Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-07-30/SPV

Again, I'm the temporary editor this week as we continue to work around summer travel schedules. As with the last time I filled in for Ral315, we bring you some more articles with personal views and analysis. Last time we had a book review, and we hope to have some similar coverage in the future. This time the topic is Citizendium, the project sometimes touted as a Wikipedia alternative. Ragesoss has written a critique focusing on its "Approved Articles", and his original draft quickly drew some attention, as a result of which we now have a response from Mike Johnson of Citizendium. We're carrying the two articles together, letting our readers balance any difference of opinion for themselves.

As you may know, this week will also be the third

--Michael Snow

Eight months after launch, Citizendium is still evolving but has not reached a critical mass of participation. The project is a wiki encyclopedia led by Larry Sanger, which distinguishes itself from Wikipedia with "gentle expert oversight" and the use of real names by its contributors. It received a flurry of media attention in October and November 2006, but generated only modest publicity for the site's public opening in March 2007.

The site is now averaging less than 200 article edits per day and has approximately 2400 live articles; by comparison, Conservapedia ("the conservative encyclopedia you can trust") generates about 1000 article edits per day and has produced about 15,000 articles since going live in November 2006. Because of its real names policy and verification process for new users, however, Citizendium has virtually no vandalism and little disruptive behavior. According to Citizendium's statistics page, new article creation has held steady at about twelve per day over the last two months.

Between July 12 and July 19, the project added about two new "Citizens" per day. The influx of new users has fallen considerably each month since March. Citizendium's registration process is much more demanding than that of many other wiki encyclopedias, and is currently done via email. On the Citizendium blog Sanger recently reported a backlog of dozens of account requests; nearly two dozen accounts were added between July 20 and July 22. Sanger has promised a 24-hour turnaround for future account requests. Delay between account request and account creation likely accounts for the significant disparity between the number of new accounts added each month and the number of users making their first edit (in recent months between one half and one third of the number of new accounts).

Though intended as an

Citizendium features a process of approval, by which articles are certified as factually correct and balanced by individual editors or groups of editors with relevant professional expertise. As of July 22, when most of the research for this article was completed, Citizendium had thirty-one Approved articles. Of these, seventeen are wholly original Citizendium content, five are identified as containing Wikipedia content, five are derived from Wikipedia articles but unattributed as such (or were unattributed until recently), and four contain similar content to their Wikipedia counterparts but were released separately to Citizendium by the main contributors.

As on Wikipedia, the production of Citizendium original articles ranges from single-authorship (often with minor copyediting by others) to coordinated collaboration among a number of writers. One of the project's strengths is in the life sciences; twelve of the thirty-one Approved articles fall under the Biology Workgroup, with two more classified as Health Sciences. The first Approved article, Biology, is a concise and well-written historical introduction to the field of biology, but is perhaps better compared to Wikipedia's History of biology than the field/discipline-oriented Biology. Life is a collaborative project like "Biology"; this article is one of several that are longer and more heavily referenced than the corresponding Wikipedia articles (see Life).

Other Citizendium originals that contain more prose and/or citations than Wikipedia's include: Ancient Celtic music (see

For example, Complex number is shorter than Wikipedia's Complex number, with a much simpler structure. It includes a numerical example of complex arithmetic, but leaves out many of the specific applications and properties discussed in the Wikipedia article. Overall, it is geared toward someone who is completely unfamiliar with the concept, whereas Wikipedia's article is organized so that more advanced readers can easily jump to the specific details they need.

Forks of Chiropractic and Vertebral subluxation—spearheaded on Citizendium by practicing chiropractor D. Matt Innis, who had also worked on them as Dematt on Wikipedia—evolved considerably from the Wikipedia versions of Chiropractic and Vertebral subluxation. Most of the exact Wikipedia prose has been replaced in these two articles, except for short phrases, though much of the original structure remains. However, they are listed as Citizendium originals because of the central role Innis played in the Wikipedia versions. Many of the citations were trimmed out over the course of the articles' Citizendium life, and a number of editors worked on them in addition to Innis. The Approved version in each case represent a compromise between a chiropractor and several physicians.

The five Approved articles that are acknowledged as Wikipedia-based (Barbara McClintock, Chemistry, DNA, Dog, and Wheat) have all changed since forking from the Wikipedia versions (mostly ca. September 2006), but Wikipedia has outpaced Citizendium in terms of added citations in each case since the fork.

History of Pittsburgh, primarily written by Wikipedian Tom Cool and uploaded to Citizendium by Cool, was split into two articles (Pittsburgh before and since 1800) and received some copyediting, but the content is largely unchanged from the Wikipedia version.

The remaining five Approved articles were originally based on Wikipedia articles, but were unmarked as such. They retain varying degrees of the original prose and structure. For one of the articles (Félix d'Hérelle), the lack of attribution was a clerical oversight (since corrected), as the versions before Approval were correctly marked. The main author of John Franklin claims that all remaining Wikipedia prose was originally contributed by him (former Wikipedian Profrap); however, some prose by others (for example, from this contribution by Blainster) remains in the article. Unattributed content from Wikipedia's bacteriophage also appears in the Citizendium version.

Finally, unattributed forks of Metabolism and RNA interference (see Metabolism and RNA interference) had similar outcomes to the five attributed Wikipedia articles: they have expanded and changed, but less so than the Wikipedia versions (both of which are now Featured Articles). Particularly substantial work went into both versions of "metabolism", the last common ancestor of which was hardly more than a stub.

Hello Wikipedia—this is Mike Johnson, casual Wikipedian,^[1] and member of Citizendium's Executive Committee. Before I start talking about what's been going on at Citizendium (unofficially and with a healthy dose of personal opinion), I'd like to thank Sage Ross and Michael Snow for the invitation to write this piece for the Signpost. Once we start our own community newsletter I'll be happy to extend the same courtesy.

Citizendium at a glance

A quick primer: Citizendium is a wiki encyclopedia everyone can edit, but

• Users must log in under their real names to edit;
• Experts (e.g., professors, experienced professionals, or equivalent) are empowered to arbitrate disputes over matters of content within (and only within) their field of expertise;
• Experts vet and approve excellent-quality, 'stable' versions of articles, though progress can continue on 'draft' pages;
• The governance structure is more explicit than that on Wikipedia, with arguably firmer^[2] and clearer laws and an editorial framework designed to better focus effort.

If I had to summarize Citizendium into a sentence, it'd be this: Wikipedia was concerned with making a working online encyclopedia; Citizendium is concerned with making a community that, if it works, will make a really good online encyclopedia.

So, is it working? I think there are many hopeful signs. We've got 2400 articles, 31 approved articles, and over 2000 users (265 of whom are editors). What do these numbers mean? Well, nobody really knows. But I think the health of our project can also be judged by what 'meta' projects we've done or are in the process of doing (more on that later).

Our main project bottleneck has been registration, as Sage Ross briefly alludes to in his sister article. Geni from Foundation-l has a pretty good take on this: "Trying to fight off our smarter vandals without having our antivandal people tends to result in people having to make registration hard which kills the project."

Such has been a uniquely challenging ecosystem to jump into, and our participation numbers, though good, haven't been as good as they could have been due to our relatively hard registration system. As I'm writing this, though, our tech guys are implementing a semi-automated registration system based on a MediaWiki plugin, which allows users to more easily apply, and allows us to approve applications with a single click should they meet our basic identification requirements. While it still requires users to jump through a hoop before they edit (something I personally still have qualms about), I expect that an easier application system combined with quicker responses will greatly benefit our numbers, and it'll also allow us to start doing serious academic recruiting.

How good is Citizendium's content?

