Co-Founder Forks Wikipedia 382
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."
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.
This will be oddly amusing (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia has gained a reputation for being a somewhat less than reputable source of information, due to edit wars, vandalism, and outright inaccuracies. But the intent is unquestionably been good, and while not a perfect source of information, for all non research uses, its usually good enough. And the way that the information is not controled by any one interest is seen as being good in that it prevents censorship.
Forking the project will cause alot of noise and debate, but in the end, I think the final result wont have any great signifigance. Forked or not, Wikipedia is probably not going to disappear.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:But... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Waa! Waa! Waa! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. On top of being an incredible source for information, it's an excercise in damage control and chaos theory. Wikipedia works, not despite page defacers and fact monglers, but *because* of them. Without the constant controversy surrounding things like politicians changing their own wiki entries, innacurate or false information would tend to sit in the pool and stagnate.
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. It's not meant to be one. It's not meant to work like one. Trying to treat it like one is foolish. Trying to base a traditional encyclopedia off of Wikipedia is foolish.
Re:Strange logic (Score:3, 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 you back your edits with references, I'm sure you can beat anyone else. Being myself a Ph.D. student and a Wikipedia contributor, I can affirm that there's noise from "wanna-be" experts, sure, but good edits usually make their way,sooner or later, expecially if you're backed up by sources (something quite harder for a "wanna-be").
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.
Re:Hmm (Score:1, Interesting)
CV-based filtering? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Reputation system was a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
It also doesn't stop the most problematic areas. Who is an expert in Middle Eastern politics? Israelis? Palestinians? Iranians? Iraqis? A polisci prof in midwest America? Who's an expert on the famous person that keeps getting their page defaced? What credentials do I need to decide what the valuable sources are in an article about The Hulk?
I don't want to say it's working well enough and I'd hate to mess with a good thing, but that's sort of how I feel. There's already enough bickering on Talk pages that it's hard to sort out interpersonal conflicts from legitimate disputes. I think an "expert" designation would only raise the ire of more non-experts who get off on challenging them. Look at all the trolls that arise whenever the "establishment" surpresses their whacko, uninformed viewpoints. Those tend to be the guys that get into revert wars.
And even so, I don't really see that I'd read an entry differently even if it was by someone labelled by an expert. I'm still gonna verify it if it's important, and if it's not, the accuracy of Wikipedia is good enough for me right now.