On 1/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 19/01/07, Steve Block steve.block@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