CZ Talk:The Author Role

Here is an introduction to the Citizendium author role, written for people who are relatively unfamiliar with wikis and how they work. But it may be useful for wiki masters, because it also covers the Citizendium's special take on authorship.

What, exactly, do Citizendium authors do?

Authors write articles, and other content, of course. So they are the lifeblood of the project. But this is not the usual sort of authorship. They neither ask for assignments from editors, nor do editors give out assignments. They just work on whatever they want to, whenever they want to--no deadlines, just expository bliss. This can be an existing article or a brand new one.

Also, our active authors--usually--act as more than just writers. They act as members of a dynamic, living community, discussing articles, debating policy, and joking around. (Don't worry; in case you are all business, joking around is not actually mandatory.) They really are citizens of a real online community.

Still, authors mostly just write.

How does collaboration work?

A robust wiki is not just collaborative, it's strongly collaborative. Articles are unsigned, so new people don't feel they're stepping can feel as free as possible to improve them. (You can still see who has worked on an article, however, in the page history: click the "history" tab.) Authors can and do take pride in their own work, but individual articles are unowned--or, perhaps, they are owned and managed by the whole community. Neither an author who has contributed the bulk of an article's content, nor an editor who has responsibility for content decisions, can claim that an article is exclusively his or hers. Instead, we all take responsibility, and mostly we negotiate to a mutually acceptable compromise.

This is astonishing, if you think about it. Recently, for the first time in history, global groups of people, working in "real time," have been creating content without any single person being solely responsible for it. Moreover, this content is free forever--so, if it's good enough, people will be inspired to improve it indefinitely. This is an opportunity to create vast amounts of content that representing the full spectrum of human understanding, in a way that is both credible and neutral. And free!

Why not just write for Wikipedia?

Prospective authors may have reservations that we can address effectively.

One is simple: why not write for Wikipedia instead? We don't wish to be disrespectful to "that other community," but there are some very good reasons.

• We have virtually no vandalism, and very few of the "difficult" sorts who are constantly pushing their own idiosyncratic points of view. Several people, independently, have said that we're "Wikipedia for grown-ups." That's because we require real names, at least a brief (and accurate) bio, and the contributor's agreement to follow our Statement of Fundamental Policies.
• We have a healthy, reasonable respect for expert knowledge. We make mistakes, of course--they're easy to find in early drafts, which many of our articles are--but you will find relatively few attempts to pass off guesswork and idiosyncratic opinion as expert knowledge.
• A lesser-known reason is that the Citizendium stands for readability and narrative coherence. If you're interested in writing articles that people want to read all the way through, this is the place to do it.

But, you ask, what are our prospects? They are fairly good. In our wiki's first nine months, we created as many as words as Wikipedia did in its first nine, and our wiki is about as active as Wikipedia was after that amount of time (as Citizendium Editor-in-Chief and Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger, recalls). We have added nearly 3,000 articles and some five million words after about ten months (the first five being a private pilot project). And we're expanding into other kinds of content in a way Wikipedia.

In short, we have the better model, and arguably, we are on track to replicate Wikipedia-style growth. As in Wikipedia's case, this will no doubt take some years. But we're on our way.

But why help create a free reference work at all?

On this question, see Why Citizendium?

What to do

• How to find more