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Going down to the specifics or the processes of how Citizendium works, we at CNET here, we try to submit links on Wikipedia to our own legitimate stories on relevant wiki topics, but they were blocked and immediately pulled down. At Citizendium would that kind of thing be allowed or would that not also be seen as legitimate?
Sanger: Well, I think the details of that policy have yet to be worked out. Generally, we don't like people to use general information resources to promote their own material. On the other hand, someone like CNET or maybe National Geographic or the Smithsonian or one of these sources of credible information can actually be doing the world some good by carefully placing links when they are really relevant and when they're as good as the ones that are up there already.
I think what we can end up having to do is make use of what we call our topic informant work group; these are people who will essentially be our liaison with people who are experts about themselves, essentially, or who are trying to promote their own causes and what not on, say, a Web site. That work group is probably going to have to carefully manage certain marketing efforts and so forth. I can see nothing wrong with CNET linking to some of its more important articles that really explain something very well or for that matter articles about current events that we have, but on the other hand don't want to be a link repository for every link that anyone might possibly want to put up. It's just that actually reduces the quality. So, it has to be managed, and how it's going to be managed is a problem that we're going to look at very carefully.
In some ways the Net that we know is based on the idea of being anonymous. Why doesn't Citizendium allow this? Why do you have to reveal who you are and use your real name to use Citizendium?
Sanger: Well, there's a couple of different reasons. First, anonymity tends to make people into jerks if they have any tendencies in that direction. They lack accountability and because they lack accountability that enables some people to disrupt the process. And there's some other reasons too, though. The biggest other reason is that if we use real names, the whole of the project looks a lot more credible. If I look at the page history for an article and I see nothing but real names, I have some confidence that if someone has put in some really egregious error, they're going to be reined in. I don't have any such assurance if there are a bunch of pseudonyms and mere IP addresses.
By using your real name, you have a sense of responsibility to what you post?
Sanger: I think it certainly increases the sense of responsibility and the actual responsibility that other people can hold you to.
But that won't stop all offensive or untrue content from being posted, right?
Sanger: No, of course not.
How long does the article approval process take?
Sanger: Well, it depends on when you consider the article approval process to begin. From the time that someone submits an article for approval, someone nominates an article for approval, our minimum is one week. So in other words, other people have to have the opportunity to comment on an article for at least a week. The approval process is not meant to be rapid, because when we put our approval on something it's actually supposed to be meaningful and important. Right now we are doing all of our approval by hand, and what we are going to be doing is changing the software so that editors can simply click a button and an article will be approved. They really can't do that right now, and that will of course make the process a little bit faster and easier.
Citizendium is a huge project. Where are you getting the bandwidth?
Sanger: Well, Steadfast Networks of Chicago has generously donated the bandwidth to us, the literal bandwidth as well as two of our five servers so, we're very grateful to them for that, but we're also paying a monthly bill and it ain't cheap. We are soliciting donations and just yesterday I put out feelers to my own network, telling people about the launch and so forth, and hopefully we'll get some extra infusions of cash that way. And there's various sort of things that we can do. One thing that we have thought seriously about doing is adding information about our donors to the bottom of pages. I think that could be a nice incentive for some companies and foundations.
We're here at the beginning of Citizendium. Where do you see yourself in the next five years?
Sanger: I would hope five years down the road that we would have over a million articles, that we would have over a 100,000 approved articles, that we would have on the order of tens of thousands of quite active people and, say, something like 10,000 editors who are reasonably active. I would hope also that we would be one of the highest ranked Web sites. I also would hope that we would be launched in many different languages and each language having its own editor in chief. And I would hope that all of those people at least would be making a living as editors in chief.
And there's a number of other projects that we are, different people in our orbit are working on, for example, a sort of encyclopedia of debate, a debate guide so to speak--something like Debatepedia, but done our way--and summaries of the news and a few other things. Actually, five years down the road, by then, I hope that I will no longer be the editor in chief--indeed, I've already committed not to being the editor in chief--and that someone else would have taken over, and in fact that person should have been replaced by a third editor in chief by five years from now. And so the whole community should be, as it were, a sovereign entity beholden only to the community members and not to any single individual. 
See more CNET content tagged:
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia, Wiki, co-founder, expert
That is the tough nut to crack. Gaming the Web has become a full-court sport and the semiotics-trained marketing experts are very good at it. Radar guns spawn radar detectors. Perhaps Citizendium will be the first noteworthy project to focus on means to de-spin information. It may be useful to study the early years of broadcast journalism to find lessons-learned as each medium has dealt with this very old problem through policy management of sources, resources, fact checking, corroboration and writing style that deflates agenda-emphasis. It is quite hard to write but breathtakingly simple looking when published. Start with the term 'advocacy journalism' and its predecessor 'yellow journalism' and see how and why what was once considered anathema to a well-trained professional journalist became trendy in the zeitgeist of post-60s social reporting, then morphed in to the vicious and one-sided reporting that is typified by Fox.
Removing anonymity is a huge step in the right direction. It won't overcome the problem of star-power where building a personality for the sake of having a frontman for a cause is the exact analog of creating a pre-processor gain stage in an amplifier. Pure signal is seldom useful because of the raw power required. So your idea of using experts is right but networks of experts like any network becomes socially organized and over time drifts toward the oldest connections. How to get a reasonable and just refresh rate into that is challenging.
Also, for any significant presence in an information ecosystem, there should be a competitor to ensure the quality of the resource. As I daily see more reports of schools refusing the use of wikipedia for research and the rising tide of skilled manipulators of marketable press, I'm glad to see Citizendium taking on the task. Good luck!
The problem is YOU.
Wikipedia is a source of information not the be all and end all. It is a STARTING point for information to get aquainted with a subject.
Anyone using these types of sites at all is a moron.
- Elitist BS
- by adlyb1 April 8, 2007 7:42 AM PDT
- A person who does not a bunch of letters after his name can be as knowledgeable about a topic as someone who a fair portion of his in higher education.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(7 Comments)Wikipedia is a working man's resource. It isn't perfect, but it has served me well.
So, go build your own fort and we'll keep this one.
8^)