A student in my “Ethical and social implications of technology” course pointed us to Citizendium, an upstart Wikipedia alternative/replacement. Their goal is to solve some of the vandalism, spam, and reliability issues Wikipedia has (mildly) suffered from by moving to a model somewhere between Wikipedia’s uber-egalitarian model and the somber-expert-author model of Encyclopedia Britannica.
There are a lot of issues here (we had a very nice discussion in class on the value, or lack thereof, of having a “real name” attached to an article), but it seems to me that the central issue for Citizendium’s growth and survival is whether they can attract good writers and editors.
I think one of the hardest things for any community-based web thing-y is attracting a large enough base of enthusiastic contributers to make it self-sustaining. Most people really don’t have the time, energy, or enthusiasm to contribute much. I sometimes struggle to get students to contribute to a course web site, and they have a clear vested interest!
Drawing in the talent and energy is often a matter of being first (or at least early) and having a model that lots of people will buy into. Wikipedia has already done that. How, then, does Citizendium either generate a new, independent community of writers and editors, or draw away writers and editors from Wikipedia, and can they do it fast enough to reach some critical mass before people lose interest and drift away?
I guess a key question is how unhappy the key writers and editors are on Wikipedia. If they’re pretty disgruntled and are looking for a new home for their talents, then maybe Citizendium can draw them in. If, on the other hand, they’re reasonably content, Citizendium has a much harder job on their hands.
Fascinating topic for a course.
I’ve written on the question you raise:
http://www.citizendium.org/whyczwillsucceed.html
–Larry Sanger
Thanks for the pointer. I’m guessing that it may really come down to the buy-in of librarians and academics. If they’ll vote with their writing/editing feet, and can build a big enough and useful enough encyclopedia then I can imagine that it might work. If they don’t, then it’s less clear how Citizendium can hijack Wikipedia’s momentum.
If I read an article about evolution, I would prefer to know if PZ Myers wrote it, or some Discovery Institute hack. Some subjects lend themselves to public correction and policing, but others require a level of specific knowledge that a very small pool of people are capable of doing that community monitoring. Credentials and peer review do have a purpose in the later case.