Wikipedia:WikiProject WikipediaWeekly/CurrentTranscriptions/SpecialEpisode1

This is the transcript of Wikipedia Weekly, Special Episode 1. These notes are typed from the released audio, and may contain typographical errors. If you find errors - which is very likely - please try to fix them.

Transcript
Daveydweeb: Welcome to a special edition of Wikipedia Weekly. With so much news over the last week, we ended up with three interviews altogether, which we've split into two episodes to reduce the running time of each. In this edition, we interview User:Poupou about the recent Methodical Culturalism debate that flared up on the German Wikipedia in recent days, and talk to Larry Sanger about the launch of Citizendium. Let's move on to the first item, with User:Poupou.

Interview with User:Poupou
Fuzheado: Very few people know what Methodical culturalism is, but just this past month the topic became the talk of the German Wikipedia. That's because on October 22nd, the German community concluded its fifth writing contest, and out of about eighty entries, Methodical Culturalism came in first. Here to talk about the contest winner, and the resulting controversy, is German user Poupou. She was a member of the community-elected jury, and is also an administrator on the German Wikipedia. Poupou, thank you for joining us on Wikipedia Weekly.

Poupou: Hi, Andrew.

Fuzheado: Before we move any further, could you please tell us exactly how Methodical Culturalism is pronounced in German?

Poupou: Okay, so in german it's methodischer Kulturalismus. And I think it doesn't exist in English anyway.

Fuzheado: And very basically, what is Methodical Culturalism? How would you explain it?

Poupou: Okay, so this is a very recently introduced school of philosophy, and basically it says that any scholarly research must be based on practical, everyday actions. So you can't base scholarly research on theory only. And it was introduced by a German philosopher named Peter Janich, so he's, like, the mind behind it.

Fuzheado: And the jury considered this article, among many, to be one of the best ones. So what were some of the things that you liked about this article?

Poupou: We thought that it was expert knowledge made understandable to ordinary people, without making it too simple. So it wouldn't simplify the concept, but still explain it so you could still understand it even if you were not a philosopher. That's what the jury thought.

Fuzheado: And when it was announced it seemed to have caused quite a stir in the community.

Poupou: Yeah, definitely. When we said that it was the winner, we also said that this was what we thought Wikipedia should progress to, like expert knowledge made understandable. So people were judging it by this statement, I think, and many people found that it was not understandable in any way. So there was sort of an outcry going on, because lots of people were saying "look, I read the first lines and I understood nothing". Yeah, that was a bit fatal.

Fuzheado: So, what were some of the things that happened in the community after it was selected?

Poupou: So very shortly afterwards, there was somebody who was proposing deletion of this article, and was quite obviously a sockpuppet. So the proposal was not considered a true proposal. But like two days later, another member of our jury thought that it was completely irrelevant, and the concept was really rubbish, and he proposed it for deletion as well.

And that made the confusion perfect, because before the jury was like.. yeah, we were standing in one line, and at that point the jury was breaking into pieces. And the community was absolutely disturbed by this, obviously.

Fuzheado: So when the jury selected this as the winner, it seemed like all the jury members were fairly unanimous? Was there consensus on this?

Poupou: Yeah, definitely, consensus, that's what it is. And we were talking about, like, some people have objections during the debate, whether this should be the winning article. And were like, "okay, let's sleep overnight about this result and tomorrow we will talk about it again, and if there is someone who can't live with this result you will have to say a veto." And so that's what we did, and the next morning nobody said that he was against this article being the winner, and so that's what happened.

Fuzheado: And you announced it, and then after some community outcry you think some of the jury members lost their confidence in the process, or something?

Poupou: I really don't know what was the motivation. So whether this person wouldn't dare in the jury debate, to say what he really thought about the article, or whether he felt sort of compelled to fill expectations by the community afterwards, I don't know. I don't know about that. He withdrew his proposal by now, so it's not going to be deleted.

Fuzheado: So is the battle over? Is there still fallout over this issue?

Poupou: I think it ended, because the article was also a candidate for featured articles. That debate was cancelled like two days ago, because it was like 32-18 votes against the article, so everybody thought it didn't make sense to go on any further. And I think the debate is now on a more expert level, there is an expert debate still going on on the talk page of the article. And there is also a debate going on about how featured articles and good articles should be elected, so - what are the criteria? So whether everybody should be able to vote, even if he doesn't understand a thing about philosophy, for example.

Fuzheado: So are there any lessons that we should take away from this, or that the German community should take away from this experience?

Poupou: I think we as a jury learned the lesson that we would have to talk even more in detail about objections, that some people have with such a result. So we shouldn't go ahead if there is someone who thinks he can't go on with such a winner. But I think for the community it was not that bad, really. Because I think that it kindled a very important debate about quality and about criteria for articles.

Fuzheado: Well, thank you very much. We appreciate it and we hope to hear more in six months, when you have the next contest.

Poupou: Thank you very much.

