Citizendium

Featured. Posting written by njacknis over 2 years ago. No comments yet.

I don't know if you've been following this, but the Wikipedia experiment has spawned something of a counter-reformation -- although that's probably an unfair designation -- with regard to the role of experts.  Something more than a year ago, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, went off and created Citizendium, of which he is now Editor-in-Chief. 

I find this alternative interesting because I view the wiki model as a useful one in public dialogues and also see Wikipedia as one of the largest experiments in collective action and governance.

At this point, Citizendium seems to have survived its initial phase and is both more successful (in terms of articles submitted within a short time) and less successful (in that most people haven't heard of it) than it hoped for.  It provides an alternative model to Wikipedia that may be less democratic but perhaps matches more the current practice of governance in the "real world". 

The question is whether this kind of debate among the wiki exponents means we will just reproduce in cyberspace the various debates of political theory that came before the Internet -- OR if there is something essentially different about what the Internet makes possible that will push this debate in new directions.  I haven't decided for myself, yet, but this question should generate some interesting discussion.

For background, here are some excerpts about CZ from its website: 

 

  • We are creating the world's most trusted encyclopedia and knowledge base.
  • this is a genuinely innovative project. Nothing quite like it has ever existed before. The expert-public hybrid model and several other innovations are quite simply new. But most people are not able to take such novel things on board easily, because they think in terms of prototypes or examples. Therefore, to them, we are like a traditional academic project, like Nupedia, or like Wikipedia.
  • we're very much bottom-up. We're a wiki—really. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. We are a strongly, "radically," collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody "owns" articles or "gives orders" to do this or that. Of course, we aren't the first to use this method; it gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric S. Raymond, who compared communities that create free software collaboratively to "bazaars," as opposed to the old-fashioned "cathedral" model where everyone has a specific role and function, and orders are given from the top down. (See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added "village elders" wandering the bazaar. Their welcome, moderating presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.
  • a lot of Web 2.0 advocates, whose online temples are websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, are philosophically opposed to our basic policies. They tend to be radical egalitarians and closet anarchists. Therefore, they dislike the idea that we ask people to take real-world responsibility for their contributions and that we make a special role for experts.

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