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Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Sep 16, 2006 10:37 AM
from the brand-new-old-ideas dept.
from the brand-new-old-ideas dept.
tmk writes "Larry Sanger, first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, plans to fork the project. In Berlin he announced the start of Citizendium — the citizen's compendium. Main differences: no anonymous editing, and experts will rule the project. Members of Wikipedia were not amused."
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no anonymous editing (Score:5, Funny)
Sprachen sie Deutsche? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sprachen sie Deutsche? (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go:
Parent
Nupedia (Score:5, Interesting)
haha, we'll see if it goes the way of Nupedia, eh?
I tried working on Nupedia for a while, and got fairly far through the process of writing an article before giving up on it. After that, I spent several years as a Wikipedia editor. This new project seems to fix some problems with Nupedia, while failing to fix others. It also seems to fix some problems with Wikipedia.
One problem with Nupedia was that articles were written by experts, but reviewed by non-experts. For example, I have a PhD in physics, and teach the subject for a living, but my article on physics was endlessly wrangled over by people who weren't physicists. Most of them were reasonable people, and made good comments; some weren't. The design of Citizendium seems to address this point by envisioning a community of experts on each topic, although it's not clear to me that they'll be able to attract the necessary number of people to have multiple experts per topic. It's also good that he states that everybody will be expected to give their real name, and a CV; in Nupedia, it was really annoying to have to deal with people who were set up as gate-keepers, but didn't give real names, and didn't seem to have any evident expertise.
A major problem with Nupedia was that the browser-based software didn't work, so everything was basically done via e-mail, and that was very clumsy and time-consuming. Sanger seems to be starting off Citizendium with exactly the same problem, and, as before, he seems to have no real plan as to how to solve the problem, except to hope that it will fix itself. It remains to be seen whether Citizendium will attract programmers with enough spare man-hours to volunteer to create the software; it doesn't seem like the kind of project that would be exciting to most OSS programmer types, but I could be wrong.
Citizendium's design does seem to address what I consider the main problems with Wikipedia: disorganized, low-quality edits by well-intentioned people. The design of Wikipedia basically wastes huge amounts of time. Most articles gradually rise to a certain level of quality, and then the pioneers lose interest in the topic because there's not much left to be done. After that, the article gradually decays in quality. You'll get hundreds of edits on an article, but the diff between the beginning and the ending version can be zero. The current system basically requires serious editors to have huge watch-lists, and check them vigilantly to keep entropy from having its way. That's no fun, and it's the reason why, after several years of heavy participation, I gave up on WP.
Parent
Re:Nupedia (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Sprachen sie Deutsche? (Score:5, Funny)
Sie mussen neu hier sein, oder?
Parent
Not a wiki? (Score:5, Informative)
But... (Score:5, Interesting)
... what will teh Interweb do?
Until now, Wikipedia was the first and last linke of research, and dismissed because it wasn't done by experts.
How will people now dismis this Citizendium?
Won't anyone think of the flamers?
Seriously, it can't be bad.
Another source is always a good thing.
Strange logic (Score:5, Insightful)
if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it.
Even worse, seeing the much lower editor/article ratio, i cannot see how he thinks to ever archive some kind of quality census. A random article browsed there will be with a very high likelyhood just a copy of the wiki article. So trying to get people to think its more reliable (and thus view it with less suspicion/ less "thinking") is a bit like cheating the user.
Re:Strange logic (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't contribute to Wikipedia as an expert simply because I don't want my edits to compete with wanna-be experts. Why should some bored 17-year-old be able to, without evidence, revert one of my changes? The edit process on Wikipedia seems to revolve around number of edits, too, and general popularity. If someone has edited 1,000 articles that doesn't make them more qualified to edit an article that is covered by my field of expertise just because it is my account's first edit.
I hope this new resource will keep editors and contributors separate. Let the experts contribute as much as they can and let the editors sort out how to present it.
Parent
Scholarpedia (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy isn't using the information to crush opposing opinions, he's just offering a different filter, without destroying the original. That's creative, additive, not destructive. There are a lot of definitions of freedom - some of them involve having the capability to make informed decisions. It looks at the offset that having this new Wikipedia fork will increase at least that kind of freedom, rather than subtract anyone's freedoms.
Ryan Fenton
Not a fair comment in the summary. (Score:5, Funny)
Who decides who is an expert? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, experts have also known to be wrong. In the sciences, there are great debates. Einstein turned the world upside down afterall, and none of the previous experts would have had it right. In history, there are debates, and theories that are hotly contested - such as the thought that Egypt didn't have iron tools to make the pyramids, even though iron has been found in the great pyramid insitu (in place).
And different experts have different biases.
How will different viewpoints get across? In the wiki, at least, as an informed user, I can look up the discussions and history of pages. I don't have to depend that the latest page is 100% correct nor do I expect it to me.
It seems to me that any furhter chase for perfection is like chasing a rainbow for that pot of gold.