Sage Ross takes a look at this question, and though we appear to come out fairly well in his analysis, I'm not sure how fair it is to have either Wikipedians or Citizendians attempt to publicly critique each others' content. Andrew Keen notwithstanding, clearly both models can create good content. I'm certainly optimistic that the Citizendium model will tend to produce markedly better content than the Wikipedia model (else I wouldn't be volunteering there), and I do think our approved articles are simply great (examples: Biology, Wheat, Northwest Passage).^[3][4]

Still on the issue of content, both projects have borrowed a bit of content from the other without attribution, and sorting out how to handle things (and how irritated to get) when this happens will be an ongoing process.^[5][6] Generally speaking, our projects' relationship will be many things to many people, but the one which has always made the most sense to me is that we're fundamentally sister projects working toward basically the same goal, albeit with some occasional good-natured sibling rivalry (see also: David Gerard's and my positions on project rivalry and cross-criticism).

Other exciting things happening at Citizendium

Governance

I think most Wikipedians would agree that project governance really does matter. We're committed and laying the groundwork to be a new sort of 'online republic', with

• A binding community charter: in addition to setting out rights, duties, and expectations very clearly, a charter allows a community to have some explicit control over how it evolves. Without a constitution or charter, governance just happens. That can be a strength, but governance also just happens down the path of least resistance, and there's no central, credible process by which to make fundamental changes.
• Four branches of government: Executive, Legislative, Enforcement (our "constabulary"), and Judicial.^[7]
• Separation of power between the branches, via various checks and balances, term limits, and the rule that no one may be a member of more than one governing body.

It'll be interesting to see how such formal governance structures will work out. Clearly there is a nuanced hierarchy on Wikipedia (in mirrorshard's words, a "very flat official hierarchy, and [a] very steep, complex, multidimensional unofficial one". I think more formal governance has the potential to be a lot "saner", but also higher friction. We're doing what we can to prevent that, but sometimes friction can only be gauged by trial-and-error and we'll have to adjust things as we go.

Citizendium 2.0

We're taking advantage of Citizendium's editorial infrastructure to push through some interesting side-projects under the "Citizendium 2.0" title, namely,

• Collecting a rich set of related reference content on clearly-organized subpages (example: the right-hand panel on our Biology draft).
• Eduzendium, where "The Citizendium invites graduate seminar instructors to include the crafting of a Citizendium article as an assignment" (we'll be running at least one Eduzendium pilot project this fall);
• Various other initiatives (check the blog for more): personally, I'm most excited about the concept of a Citizendium-refereed free content brokerage.

Why should Wikipedians care about Citizendium?

I'd offer three reasons.

1. The first is the most obvious. We're an alternative to Wikipedia, and we have a lot of good and interesting things going on. You might consider editing here. We welcome Wikipedians, and a lot of you may appreciate how we do things and what problems we don't suffer from (e.g., vandalism).
2. The second follows the saying, 'let a thousand flowers bloom': it becomes easier to understand and improve your wiki once your sample size rises above 1.
3. The third may not be intuitive, but I think it's very real: I suggest that Wikipedians should be deeply invested in Citizendium's success since having a viable competitor is invaluable for the long-term health of any organization. I won't make the full argument here, but it could be that if 10% of Wikipedians left and joined Citizendium, it'd be better for Wikipedia in the long run. It's just a thought—but do think about the value of having a strong competitor.

I don't want to play up the competitor angle too much, however, since I think we're ultimately on the same side: that of making more and better free content available to the world.

Oldwindybear joined Wikipedia in August 2005. His request for adminship succeeded with a nearly unanimous tally of 66/0/1, so he was promoted by Deskana on 14 July 2007.

Three days later, on 17 July, Deskana asked other administrators to investigate a suspicion that Oldwindybear was using User:Stillstudying as a sock puppet account. This suspicion first came to light in May 2006 at Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Oldwindybear, but User:Dijxtra closed the case as inconclusive. The year-old sock puppet case was not cited on Oldwindybear's request for adminship, but once it was discovered, the administrators decided to investigate further.

