Archive:Why I contribute to CZ

Here is a collection of personal explanations of why we contribute to the Citizendium (CZ).

Please place testimonials in alphabetical order. Don't worry about repeating what others say; write what you think.

Howard C. Berkowitz

I've seen far too many Tragedies of the Commons, where a minority degraded a valued shared resource or made it useless. All too often, there is a brilliant new idea, shared effectively by the first generation working cooperatively but in a walled garden. If the resources can survive into a third generation, after the greedy and antisocial have done their damage, the right balance between structure and creativity might develop. CZ, while still feeling its way, is seeking that balance. The early, closed-community precedessors to the Internet were walled gardens, and this was true of the early World Wide Web; they were, if you will, not only village markets, but markets guarded only to the mutually committed vilagers. The introduction of PCs in the early 1980s, the open-access Internet of the late 1980s, and some aspects of the loosely-defined Web 2.0, including The Other Place with respect to CZ, led to various levels of chaos and destroyed commons. Once friendly markets had become bazaars where far more was offered, but their anarchy also forced the buyer to beware. If elders, leading by example rather than demanding by authority, can wander the bazaar, advising and teaching, the third wave of network-enabled collaboration may flourish again.

There's been a very parallel evolution in network-enabled projects. In the predecessors of the Internet, closed communities such as the ARPANET had strong peer pressures for effective collaboration. When widespread anonymous access became common in the late 1980s, some previously valuable tools, such as USENET (i.e., newsgroups) became largely useless through trolling, etc. Tragedy: a minority broke a social contract and destroyed a resource. At The Other Place, I stopped working in one of my areas of expertise after I not only corrected the same error multiple times, but, when challenged for justification and citations, produced peer-reviewed material of which I was a primary author. My critic, however, insisted that he was right; even if I had written the generally accepted definitions, I didn't understand them.

After that, I contributed in fewer places, but still, I believe, with value. It took six months, but I was able to broker a compromise about coverage of a complex and highly controversial areas, creating a market of ideas among very different opinions. This flourished for a time, until one individual, admittedly with great energy, split a small number of consensus-based subarticles into over a hundred unmaintainable pieces. The greatest value of the subarticles, which came from one unmanageable and enormous article, is they seemed to have found a workable level for focused collaboration. There were other cases, where political, ethnic, and cultural conflicts that resulted not in mutual learning, but in edit wars.

Here, however, the ideal of the wandering elders, smoothing the social and subject conflicts, is at least a goal. Rather than tearing apart battling fighters, the Constabulary is intended to facilitate discussion and courtesy. Subject matter experts can provide stability where edit wars existed.

When the tools are inadequate, one of the most exciting things is that toolmakers come together and try to decide what will improve the process (e.g., CZ Talk: Usability). Such a discussion and the associated experimentation accepts that ideas need testing and cannot be issued by fiat. Among the most effective modern collaborations is the Internet Engineering Task Force, in which new ideas are welcome from anyone, as long as they are clearly articulated, or built together from fragments. At the same time, the informal motto of "We don't believe in kings, presidents, or voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code" allows many things to be offered in the bazaar, with consumer choice but also with buyer choice.

Milton Beychok

I joined Wikipedia because I wanted to give back some of my experience and knowledge of Chemical Engineering. I left Wikipedia to join Citizendium primarily because of the rampant vandalism by children and others on Wikipedia, and because I grew tired of the revisions of my contributions by people who thought they were knowledgeable of a subject when they were patently not knowledgeable and who refused to be reasonable in their discussions. It reached the point where almost all of my time was being spent on reverting vandalism and with trying to maintain the integrity of what I had written. It became abundantly clear to me me that most of the people in Wikipedia had absolutely no respect for experience and for expertise. At that point, I left Wikipedia and joined Citizendium.

