Citizendium: Difference between revisions

Citizendium ("a citizens' compendium of everything") is an online wiki-based encyclopedia first intended to begin as a "progressive or gradual fork" of the English Wikipedia,^[1] though a decision to start largely from scratch was then made before launch. It aims to function in a similar way to Wikipedia, but does not allow anonymous editing and introduces a new "editor" role for specialists in particular subjects.

The Citizendium project is spearheaded by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and former editor-in-chief of Nupedia.^[2][3] It will be carried out under the auspices of the Citizendium Foundation.^[4] Sanger was previously involved in another online encyclopedia project, Digital Universe, but he left it to focus on Citizendium.^[5]

On March 25, 2007, Citizendium was opened to the public, but is still in its beta phase. The Citizendium Foundation is listed as a project of the Tides Center.^[6]

Sanger said in an October 17, 2006 press release that Citizendium "will soon attempt to unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online."^[7] The project began its pilot phase in November 2006.

On January 18, 2007 a change of plans was announced. Sanger announced on the CZ mailing list that only articles marked "CZ Live", those which have been or will soon be worked on by Citizendium contributors, would remain on the site, and all other articles forked from Wikipedia would be deleted. Not all Citizendium contributors were supportive of this change, but Sanger emphasized that this deletion was "an experiment" and a new set of Wikipedia articles could be uploaded if the experiment were deemed unsuccessful.^[8]

According to statements and essays on Citizendium.org, the project was initially intended to begin as a fork of Wikipedia, carrying a copy of each article — under the rules of the GNU Free Documentation License — as it existed on Wikipedia at the time of Citizendium's launch.^[9] However, after initiating the idea of not forking, and then soliciting comments on the matter from Citizendium mailing list and web forum members, Sanger said that a complete fork at launch was not a "foregone conclusion."^[10] On January 18, 2007, Sanger announced that the pilot will, as an experiment, only carry articles that have been or will soon be worked on by Citizendium contributors, instead of a complete set of Wikipedia articles. He stated that the experiment "represents a reconception of our project's basic aim."^[8]

No announcement has yet been made on Citizendium in languages other than English, but Sanger has stated in his essays that they may be forthcoming after the English language version is established and working successfully.

The stated aim of the project is to create a "new compendium of knowledge" based on the contributions of "intellectuals," defined as "educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly."^[11] Citizendium hopes to foster an expert culture and a community that encourages subject specialists (presently named as "editors") to contribute, and "citizens" (to be called "authors") to "respect" the expert contributions (by what he referred to as a "gentle process of guidance").

An appeals process for disagreements between editors and authors, and between different editors, will be in place, according to a provisional "Citizendium Policy Outline" published by Sanger.^[12] Experts will be required to verify their qualifications openly, for transparency and publicly accepted authority.^[12] This contrasts with the open and largely anonymous nature of Wikipedia, where subject specialists have neither any verifiable special knowledge of their subject nor agreed special status. Sanger has stated that editors will not have pre-approval rights over edits by ordinary authors, though editors will have somewhat undefined authority over articles that fall within their specific area of expertise.

Many of Citizendium's proposed policies are attempts to correct perceived flaws in the original design and present public image of Wikipedia that have led to problems with Wikipedia's acceptance as a valid and trustworthy resource.^[13] Librarian and expert consensus seems to be broadly that Wikipedia is a valuable starting point for knowledge but (as agreed by Wales) should not be used as a sole or primary source,^[14] and quoting from Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in formal papers. Some educational institutions have blocked Wikipedia in the past while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources.^[15]

Regarding Wikipedia's oft-cited problems, Sanger wrote that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to … academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism."^[11]

Citizendium will only in rare instance allow anonymous editing, including possible proofreading by trusted copy editors, who have low-level authority to amend the texts for typographical, syntactical and grammatical errors etc. People will be asked to register under their real names with a working e-mail address, in order to participate. (Details of this process are still to be worked out. Problems with online safety and privacy are currently being addressed).

Sanger has stated that Citizendium administrators, or sysops, will be called "constables," and will need a bachelor's degree to qualify. Sanger has also suggested a minimum "maturity" requirement — 25 years of age — for constables.^[12] The "head" constable will be the Chief Constable (Ruth Ifcher), and the head editor will be the Managing Editor.^[4]

Recent comments by Sanger envision an Editor-in-Chief (Sanger himself) who will be the "main individual in charge," and who will be part of and answerable to a Board of Directors. There will also be Chief Subject Editors selected for each discipline treated in the encyclopedia. Sanger states that final decisions about management structure will not be made "until more of the (future) primary stakeholders are on the scene."^[16] In a Citizendium blog entry of November 10 2006, constable Sarah Tuttle announced the formation of an "executive committee" consisting of herself, Sanger and eleven others, which will work on issues of "long term governance" of the project.^[17]

Sanger has indicated that Citizendium articles will be subject to an "approval" process after they have achieved reasonable quality. A subject expert "editor" will select a version of the article to be identified in some way as "approved". However, further editing of the article would be allowed, at least to some extent. If those further edits were judged by the editor to be improvements, a newer version of the article would be chosen as the approved version. This approval process appears to be a response by Sanger to criticisms from some members of the Citizendium mailing list and web forum that the new project would not be sufficiently controlled by experts. There will be a dispute-resolution process for disagreements about which version should be selected as "approved."^[12]

In an October 26 post to the Citizendium web forum, then Managing Editor David Marshall indicated that the approved version of an article, if it exists, will be the default version displayed to a visitor to the site. If a contributor wishes to modify or add to the article, login will be necessary to work on the "dynamic wiki page" open to editing:

"All reader searches will auto-forward to the most recently approved version of the page (assuming that a version has been approved). Once at an approved page, the reader will be given the option to register/log in as an author and move to the dynamic wiki page in current use for development purposes."^[18]

Whether Citizendium can succeed as a more expert-driven source of information than Wikipedia has been questioned. Information World Review wrote that Citizendium offered "experts who make their living from writing or publishing material little or no incentive to offer up their knowledge."^[19] Ars Technica asked about the project's reliance on expert guidance: "But no encyclopedia can tell the future; will we all submit to 'gentle expert guidance' five years from now?"^[20]

The project was announced by Sanger on September 15, 2006, at the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Berlin. He gave no deadline for the full launch of the wiki.^[21][22] However, on October 2, 2006 Sanger released a pilot project announcement that envisions a fully functioning wiki within "one to two months".

In an apparent attempt to quicken the pace of the project, on October 2, 2006 Citizendium web forum moderator Peter Hitchmough suggested what he called an "alpha test" of the concept. Hitchmough proposed the forking of a limited number of Wikipedia articles to a site where Citizendium web forum and mailing list members could "rewrite a complete section" of Wikipedia content.^[23]

Larry Sanger reacted enthusiastically to the idea and at first suggested his already existing Textop wiki as the site for the alpha test. Sanger later posted that Textop would not be a good choice, but showed continued interest in the proposal. He envisioned a "restricted-access" wiki where the idea could be tried and requested further discussion.^[24]

No access to the pilot version of Citizendium, even read-only, was allowed to the general public. Sanger stated: "Only invited people will be able to view and edit the pilot project wiki."^[25] Sanger also said that constables for the pilot project will be chosen by the chief constable.^[26]

In a press release on October 17, Sanger announced: "the fledgling Citizendium Foundation will launch a six-week pilot project open to potential contributors by invitation". Several editors and other project leaders were named. It was also announced that the Citizendium Foundation had "started the process of applying for 501(c)(3) status" and had "received a firm commitment for a significant seed grant from a foundation, as well as small personal donations."^[7] In a follow-up post to the press release, Sanger said that the initial group allowed access to the pilot would consist of "ten editors, three constables, six authors, and me."^[27]

The pilot project began operations on October 23.^[28] On November 8, Larry Sanger reported that 263 user names had access to the pilot wiki, 183 articles on the wiki were "live" (meaning "someone is or intends to be working on them") and there were about 300 total edits to the wiki on November 7.^[29]

In a January 17, 2007 post to the Citizendium forum, Larry Sanger stated that "we have had only 10–20 (very) active people out of 500 accounts created." As a result, Sanger decided to delete all articles besides those marked "CZ live" from the pilot project in an attempt to motivate greater participation.^[30] On January 22 Citizendium experimented with a new self-registration procedure: read/write access was granted automatically after creation of the account.^[31] There were a few instances of vandalism after this change, though the vandalism was quickly reverted.^[32] On January 19, Sanger announced the formal organization of Citizendium as a legal non-profit.^[33].

On February 16, in response to rising site vandalism, automatic account creation^[31] was put on hold while increased protections were being put in place to counter vandalism.^[34] The next day, page moves were limited to constables as an additional measure against vandalism.^[35] In addition, Sanger continued the process of un-forking Citizendium from Wikipedia by inviting contributors to delete any Wikipedia content that had changed only superficially since it was imported.

On March 25, 2007, Citizendium ended its pilot phase and went live, into its beta phase, and the site became publicly readable.^[36] The launch coincided with a feature-length Associated Press article that ran widely, with a title in USA Today of "Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia".^[37]

As of July 11, 2007, thirty-one articles have been approved^[38] by the editors, including: Bacteriophage, Barbara McClintock, Biology, Chemistry, Chiropractic, Shirley Chisholm, Complex Number, Contraception (medical methods), DNA, Dog, John Franklin, Horizontal gene transfer, Infant Colic, Joan of Arc, Life, Literature, Metabolism, Northwest passage, Pittsburgh, History since 1800, Pittsburgh, History from 1800, Prime Number, RNA interference, Telephone Newspaper, Terrorism, Tux, Vertebral subluxation, and Wheat. According to the Citizendium main page: "Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2. All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined."^[39]

The day prior to launch, Sanger released an essay, "Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed" in which he stated that activity at Citizendium grew from 100 edits a day in the first month to over 500 prior to launch.^[40] After the launch, on March 27, 2007 a press release quotes Sanger as saying "You don’t have to choose between content and accountability. We have shown that we can create open and credible content. We can, in fact, be open to all sorts of participants, but still hold people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community."^[41]

Sometime after the launch, it was noted that Citizendium's family friendly policy would mean the project would likely tend to avoid articles on slang terms for sexual activity, and particularly explicit articles on sexual practices.^[42]

On June 29, 2007, Sanger announced via the project-wide mailing list what he dubbed "Citizendium 2.0". Characterizing his comments as a "project planning document", Sanger detailed a series of initiatives designed to launch Citizendium into its next phase of development. The document outlined plans for a judicial board, an advisory board, a personnel manager, a new chairman of the editorial council, wider participation in the project by volunteers, a system of subpages for articles, and an expanded article checklist.^[43]

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