[transcription ending time: 6:38]

Interview with Larry Sanger
Daveydweeb: For our second interview this episode, users Fuzheado, Sushigeek aka 1ne, Tawker and I, user Daveydweeb, spoke with Larry Sanger about the recent launch of Citizendium. Let's move on to that.

[transcription starting time: 7:15]

Fuzheado: As many of you know, this week Citizendium launched, and Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, and the original editor-in-chief, was the person who started the project.

Larry: Hello, thanks for having me.

Host: Could you explain to the layperson, someone who might not know what Citizendium is, what is the Citizendium project all about, and its relationship to Wikipedia?

Larry: Essentially, the Citizendium is a Citizens' Compendium of everything, that's where the name comes from. We will begin as a Wiki encyclopedia, or at least, a project that aims to create an encyclopedia, and of course, we are beginning as a fork of Wikipedia. So that means we will be taking the content of Wikipedia and flagging articles that we have changed in the database, ones that we haven't changed will then be regularly refreshed from the latest in Wikipedia. As I speak now, there are 80 live articles; so, not much, but we're getting there.

Panel: Well, I think when Wikipedia started off, I think it was 20 articles on the first day, or some even smaller number.

Larry: No, no, it was much smaller that that. We didn't have anything that really counted as a article, anyway.

Host: Why don't you tell us a little about how Citizendium did this week, as you launched the first pilot?

Larry: Well actually we launched the pilot 10 days, well I guess it's more like two weeks ago. There's two phases to the pilot; the first was basically internal, to a group of about 10 people who were banging away on it, making sure that everything was set up. Then the second phase started last Sunday, and involved actually inviting people, you know, outside of that group to start working on the wiki - so far it's gone, I would say, extremely well.

Fuzheado: And, right now, you have roughly how many editors and folks signed up to do editing?

Larry: Well so there's 236 user accounts created, but I think, only, I dunno, probably only two-thirds of those are actually wikieditors, in other words, have read/write access.

Daveydweeb: What would the rest of those users be?

Larry: People who, their accounts haven't been activated yet, or they made an account name without realizing they needed to use first name last name, and we haven't deleted those accounts, so that's pretty much why.

Fuzheado: Right now, if you look at some articles in there, they look very much like the Wikipedia article but they are missing some things like the pictures and things, are there...

Larry: Yeah, that's right...

Fuzheado: What are the plans right now in terms of what to do about images and some of the special features from Wikipedia that you may not want to cary over?

Larry: Yeah, mainly the reason that we haven't - there are two reasons we haven't uploaded the images yet, the first main reason is that, for whatever reason, we haven't got the server space, so that's one of the things that I'm going to be, well actually I and the technical crew are going to be, getting another virtual server set up, and some of their hardware improvements that's just going to allow us to upload the images. We also, pretty soon, want to delete wholesale certain portions of the image database, there's ones that are specifically tagged a certain way that we're going to want to get rid of.

Daveydweeb: You sent a email recently to the Citizendium mailing list -

Larry: I've just encouraged people to start editing each other's work more, and, as far as I can tell, they have. Or maybe it's just my perspective has changed, but I am seeing people going in and banging away at each other's articles quite a bit. I mean, lets see here, let me try to find a good example for you... OK, the Biology article actually has two editors so far, anyway there are several that have been worked on by several different people, so that's good. I will have to admit that I am still a little bit concerned about that problem, there's obviously there's so many people involved in Wikipedia that there can be a really robust collaboration on relatively specialized articles, but when there aren't so many people involved in Citizendium, then there can't be as robust a collaboration on those articles, unless we specifically sort of artificially encourage that collaboration. So that's what I'm going to try to do, anyway.

Fuzheado: Well hopefully that will improve over time as you add more users, anyway.

Larry: Oh, I think so too. I'll tell you, we are going to have, after we finished getting people on board, we're going to have on the order of 200, I estimate, at least 200 active accounts, probably more like 250, and there's new people, 10 or 20 applicants every day, and of course when we go live, then it's really going to take off - at least, I think.

Fuzheado: Now, one of the big things which everbody seems to be asking about is what are the requirements for editor access, and what kind of people are you looking for?

Panel: Yeah.

Larry: Well, you can actually find that out by going to citizendium.org and clicking on the "Call for Applications".

Panel: I'm looking it up now.

Larry: Yeah, it's the second link in that box, under essentials. That's the page that our so-called personal administrators, there are, I guess, 5 of us, I think. That's what we're using. To be an editor, or rather, to be an author, just a rank-and-file contributor, all you have to do, well, this is a lot more than you have to do on Wikipedia, of course, but, what we ask you to do, is send in a CV or a resume, plus some link to online information that helps support that you are who you say you are; and that will pretty much do it. Well, you also have to declare that you support the Citizendium Statement of Fundamental policies; it's a bit of a, it's like a social contract, there. But for editors and constables, there are other requirements. We aren't actually adding any more constables right now, we don't feel that we need any more than the, I think it's 4, that we have.

Panel: Is a constable basically like a Wikipedia administrator, is that pretty much the same privilages?

Panel: Yeah, I was just going to ask that.