Nick Gardner

A long-retired economic adviser, I stumbled upon Citizendium, started tinkering with one of its articles, and became absorbed with the task of conveying the meaning of a maze of mathematics and charts to intelligent people who were familiar with neither. Finding myself in largely unoccupied territory, I then rambled around, starting an article here and there and waiting expectantly for expressions of dissent or agreement from the dozen or two people listed as economics authors. Getting no response from them or anyone else, I think I would have given up had it not been for some words of interest and encouragement from Martin Baldwin-Edwards. (By this time I had already come to believe –for reasons that I shall explain - that I had been writing stuff that people who read it would find interesting and useful.) Martin had proposed a prioritised programme of work to fill in the gaps in CZs coverage of economics, and I set myself to work on that programme. I then found that there had been many advances in economics since I had last tried to keep abreast of it , and I started getting a lot of satisfaction from a fresh learning experience. I still am. But all of this is perhaps too personal to me to be of interest to others, so I shall turn to my reason for believing in the value of citizendium.

Like many another working economist, I had become aware of the view among intelligent and well-educated “laymen” that economists were incapable of agreeing upon anything, had lost contact with reality, and were given to delusions of superior understanding of questions that were really only a matter of commonsense. I had also become aware that, although there was more than a grain of truth in that view of the practice of economics, much of the commonsense DIY economics of those intelligent laymen was sadly mistaken – with sometimes damaging consequences to them and others. So there – I thought – was a task worth undertaking: to find, understand and explain those developments of economic theory that were firmly connected to reality by good empirical evidence, as well as explaining some of the apparently promising ideas that had not yet attained that status. I was convinced that it had to be done without using the charts and higher mathematics which are the tools of the academic economist’s trade (and which the academics are prone to display to impress their readers), and without burdening the reader with a lot of inessential intellectual history, so I adopted the practice of consigning all of that stuff to subpages (where it might help economics students to impress their tutors). In that way I hoped to avoid some of the manifest shortcomings of the Wikipedia treatment of economics.

So I value Citizendium for letting me do those things, but mainly because I see others taking the same approach to other subjects – often to very impressive effect. It is a matter of great regret to me that I have not been able to provoke lively discussions with fellow-economists, and I still yearn for the development of a collegiate process of generating articles - but maybe that will come in time.

Sandy Harris

I wandered in more-or-less accidentally. I've been fairly heavily involved in the travel guide wiki Wikitravel for some time and sometimes contribute to Sensei's Library [1] the Wiki about the game of Go, and on Wikigogy [2], the Wiki for English language teachers.

As for WP, I read it moderately often, usually either because a web search turned up a WP page or someone cited one in email. I almost never go there directly to look for something, and almost never contribute there, though I've had an account for some years. Part of that is because I'm in China and the Great Firewall often blocks WP. Part of it is that I just never feel inspired there. On Wikitravel I feel I understand the policies and know where I can contribute something unique. On WP, I've never felt that.

I heard about CZ somewhere, perhaps Slashdot?, and some of the ideas seemed interesting. I wandered over to have a look, saw things I could fix and gaps that needed filling, so here I am. I'm not certain I understand all the policies or all the mechanisms (like Related pages) yet, but I am getting things done and the discussions, if sometimes heated, are usually both civil and productive and fairly often interesting.

By the way, there is a WT page Cooperating with Citizendium. Sandy Harris 08:37, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Peter Jackson

I contribute to make information available, particularly on points where people are often misinformed, and particularly on Buddhism. I left Wikipedia because it has no effective procedure for enforcing its neutrality policy. I'm new here so it remains to be seen whether this is better. Peter Jackson 09:44, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Gareth Leng

I contribute to Citizendium mainly because, as a public funded scientist, I consider it important that I do my bit to contribute to the public understanding of science. But it's a two-way thing, while I try to get across the way that scientists think, engaging in collaborative writing like this helps me think more clearly and express myself more clearly. It's also an opportunity to pursue "hobby" subjects in a focussed way - since I started on Citizendium, I've found developing articles on Edinburgh a lot of fun -learbning things I'm glad I've learnt. It's a good community - it's good to work with people who want to do this, rather than people who have to do this.Gareth Leng 09:14, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Larry Sanger

I started the Citizendium partly in order to give the world a better alternative to Wikipedia, but to put it positively, because I saw an enormous and unexploited opportunity to bring everyone together to create a truly high-quality free reference resource. (For more in this vein, see CZ:Why Citizendium?)