Experts need 'personal space', too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, the "experts" you know are a lot more polite than the ones I'm familiar with. I think that if anything, someone who thinks of themselves as an expert is more likely to wipe out information which they perceive to be 'incorrect;' intellectual debates can get pretty heated, after all.
I think the only way that an expert system could work is if edit rights are restricted to certain individuals, allowing each person to basically have their own article about a particular controversial topic. For instance, if you looked up string theory or evolution, there would be several different articles to choose from on string theory, written by several distinct "experts," each with different backgrounds and expressing a different perspective on the issue. It's a big mistake to let one expert have edit rights on content written by someone else whom they disagree with, and expect them to just play nice.
Maybe the string theorists would get along and let each others' work be; perhaps the evolutionarians would as well. But how do you think the article on Islam is going to work? I could think of people who might both be well-described as "experts," who nonetheless might have little tolerance for the opinions or work of the other. People kill each other over philosophical disagreements, where religion and politics are involved -- do you really think that they wouldn't revert each other's stuff online?
I think it's a mistake to try to cram too many different viewpoints into one article. This is the trademark of an encyclopedia, to be sure -- one article per entry -- but it's one of the reasons why encyclopedias traditionally aren't used for real research. It's just not possible to have one monolithic article for each topic and still preserve the context and flavor of each argument; to have an honest discussion of a contentious issue requires that you give each of the different viewpoints a separate space in which to express their argument, and then read them each in context.
Any 'expert system' which lets one 'expert' overwrite another is probably going to have just as many revert wars as the layman's Wikipedia; the only difference might be the grammar level used in the ad hominem attacks in the discussion pages. Being an 'expert' doesn't instantly make people respectful of dissenting views; if anything, my experience has taught me the contrary. The more developed someone's opinions on something are, the less likely they are to accept the dissenting point of view as valid. There are exceptions to this, but they're somewhat rare.
My ideal system would be one where I could go to a topic and see a consensus-based general introduction, which would be publicly editable and have a tracked history. This would allow me to get an idea of the "man on the street" perspective -- it might not be correct, and it might be totally at odds with what scientists or experts think at the same time, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value. (E.g., it would be helpful to know of the wide gap today between the scientific consensus on global warming and the hoi polloi; the latter is important even if it's wrong, just because it's widely held.) Separate from this would be the 'expert articles.' The expert pages would each have a single author (which might be a real person, a psudeonymous entity, or a group of people acting as author -- for example a committee), and express a particular viewpoint. I would be free to agree or disagree with these, and they might contradict one another. That's the nature of knowledge.
Parent
reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think 99% of the claims are bullshit. You have political people out there who claim Wiki is bogus because the articles don't match up with their agenda. I think the majority of the claims probably have to do with subjective, delusional interpretations of that nature.
That notwithstanding, I've still never really found Wiki information to be significantly inaccurate. Maybe I am not looking in the right places, but even when an entry is defaced, it's pretty obvious and often it's quickly corrected. I still don't think there is any encyclopedic source anywhere that is as dynamic and comprehensive (and probably willing to be updated based on consensus discussion among a wide variety of participants).
So is this notion of Wiki being a questionable information source warranted? Or is this some ambiguous claim that seems to be passed on and on without much substance behind it?
Abandon Ship? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does seem to me, however, that this is an overreaction to some of the bad press that Wikipedia has gotten over the last year or so. If you listen to the news media, wikipedia is an untrustworthy haven for trolls, flamers, liers, Colbert-elephant vandals, and so on. While it is true that Wikipedia isn't perfect and no one should base a research paper on it, in my experience the quality of information has actually been quite good. So I don't think there's really a huge problem to be addressed. Which means there's not much to gain by forking it. (I assume by "fork" they mean "we're going to steal all the hard work that's been denoted so far so that our new product doesn't have to start from scratch.")
On the other hand, what do we have to lose with the new version of wikipedia? To my mind, the most important aspect of Wikipedia was transparency in contradistinction to authority. Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed "facts", when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process. You see the front page, the article itself, but also have access to the discussions that go into that page. If something is controversial you see the controversy. This affords a kind of meta-information every article that opened up a whole new kind of information from enyclopedias. No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information.
The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name) threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of "experts" (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to "experts" is a huge step back.
It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and "forking" it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?
If you only care about a good OS (or, by analogy, a good encyclopedia) then I guess there's no reason to be worried. But if you care about the open source movement, then this is cause for grave concern indeed.
-stormin
Forkipedia... (Score:5, Funny)
Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:once again "openness" fails (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely the opposite. The openness allows someone with a "better idea", yet to be proven, to attempt to prove it better, without having to start from scratch.
Parent
Re:once again "openness" fails (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an Wikipedia alternative where a real (I hope) expert watches entries like this and provides good solid data and knuckle draggers are not allowed to correct the "expert" with pop culture bullsh1t can only be a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, I still love the Wiki... I just don't understand why the bad vibes.
$diety bless Wikipedia [i-bless.com]
Parent
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent