[WikiEN-l] Citizendium trying out not being a fork of Wikipedia for a while

[Guettarda]

On 1/19/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 19/01/07, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> > Still, not really a huge amount of sense discussing citizendium here.
>
>
> It's a relevant and interesting related project, so is relevant to
> discuss insofar as it informs what Wikipedia does and how it does it.


Looking through the Citizendium forum is interesting
http://forum.citizendium.org/

I took a good look at them this weekend and tried to figure out what they
were about, and how they saw themselves from being different to us.  There
appear to be two key elements of CZ that distinguishes it from WP - approved
versions (your edits don't show up until they are approved) and expert
approval (that you need to be a subject-matter expert, a so-called "Editor"
in order to approve a version).

Neither of these ideas are new, of course.  Anyone who has hung around this
list long enough has heard the discussion of "approved versions" - the idea
that an established Wikipedian would approve any article as "non-vandalised"
before the edits actually show up.  It's one of these perennial issues like
single logins across projects.  There are a lot of people here who want to
see "stable versions" of articles showing up eventually.

The issue of expert approval has also been floated at various points.  Of
course I have never seen a clear definition of an expert around here
(whether I agree with his definition or not, at least Larry came up with
one).  It has some value - it guarantees you that the version you are
looking at has been fact-checked, etc. (Would approved CZ articles meet
WP:RS?  I'm guessing that they would.)  It seems like a good idea...until
you start thinking about the mechanisms of it all.

Expert approval doesn't scale.  Getting an article up to the level where you
want to put your name on it as "approved" takes a lot of work.  Even if you
aren't writing it, just fact-checking it, it's still a substantial
investment.  If you just shoot for 100,000 articles, it would still take a
team of a few hundred people a year or more to do that.  But writing is the
easy part.  Having a set of articles to babysit, and having to look over
them regularly to approve changes, is a huge undertaking.  How many could a
person really shepherd?  How do you convince experts, people with advanced
degrees, to dedicate this much time to the project?  On the other hand, how
are you going to convince people to edit articles if their changes aren't
going to show up for a couple months?

One of the fears I have seen in the CZ forum is the idea that WP could just
"steal" content (one reason suggested for cc-by-nc-sa).  Others people have
said (with a contempt for WP that I have seen often) that even if we did
copy their articles, they would rapidly be "degraded" the way Wikipedia
articles are.  The interesting thing is that having CZ articles on WP could
have exactly the opposite effect.  People aren't going to edit articles if
their changes don't show up for months, which suggests that CZ articles will
never get the number of edits - minor fixes, etc. - that WP articles get.
They will also never be as up-to-date.  It seems to me that it would be far
smarter for them to try to get their versions of articles into WP, where
they would be exposed to the sort of drive-by editing which both degrades
articles and makes them great.  As a CZ editor, all you'd need to do is drop
by from time to time, look at the changes made by the hoi polloi, and
determine which ones you want to keep and which ones you don't.

Not that it matters to me.  I'd like to see some sort of approved, stable
version of WP articles available (whether it's the first thing people see,
or it's an obvious link near the top ofthe page), but the more we fence
things off, the more we loose the free copy-editing by people who actually
read articles.

Ian