CZ:Myths and Facts

For whatever reason, the Citizendium has been subject to large amounts of misunderstanding. This page is devoted to correcting those errors.

Myth: we're experts-only.

Reality: we love experts--we admit it. But this is still a remarkably open project. You can be an author with no degrees and only a basic facility with English. We agree heartily with the larger "Web 2.0" crowd that most reasonably well educated people have something to contribute to a project like this. Our youngest registered members are 13, and we have some active high school students who have done good work.

For further reading, see The Editor Role and The Author Role.

Myth: we're a top-down project, with expert editors giving orders to underlings.

Reality: wrong. We're a wiki--yes, we really are. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. No editor can simply delete your contributions without a good explanation, and such deletions rarely happen in any case. We are a strongly, "radically," collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody "owns" and "gives orders" about anything here. Of course, we aren't the first to use this concept. It really gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric Raymond, who compared communities that create things collaboratively to "bazaars," as opposed to the old-fashioned "cathedral" model where everyone has a role and a function, and orders are given from the top down. (See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added "village elders" wandering the bazaar. Their presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.

For further reading, see Group Editing and How to collaborate.