But why do I continue to lead and contribute to CZ? I believe in this project. We are approaching 10,000 articles, which I believe will be a psychologically important milestone. Our articles tend to be substantial, well-written, and, when not actually authoritative, well on their way to being so. We have a robust community of self-starting intellectuals, independent thinkers who are "early adopters." I am especially proud of the fact that, with a few exceptions aside, we are able to work together as colleagues, and this in spite of the fact that no one invited us specifically; we personally chose to learn about the website and then participate. It is a testiment to what is possible, that we can work together, experts and the general public working shoulder-to-shoulder, as well as we do. But CZ is what it is not because I or anyone planned it, but because of the very laudable individual initiative of over a thousand contributors, and hundreds of regular contributors. It fills me with pride to think that we have shown the world that Web 2.0 with "gentle expert guidance," with "village elders wandering the bazaar," can actually be made to work, visionless naysayers aside.

CZ is continuing to grow steadily, and I still maintain that there will come a time, in the perhaps not-too-distant future, when we will reach a tipping point, and we will be flooded with a lot of new people who will make us grow much faster indeed. But the project even in its present state is worthwhile. Our articles tend to begin life at a high level of quality, and for the most part they steadily improve. We are approaching a point where we will actually be useful as a general information resource, and difficult for our detractors to ignore. Because we are strongly collaborative and are seriously committed to neutrality, we do have an excellent chance of becoming, after some more years (it is hard to say how long), the most reliable general information resource online, period--outshining Wikipedia, of course, but also Britannica and others as well. --Larry Sanger 18:14, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Domergue Sumien

I contribute to Citizendium:

• because quality prevails.
• because reliable information prevails.
• because users are friendly and polite: you always work better in a peaceful atmosphere.--Domergue Sumien 15:00, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Alexander Wiebel

Just one sentence that is on my user page since I joined: I contribute to the Citizendium to create a citeable online encyclopedia. -- Alexander Wiebel 08:41, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Paul Wormer

Maybe the more topical question is not: why did I start contributing to CZ?, but why do I keep on contributing to CZ?. My reasons to join CZ were the same as of many "citizens": a complete dissatisfaction with WP. My own problem with WP was not so much with vandalism, trolling, or sockpuppeting, but the impossibility of convincing non-experts of their mistaken views. I had not expected that because I strictly confined my WP contributions to maths and physics. But even so, I landed up in unpleasant quarrels about matrix-vector multiplication and the normalization of wave functions.

I have almost 25 years of experience with e-mail (as a heavy mainframe user I jumped on it when it was introduced in Europe as "EARN/BITNET" in the early eighties). This long experience has taught me that e-mail is a terribly bad medium for arguing/debating with people, it is written and read hastily and superficially. Yet, e-mail may arouse strong emotions among its participants. I found out during my days at WP—and to my regret also here at CZ—that the Web suffers the very same malady. So, we see here, too, that the arguing back and forth among people soon becomes prickly and easily leads to bitterness. In particular, I noticed that experts have difficulties to get their points across, here as well as at WP. In the past, this motivated several experts to say goodbye to CZ.

This brings me to the role of the experts (the editors). So far I have not seen that their function is anything more than ornamental; they may approve articles (which in practice means asking Matt to enter a green checkmark); they are not allowed to veto an article. Even after long and thorough explanations, an expert may not veto a single paragraph or sentence as long as his/her opponent declares that (s)he is not convinced. And again, convincing somebody by e-mail or on the Web is nearly impossible. Maybe, when the medium becomes more-dimensional (sound and picture added, not just written texts) this problem of mis-communication will be solved or at least alleviated, until that time I foresee problems with the retention of experts, both at CZ and WP.