarier than its predecessor because we're being told that this time, there's more chance it's really all accurate.
Wikipediality come about because of us commoners posting our falsely-held notions all over the web, didn't it? Wasn’t it the experts who told us that Columbus discovered America? Seems to me that Wikipediality and Citizendiality, in one form or another, have been around for a long, long time!
Good call, Jane. There's already a lack of skepticism towards Wikipedia, and users will have to be even more alert with Citizendium.
BTW - I think wikiality is the word you're looking for :)
He is right about the name being a nuisance, though. It's just so cumbersome. I'd totally name it 'Gabbo.'
Haha, nice. "Gabbo Gab-bo GABBO!!!"
I don't think this is a great idea nor the name is catchy. There could be one ton of better names for this new product.
I don't believe in controlled social products. People won't write so many stuff as they write for wikipedia if they can't see the result of their writings before a so called expert approves it. It will fail!
I'd suggest reading the FAQ on the Citizendium site, because people can contribute to the site without going through an expert first. The expert is just there to oversee and resolve conflict.
Long, long ago (8 years ago) when I was in high school and still just getting a grasp on the internet, I dreamed of a site/database where information on every subject could be immediately accessible and reliable. It was one of the functions I expected to find from the moment I logged in for the first time and was disappointed to find lacking, finding instead a million Geocities/Tripod accounts with pictures of cats and bad poetry (along with their "copyrights" and threats of retribution if you even thought about claiming their work as your own). *shudder*
Then came Wikipedia, and I was elated, but naturally the rather cladestine submission process has always been suspect and I only use it as a starting point for research. I'd never EVER cite it in an academic paper (though some certainly do). It's still only about three steps ahead of UrbanDictionary in my mind in terms of reliability.
This new step is absolutely necessary, but one thing enters my mind that will absolutely need to develop later lest the information become suspect by vice of its newfound authority. That is, if it is to become this great nexus of information, particularly regarding historical and sociological subjects, multiple articles and authors with differing opinions and perspectives are quite necessary. This is something even the old, tried-and-true Britannica is lacking. Why should Citizendium be accountable for lodging all of these different views? Not only would it be a wonderful first to have many articles with varied perspectives lined up next to one another (outside of one of those old databases from your senior high library), if their mission is really to create this virtual utopia of information, they are obligated to showcase the subjectivity and the fallibility of even the experts. Well, given the current, endemic anti-intellectualism in the US, maybe that isn't for the best. Still, it would be a good lesson for a world that's always been a little too hasty to believe everything it reads, perhaps now more than ever.
Unfortunately, if it's being edited by real experts, writing/editing these varied views will require the cooperation of a number of them in many fields, sometimes overlapping, to give all viable perspectives a fair shot. That is a lot of manpower. Brainy manpower. It doesn't come easy or cheap, and frankly I'm so jaded about both academia and the standards of people who market this information, I'd be clamouring for their credentials all the same. I'm skeptical that it will live up to the ideal, for it would be a monumental thing to do so, but I remain optimistic for the mere chance of breathing a little life back into the part of me that died the first time I searched on AltaVista for information of Dostoevsky and ended up finding a spammy Russian porn site.
Did I bother doing any research on the internet for the remainder of my high school career? Nyet!
I'll be curious to see if this succeeds as well, but to my mind, the keys are going to be in the launch of the product. Wikipedia has so much brand traction that I think unless Citizendium can hit the ground running, with something totally amazing, unique from Wikipedia (according to the article, they're just going to be a mirror at first - bad idea to my mind) and compelling to Internet savvy folks and regular joes alike, it's not going to last long.
Frankly, I think the Citizendium site makes a good point about Wikipedia which will work in their favour: that is, Wikipedia has already chased off many potential readers and contributors (the article estimates thousands, and I would agree) due to the very free-forum contribution method that attracted so many others. Those who have run away in the past may be lured to Citizendium and its more regulated approach once they hear about it, and that probably won't take long if they are the least bit web-savvy. Many Wiki users will probably start shifting towards Citizendium before long, if only at first to start comparing the articles on it with those on Wikipedia. This may even cause a few tantrums among the die-hard Wikipedia types, which may then in turn cause others to convert to Citizendium status. I've seen it happen on other communities, so I wouldn't be the least surprised if it happened there.
I see it doing well if they weren't overly generous with their estimates about how many people have been chased from Wikipedia in the past. The rest will come around eventually.