CZ:Managing Editor/2012/001 - Interview Correio Braziliense

We received a request for an interview from Correio Braziliense, with the following set of questions. No word limit was stated. Anyone is invited to contribute to the replies until Friday, Jan 13 noon UTC.

How did the idea of creating Citizendium come up?

When was it created?

Citizendium was founded in 2006 by Larry Sanger, who also co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales.

How does it work?

Sanger originally envisaged Citizendium as a project to improve Wikipedia articles by having all contributors edit pages under their real, verified identities, with specialists to provide "gentle expert guidance". However, in 2007 the early contributors agreed with Sanger to delete most of the Wikipedia pages and start a brand-new knowledge project. Since then, the site has grown to over 16,000 mostly-original articles, of which a little under 1% have been 'approved' by experts and locked from further editing, though improvements are possible on a secondary 'draft' page. Citizendium articles also divide their content into separate subpages, such as for weblinks or videos that relate to the topic.

Citizendium is not an experts-only project; anyone who is willing to contribute under their real, verified name and maintain a biograpghy is allowed to edit articles. This policy is designed to create a more collegial atmosphere. Although joining Citizendium is therefore not an instantaneous process, through this policy the site benefits from very little disruptive editing ('vandalism'), which is more common on open wiki projects such as Wikipedia. All contributors are known as 'Authors', and those recognised as experts due to their qualifications and/or experiences are called 'Editors' (by contrast, on Wikipedia an 'editor' is any user who can modify pages). Behaviour on the site is moderated by administrators who are titled as 'Constables'. Citizendium also has two elected bodies: the 'Editorial Council' to decide matters of content, and the 'Management Council', which deals with administrative, technical and legal issues. There is also a directly-elected Managing Editor, who is able to make interim decisions and represent the project, and an elected Ombudsman to mediate in disputes.

Citizendium is currently available only in English, and has a requirement that contributors be able to write acceptably in that language. A long-term goal is to open versions in other languages.

What is the importance of having such a vast offer of information?

How does this change peoples lives?

In principle the public encyclopedia can change people's lives by providing them with guidance to the best knowledge on topics they are interested in. It becomes a form of education outside school walls.

For the contributors it changes their lives in many more ways, as they learn more about this form of human interaction, and learn better how to communicate with a very wide public, rather than a narrow field of specialists. It also can happen (though less than one would like) that one learns a new form of enjoyment in a new kind of creative process that involves learning not only the subjects that one collaborates upon, but also about one's own peculiarities that weren't so visible before. In particular, one learns that how one arrives at beliefs can be greatly improved upon, and that differences of opinion are opportunities, not rhetorical debates.

How do you see online collaboration nowadays?

On-line collaboration nowadays is rare and accidental. Especially in anonymous settings, like Wikipedia and unlike Citizendium, the crudest and rudest behavior eventually dominates, and the goal of the enterprise becomes scoring points or embarrassing opponents, much like the Republican presidential primary this year. The positive goals that were the basis for the original foundation become lost completely.

How do you see it in the future?

One would hope that groups could form that would by virtue of their organization make collaboration the norm. A possible motivation is the fun that collaboration allows. I know of co-authors who found collaboration on a book was a thrill, and I also know examples where the co-authors never spoke to each other again. Although writing a book can be motivated by many factors, for most authors (at least of scholarly works) the rewards are largely the realization of a conception and putting a picture together. Can an organizational model be found that amplifies the fun and smooths out the differences?

How does Citizendium survive?

(in terms of money, is it by donations, publicity?)

Citizendium is currently financed entirely through donations. Advertisements are prohibited by our Charter.

What guarantees the credibility of the information provided?

There is no guarantee for the credibility of any information other than, perhaps, that from primary sources. The advantage of freely accessible online resources is that anyone can verify the information provided there and - in the case of collaborative environments like Citizendium - correct or update it as necessary. This vindication process can be centred around expertise or the many-eyes principle, or combinations thereof, as we are trying at Citizendium.