A

This week's

(← Prev)	Signpost archives	(Next →)

Harvard professors reflect on Wikipedia experience

Two Harvard Business School professors discuss their interactions with Wikipedia in the context of an

The San Francisco Chronicle carried an opinion piece about the approach that Wikipedia has taken in dealing with Internet censorship in China, and how it differs from the behaviour exhibited by large corporations such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Wikipedia, run by a non-profit organisation, is not as subject to the whims of shareholders, and there is simply no advantage to the unethical censorship of its content. Wales' stance on the issue and the contributions of Chinese Wikipedians who continued to contribute even while the site was blocked were praised by the author.

Wales: wikis useful in corporate setting

Newsweek interviewed Jimmy Wales on his thoughts about the wiki making an entrance into the corporate arena. Wales notes that the wiki has become more mainstream recently, spurred on by the popularity of Wikipedia. He believes that wikis are useful where there is a "clear and shared vision", and the editable nature of a wiki encourages consensus. To take advantage of efficiency that wikis afford, Wales believes that companies will need to become more free in the way they do business.

Other mentions in the news

Other mentions of Wikipedia in the online press include:

• Wikipedia Infiltrated by Intelligence Agents? - Slashdot generated a lot of heat and not much light when it linked to a Korean website, which claims to have evidence suggesting that a certain Wikipedia administrator is, or at least was, an intelligence operative.
• 'I'm contributing to something greater' - ^demon was interviewed in his local paper, providing insight into the life of an administrator.
• Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur": BRILLIANT! - this was written a while back, but Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig provides an in-depth, biting critique of Keen's book (see archived story).
• Translating Harry Potter to support the governing ideology in Iran - Wikipedia was cited in an article about Harry Potter translations in Iran.
• Wikipedia founder gets Grubby with search - the launch of Wikia-related Grub open source search invites obvious comparisons with Wikipedia.

Administrators

Eight users were

Bots

Eight bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: BoxCrawler (task request), KiloBot (task request), Cherybot (task request), OverlordQBot (task request), Chem-awb (task request), O bot (task request),

Featured content

Eighteen articles were promoted to

No lists were de-featured last week.

No portals were promoted to featured status last week.

No topics or sounds were promoted to featured status last week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: World's largest compass rose, Las Vegas Strip, Mammatus cloud, Golda Meir, A man exemplifying anti-Iranian sentiment, Salt mounds, and Prairie dog.

Eight pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.

• 
  Slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp
• 
  World War II aircraft worker
• 
  Pimelea spicata
• 
  Neuron cell diagram
• 
  Divers Preparing for Work
• 
  Honeybee mite (Varroa destructor)
• 
  Tōyō Miyatake
• 
  Pupae of the Western honey bee

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

Fixed bugs

• An API query for the imageinfo of more than one image now returns each image's information once, rather than re-returning the information for earlier images in the information for later images. (r24372, bug 10662)
• A bug preventing the checkbox used by administrators to move-protect pages without protecting them from edits working properly in all browsers was fixed. (r24419, bug 10732)
• The 'delete' link for old versions of an image now only appears for administrators (before, the link appeared for all users but didn't work except for administrators). (r24432, bug 10741)

New features

• It's now possible to provide an edit summary when reverting an image to a previous version. (r24439, bug 10739)
• Several enhancements were made to the API: (r24453, [1])
  • The query list=search now allows for full text searches (like the 'Search' option of the search box).
  • The query list=allusers now allows returning and filtering by user groups (such as administrator and bureaucrat). (bug 10684)
  • There was also a breaking change to the output of prop=revisions, that removed a duplicate pageid in the output.

Ongoing news

• Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla.

The Arbitration Committee accepted three new cases this week, and closed one of these cases as well as three older cases.

Closed cases

• Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram: A review of compliance with the earlier decision in Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram was closed without action because Certified.Gangsta has not edited since early June. The review may be reopened if Certified.Gangsta resumes editing.

• three revert rule by Swatjester
  . The committee advised Miskin to seek consensus on an article's talkpage if his initial edits are reverted, and advised Swatjester to take into account the length of time since previous blocks when deciding on the length of a later block and to treat all editors violating the 3RR fairly.