Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: If I had to guess, one response would be: the opportunity for a genuine expert to work hand in hand with other genuine experts, without the social difficulty of having to interact with the general public, some of whom are quite noticeably stupid and annoying. We try, as a community, to be welcoming and respectful of experts. We have good people in the community who try to help experts deal with the trolls, vandals, and general nonsense that is likely to come up from time to time. But we can also all easily admit that sometimes it does not go perfectly, and that genuine experts end up leaving rather than wasting time arguing with idiots.

--- Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: We already plan to give reviewership roles to certain users who know about certain subjects and can thus tag certain article versions as reviewed. Larry's plan seems to require the use of real names and declarations of credentials for an analogous 'editorship' role. Not much more seems to be different. We could simply give reviewers the option of verifying their real names and credentials if that aspect of Larry's project seems to work. I only see benefits to Wikipedia by Larry's experiment; we can copy the improvements to articles and any process improvements. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

On 9/17/06, Oskar Sigvardsson Or instead, we could try to keep up with growth by implementing some more advanced soft controls of our own. The idea of depending on others to develop better content and then hoping they provide their content in an exportable format is... not a good one. Their process almost reads like a copy of some of own ideas over the years, some of which Ive abandoned simply because 1) we know in fact that most of Wikipedia is not written by the "core" (thanks Aaronsw ), and 2) If it aint broke dont fix it. And nobody really knows how Wikipedia really works anyway except to say that the more structure the less attracted energy, and the more freedom the more trust and participation. Thats not to say there arent specific little things that arent broken and other things which could be improved. Of course, like any upstart like Citizendium is just trying to find some kind of "expert-editor" niche which Wikipedia doesnt cover. It doesnt matter what project it is, its always a good idea to look for holes in the coverage spectrum. Who knows? People might like them more just because they use a more easy on the eyes color scheme as a default option. -sv

stvrtg wrote: To be honest, if (BIG IF) Citizendium is going to work and produces higher quality stuff at a sufficient fast rate, it will only need a study or two showing that Citizendium is higher quality/more reliable than Wikipedia to flip everything around. If Wikipedia has to rely on Citizendium for better quality GFDL texts than that they can produce themselves, it effectively proves that Wikipedia cannot do what it wants with its current editing paradigm. Citizendium has one big advantage, they start from scratch with editorial control in place, and will get a different community, while if Wikipedia would like to implement something like that, it has a community that will revolt against that and has to find ways to overcome that. Kim -- http://www.kimvdlinde.com

On 17/09/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Yeah. On Wikipedia, dealing with people you consider to be noisy useless idiots is not optional. You can't refuse to suffer fools. If Larry can get a live project going that doesn't do that, I think it'll lure a lot of contributors - some from Wikipedia, but also many who won't go near Wikipedia because there's no cure for stupid. At least with "expert" qualifications the idiots will be expert idiots, and any good academic has way too much experience dealing with those. - d.

David Gerard wrote: I think this may actually be a strength of Wikipedia---expert idiots, in my experience, are the most likely to be offended that they aren't being given proper deference as experts, and so avoid Wikipedia. (Of course, not all---or even most---experts who avoid Wikipedia are idiots, but the credential-waving type do consistently avoid it.) What's more, expert idiots are the hardest to deal with. Non-expert idiots usually know they're outmatched when someone who is familiar with the relevant literature shows up with citations, so can usually be chased off, or forcibly chased off if necessary. Pretty much the only place this doesn't happen is in areas where multiple fields are laying claim, in which case it's disagreement over the definition of "expert" that's the problem in the first place (and Citizendium has no magic solution to resolving that one). If Citizendium on the other hand encourages the credentialist idiots to show up, then that's a whole new level of problems. As you point out, anyone in academia has to deal with those sort on a regular basis, but that's unfortunate, unavoidable, and my job---I'm not going to put up with that crap in a volunteer job if I have an alternate way of accomplishing my volunteer goals! -Mark

On 18/09/06, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: shhhh! you'll give the game away! There's pathological cases, like the WMC arbitration case, where a pile of faith-based science advocates tried to get a leading climate scientist voted off the wiki. Thankfully it didn't alienate WMC utterly from Wikipedia. *ahem* I hope Citizendium succeeds admirably. - d.

On 9/18/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote: If the people who have written about the "expert problem" that Wikipedia has are correct, then no, there is real value to a place where there can be expert-driven work. While it is easy to write on subjects that no one else cares about, getting things done on topics where there is some amount of controversy requires considerable political skills. Granted, an expert-driven process does not eliminate the problem of politics, but it does reduce the need to deal with people peddling fringe theories. Wikipedia has a persistent problem with fringe theories. If you ever edit any page related to evolution, there are persistent problems with people who repeat creationist arguments regarding evolution - argument which they have picked up from some web site or book, and they now push as gospel truth. It doesn't matter that the arguments have been {explained/refuted/are trivial} - you are dealing with someone who doesn't understand the scientific method or how science is done, so you have to start explaining from first principles why the issue they want to insert into the article is idiotic. And, you have to do so without calling the idea idiotic, or you will get people screaming at you for violating WP:BITE or WP:NPA. Now, there are also problems with expert editors. There are real disputes about how some idea should be presented - some of them (like the Natural selection article) end up before the arbcomm as well. So, of course, expert-driven does not mean "free from conflict". But it does establish a set of ground rules for discussion. It still requires considerable political skills to get a stable version, but the range of possibilities is reduced. This might make for a considerably saner work environment. The idea that such an environment is meaningless because the content can be ported back to Wikipedia isn't true. For one, it provides a work environment for people who don't want to deal with the stress of Wikipedia. It also creates a "stable version" against which the Wikipedia version will always be compared. Implemented properly, it can serve as a buffer against articles becoming degraded. The idea that expert-driven process will result in experts "telling people what to do" seems like a rather pessimistic view of "experts". We have lots of experts on WP - some of them lack the ability to work with others, some of them grow disenchanted and leave the project - but lots of others stay and slog it out - and work quite well with others. Ian

David Alexander Russell wrote: Encyclopaedia's with clear navigation, crosslinking etc? No, not really. And why would Citizendium not be like that? That is a risk. If I had my say, it would not be a fork in the way Larry describes, but that pages get copied and improved, and if the page is not available at Citizendium, a link to Wikipedia is provided. That will be a good incentive for everybody to make those basic pages as well. But do not worry, if I start with the evolutionary biology section, I will start with the basic pages. Maybe the control of the content is there, but just imagine a group of authors working together with some experts to make a truly good article, after which it gets approved and instead that you have to continually monitor it for idiots who have vandalized it, or added some nonsense, you can just start working on the next cool article. Indeed, I personally do not see the need for all the fancruft etc. to be at a Citizendium. Could be. It could also just work the other way round. And if the articles at Citizendium are not better than at Wikipedia, it will be gone within no time. There is no need for a project of equal quality, there is a need for a project of higher quality. Kim -- http://www.kimvdlinde.com