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 had earlier worked on an online encyclopedia project called Nupedia before co-founding Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001. After an initial private testing phase, the project was publicly launched in March 2007.

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, whereupon the improved version may be approved to replace the previous approved and locked version.

In order to free articles from supplementary material, pages are organized in "clusters" of subpages that complement the main article with separate "subpage" tabs, such as for weblinks, videos, annotated further reading suggestions (bibliography subpage), 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 minimal biography 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 called "Constables".

Since October 2010, Citizendium has had a Charter and 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.

As usual on wikis, each article hosts a Discussion, or Talk, page that encourages/enables contributors to discuss issues and topics related to the article's development.

Citizendium is currently being developed 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?

Note: the question can be understood in several ways. We have replied to two of them: (1) Why collect information?, (2) Why another project that collects information?.

Ad 1: Knowledge and information have always been collected—in manuscripts, libraries, and encyclopedias. In this Internet age, they are also collected online.

There is already a broad choice of online encyclopedias. Some are specialized like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that appears to be successful and benefit from a narrow focus, a characteristic it shares with most technical journals. Others are general encyclopedias like Britannica and Wikipedia. The success of open-access online-encyclopedias in general, and of Wikipedia in particular, clearly show the importance of online collections of information and knowledge.

Ad 2: If the question asks why it is important to offer yet another general online encyclopedia then the answer is that—as everywhere else—competition is vital for encyclopedias, too. Monopolies or quasi-monopolies such as that of Wikipedia are dangerous.

How does this change people's lives?

Access to information has a fundamental effect upon people’s lives because, without it, they may end up taking decisions that are contrary to their own interests. Online encyclopedias improve their lives by offering rapidly accessible summaries of, and guided access to, authoritative sources of information. Easy access is important because people actually get into the habit of looking for information.

Ideally, with this access, the standard for fact-based debate is raised, not only by the broadening of viewpoints garnered from the breadth of an article, but from the community acceptance that some simple research is a normal way to proceed. However, since search engines like Google can only list sources and not evaluate and recommend them, it is often difficult or even impossible to decide whether the information found is reliable. It is therefore important to establish sources that can be trusted and be used instead of arbitrary and often accidental search results.

For the contributors, it changes their lives in many more ways, as they learn more about this form of human interaction, and learn how to communicate better with a very wide public, rather than a narrow field of specialists. It also can happen (though less than one would like) that one experiences 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 were not so obvious before. In particular, one learns that how one develops a personal take on a contentious topic can be greatly improved upon, and that differences of opinion are opportunities, not a matter for rhetorical debates.

How do you see online collaboration nowadays?

The advantages of joining forces and collaborating are obvious. However, there are also dangers. For example, if an article is "improved" over and over again by too many contributors it easily loses focus and personality, and becomes overloaded with too many details.

Moreover, online collaboration, especially in anonymous settings, easily becomes a power play in which the crudest and rudest behaviour eventually dominates, and the goal of the enterprise becomes point-scoring or embarrassing opponents.

How do you see it in the future?

We 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. We know of co-authors who found collaboration on a book a thrill, and also 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 an idea 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.

It survives because there happen to be some contributors ("Citizens") around who identify with the principles of the project, think that it is important and believe that it can succeed.

It survives because there happen to be some folks out there that find Citizendium is about working on an encyclopedia, and is not an interactive strategy game to build your ego and your empire and crush your enemies.

In the long run, to survive and fulfil its ambitious goals, Citizendium will need many more competent contributors and a secure financial basis.

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.

At the moment, Wikipedia has a larger range of subjects covered. On the other hand, the unreliability of its coverage is a subject of sitcoms and comedians, and professors even have contributed misinformation to teach their students not to use Wikipedia as an uncorroborated source for reports and essays. The present assessment appears to be that the online encyclopedia is a good prod for exploratory questions on a topic, and a starting point for discovering sources, but there is (justifiably) little trust in its content.

The structure of Citizendium is intended to identify reliable content and insulate it from poor contributions. Thus, there are "approved" articles such as "Set theory" with "draft versions" where changes are suggested, but the main page cannot be changed without a formal process of acceptance by experts. This process in principle should improve quality and reduce contributors' need to repeatedly defend good content, but at the moment Citizendium has too few Editors for the approval process to work properly. Presently most articles on Citizendium do not have approved versions, and some that do exist are not of high quality because insufficient expertise has been brought to the approval process.

Ultimately the success of an encyclopedia project rests upon the climate under which it operates. A major effect upon the Citizendium climate is the requirement 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 governance of the project, which can engender a civil and responsible environment, rather than allow cliques to bully contributors or enforce their own peculiar criteria for acceptance of content. Here Citizendium has seen several major clashes over the years, 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. But still, Wikipedia's editorial policies are designed around consensus on crowd-sourced content, while ours are 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 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.

As for readers, they 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. But in order to succeed, Citizendium will have to become better known and establish enough of a good reputation such that readers will consult it in spite of its often low-ranking in Google search results.

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 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. A grab-bag of ideas about interesting academia in participating can be found here.

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.

As for Google, it is becoming more and more apparent that searches do not turn up everything searched for, even if one patiently pursues the results to the ultimate n-th page and ignores their stacking order. That remains true even if one develops some expertise at designing queries to ferret out what is sought. And of course, there is no assessment of quality. An online 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 online encyclopedia. The encyclopedia has a very much more ambitious role to play than a search engine.