Wikipedia:Comments on Citizendium


 * This page (and its accompanying talk page) is for Wikipedians to comment on Citizendium--the proposed project itself, not the Wikipedia article. Currently, Talk:Citizendium contains much discussion about the project itself, rather than the article, which is inappropriate.

Random Comments by Michael Johnson
I'll start this off with some random comments, based on my readings over the last 24 hours. I hope this is an appropiate use of this page. If not please just delete.

Constables
Well this might seem to be trivial, but this got my back up immediately. In North America, "Constable" might be a quaint old fashioned term, but in the rest of the English speaking world, it means Police officer. Editing an online encyclopedia is a recreational activity, I don't want a policeman tapping me on the sholder.

I noted on the Citizendium Forums that everyone had a set of stars besides their names - one star for a "newbie", three for a "full member" and five for Larry Sanger, who is the founder and overall senior administrator. This points to a highly structured setup, and this may well appeal to some editors.

Expert Editors
This is a constant critism of Wikipedia - experts opinions are given equal weight to Joe Editor off the street. I think this is somewhat overstated. Most articles I'm associated with seem to be well written and factual. Of course there is always room for improvement. But in many cases "experts" are not the best people to write about their area of expertise, simply because they may not have the skills to communicate their expertise to a general audience.

I would possibly qualify as an expert editor on Citizendium, but I actually do very few edits in my area of professional expertise on Wikipedia. My edits tend to be divided into two categories. Firstly I have started articles or substantially edited mainly in the area of my recreational intersts. Then I also randomly edit articles, across a wide range of topics, when I see room for improvement. They may be formatting or perhaps adding infomation, or removing POV. These edits have no rational order to them, just when I see something I can improve.

I have written for a hard-copy encyclopedia in my professional area. They told me what they wanted me to write, how much they wanted, and when they wanted it. And then they paid me for it. Editing Citizendium sounds alot like a job, and I think I'd want to be paid for that too. I wonder, realisticly, how Citizendium will be able to attract the number of expert editors they would need to attack the huge job they have defined for themselves.


 * That's how I feel too. I certainly have legal qualifications, and am tired of arguing here about things I learned in my freshman year, but mostly I'm interested in editing other things. And if I have bought books and spend months studying something, I don't appreciated being second guessed by a PhD with an axe to grind. Fred Bauder 21:48, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

No editing by anons
I have some sympathy for the proposal to not allow editing by anons. Most of the vandalism I see on Wikipedia is by unregistered users. Most gets reversed pretty fast, however I wonder if there is more to gain by restricting editing to registered users than would be lost. Apparently anon editors would be able to copyedit, but I'd be interested to see the software that would allow someone to correct a spelling mistake but not re-write an entire paragraph.

"Blessed" articles
The core to the proposal seems to be "blessed" or "approved" articles. As I understand it the article has gone through an editorial process by an expert editor it is marked as "approved". Non-approved articles are marked as "non-approved". Readers can then make a judgement at to the reliability of articles. The proposal seems similar to Wikipedia "featured articles" and "good articles", however the text that is shown to readers is frozen in the "approved" format. The article can still be edited, but the newly edited versions will not be available till approved again by an expert editor. This would seem to be a good idea, but I think there are a few practical problems:
 * Even minor corrections would have to be passed by an expert editor, so a considerable time might pass before a fresh version of the article became available.
 * Editors might be disinclined to edit "approved" articles, leading to such articles becoming stale or out of date.
 * The enormous task in getting an article to approved level will require a gigantic effort. Even English Wikipedia, with thousands of editors and admins, has only about 2500 Featured and Good articles out of some 1.4 million plus articles.

Seeding from Wikipedia
Citizendium proposes to start by copying across the entire Wikipedia, and then gradually edit it so as to improve it to their levels. So day one, Citizendium and Wikipedia will to all intent be almost identical. The difference in reliability that Citizendium claims will only occur once a substantial number of articles have been edited to approved status.

As alluded to above, the task of getting articles to approved status will be substantial. Let's say that it would take a competent editor on average an 8 hour day to bring an article to approved level. A bit of maths on the back of an envelope shows it would take about 580 editors working full time for one year to bring just 10% of Citizendium's content to approved article status.

In the meantime Citizendium will have all Wikipedia's faults. Take for instance the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy. Vandalism on high profile articles in Wikipedia is usually quickly reversed. Vandalism on Evolution, for instance, is usually reversed within 60 seconds. The reason the Seigenthaler article was vandalised for so long is that, with all due respects to the gentleman, Seigenthaler is somewhat of an nobody. Had a corresponding edit been made to the Robert F. Kennedy article, no doubt it would have been reversed within minutes. The Seigenthaler edits sat there because nobody with any background in the subject was interested enough to look up his article, until a friend of his found it. If Citizendium had been launched in June 2005 it would have included the vandalised Seigenthaler article. And it might have sat there for years before an editor got to it.

None of this is important except that Citizendium is claiming from day one to be more reliable than Wikipedia. Yet I think it likely to be many years, if ever, before that claim can be substantiated. --Michael Johnson 05:31, 27 October 2006 (UTC)