Ultimately the success of the encyclopaedia rests upon the climate under which it operates. A major effect upon this climate is the requirement of Citizendium that contributors be identified with real names. The use of a real identity puts a damper upon wild editing by anonymous contributors and the use of many aliases to create the appearance of popular support for opinions that are really those of only a few. Another major influence is the government of the project, which can engender a civil and responsible environment or instead support the creation of cliques and gangs that bully contributors or enforce their own peculiar criteria for acceptance of content. Here Citizendium has a colored past, but overall it has succeeded to a larger extent than Wikipedia where bickering and gang warfare is common on Talk pages, and simple politeness is often ignored in the hurry to gain points or to shoulder unwanted viewpoints off stage.

Is it difficult to establish a new free encyclopedia when you have others such as Wikipedia and when you have search mechanisms such as Google ?

It is always difficult to try to fill a niche that is already occupied, but Citizendium attempts to create its own niche in the world of free online encyclopedias by combining expert-based and crowd-based approaches. Wikipedia has recently scaled up, with some success, its efforts to increase expert participation, and it is not unreasonable to assume that the very existence of Citizendium has helped catalyze that. But still, Wikipedia's editorial policies are designed around consensus on crowd-sourced content, ours around expert approval thereof. The two are not necessarily aligned, and both can lead to editorial decisions that would, with hindsight, be regarded as wrong. The art, then, is to structure and manage the project such that the probability for errors of this kind is minimized, and Citizendium is an important experiment in this regard. Google's encyclopedic venture Knol is bound to close down later this year, and while Google searches are a major source of traffic to Citizendium, they only list and rank information and do not weave it into the structure of existing knowledge, so we do not see them as having significant overlap with the Citizendium niche.

The difficulty in establishing an encyclopaedia is a long term assessment. At the moment Wikipedia has a great deal more attention than its competitors, and it appears that it cannot be dislodged from the niche it has occupied. However, that is not the whole story. A problem Wikipedia has unearthed but has not solved is the ability to maintain interest among competent contributors. That difficulty arises from several sources. One of these is the very difficult environment for contributors because anyone can contribute, and contribute with anonymity. The result is that a competent contributor has to educate others that wish to modify content, and persuade them to leave things in good shape. Apart from a few fanatics or retired souls with lots of time on their hands, no reasonable person wishes to spend hours educating every new arrival that wishes to make an addition, or revisit the same misconceptions over and over as the latest bus-load of neophytes arrives. Another difficulty is that administration of the encyclopedia is as yet an art little understood: administrators have to deal with unreasonable contributors and prima donnas that are certain they are infallible and should have preferential treatment. Every journal editor has faced such problems, and because journals have an organization based upon experts and the desire of contributors to maintain a solid public reputation, these problems have been solved. But with the more open system of the public encyclopedia where contributors don't much care what the other contributors think of them, where credentials are not highly regarded or readily identified, the problem is yet to be solved.

The upshot is that the successful final form for the free encyclopedia has not yet been found. It appears likely that Wikipedia is too rigidly organized to learn from its own experience and is, in fact, responding by becoming more and more authoritarian and inflexible with time. It is run by what amounts to life-time appointed Administrators beyond community recall, leading to a largely unresponsive aristocracy more interested in running with the hounds than in running the country. Citizendium is a more fluid establishment, has a less contentious public to deal with, and may be able to cope with evolution better − time will tell. In any case, readers do not have to choose between Citizendium and Wikipedia. Both are freely available, and different readers will have different preferences as between their different approaches to different subjects.

As for Google, it is becoming more and more apparent that searches do not turn up everything searched for, and of course, provide no assessment of quality. An on-line encyclopedia provides guidance, suggests related topics, prompts questions that might not otherwise occur. In short, Google is a big asset in writing articles on topics, both through Google itself and its associates Google books and Google scholar, but these resources have to be combined, assessed and put into a picture along with other sources to form an article in an on-line encyclopedia. The encyclopedia has a very much more ambitious role to play than a search engine.