Larry: Yeah it is, but the role is going to be considerably different, I think, because, essentially, they will be acting as a check, in a certain way, on editors, and editors will act as a check, in a certain way, on the constables; there's a bit of a division of authority, in that regard.

Panel: So, they'll kind of have like checks and balances on each other, like in the US government?

Larry: Well, something like that. So, the editors will not actually be able to ban anyone, they won't be able to take any sort of administrative authority, they will merely be able to call a constable. And a constable won't be able to make any content-based decisions, but only behavior-based decisions; the content-based decisions will have to be made by editors, and then the constables will have to, essentially, carry them out.

Panel: So what is the big difference - I'm just taking a look at the page - between an "author right" and "editor rights"? Are they one and they same, or is there a difference there?

Larry: So, what's the difference between an author and an editor?

Panel: Yeah.

Larry: Well, there's a considerable difference. Although in operational terms, right now, there isn't a whole lot of a difference. In their day-to-day work, authors and editors are going to be very much the same thing. And that's why I say, in the FAQ, that they're going to be working shoulder-to-shoulder. For the most part, they're going to be doing most of the same things. However, if there are some disagreements among authors, the people who will be licensed to settle those disagreements - when they concern content - will be the editors on hand. Of course, if the editors disagree, they will have to go to an editorial work-group to settle their disputes. But the idea, then, is that there won't be the content-based edit wars that go on, and on, and on, in Wikipedia. They will be settled by editors, and the editors themselves will not, hopefully, get into those disputes - because they will be beholden to groups of their peers. The other thing that editors will be able to do, although we haven't actually written any sort of software to do this - we might just use a certain category or template to do this, it really depends on how we decide - it's to approve articles. So, a single editor will be able to go to a certain page, do something to it - maybe press a button, put up a certain template, whatever - and declare that that article, is reliable, meets whatever standards the editors have decided upon.

Panel: So, if we could go back to the applications for CZ, again - you mentioned earlier that people who wish to be part of the project need to provide a CV or a resume, just to prove...

Larry: That's just for the pilot project.

Panel: OK. What kind of credentials do you require for the pilot project?

Larry: You mean, to be an editor, right?

Panel: Yes, to be an editor.

Larry: Right, we actually don't require much of anything, to tell you the truth, in terms of credentials to be an author. But, to be an editor, generally we put them into two different categories. This part actually isn't on that page. Editors, in traditionally academic fields, have the requirements that are typically needed for a 10-year track academic position in the field. So that means a PhD, or very close to getting a PhD, and a number of publications in the field. And for people working in professional fields, again, here we're talking about the pilot project, right? All of this might change after we go public, after the editors start really refining all of this. But, for people in professional fields, like journalism, engineering, computer science, etc, they need to have what is generally regarded as the terminal degree - of course in computer science, there's no such thing - but in other fields there are. So in journalism it would require a Masters degree, and I think we've said 3 years of serious, continuous professional experience. And in some fields like library science we would also require that the person have published, in the ways that library scientists are expected to publish.

Panel: Do you have any plans to drop some of the more non-encyclopedia-like articles? Say the corporate articles, a lot of companies, that sort of thing?

Larry: Oh, to drop articles? You say...

Panel: Yeah, essentially stuff about companies, that sort of stuff?

Larry: Actually, if anything, quite the opposite. My philosophy on this is that, as we said from nearly the beginning - and this one here is actually a Jimboism, I believe - is that Wiki is not paper. And with that in mind, I'm quite a bit of an inclusionist, myself. A lot of people, for some reason, associate academic standards with deletionism or exclusionism, but I don't, at all. I don't really see the connection between higher standards and getting rid of perfectly good content.

Panel: So are you going to see a sort of notablity requirement close to Wikipedia's?

Larry: There will be no notability requirements, per se, if I have anything to do with it. The policy simply won't be expressed in those terms. It's a fundamentally confused way of thinking about the problem. You see, the point is not to determine who's notable enough to be in the encyclopedia, because there's all kinds of things that are not noteworthy to anybody but a handful of people, but there are still articles about htem. It doesn't have to do with notability - it has to do with maintainablity. In other words, if some information can be usefully, or reliably maintained, and all other similar kinds of info can be reliably maintained, then there's no reason why we can't have it. So, if there is enough of a community to have articles about all of the episodes of Star Trek, then, God bless them! That's great, have 'em, why not? That's how I feel about that.

Fuzheado: I guess the reason there are a lot of deletionists on Wikipedia is because they see 'wikipedia.org' as the entryway into a body of work that should have some coherence as 'wikipedia.org'. And I guess your view might be a little different, in that...

Larry: Well, wait a minute - how is it - I think I understand what you've said so far. But how does it make it less coherent to have articles about Pokémon, or for all of the episodes of 24, or whether...

Fuzheado: It's a good question - I think the impression was that the lot of the criticisms you see of Wikipedia in the mainstream press are when people visit the front page, and maybe a fourth of the featured articles are either Pokemon, or pop culture related, or... people just don't take it as seriously.

Larry: Well, that's one of the bad criticisms of Wikipedia. That's how I see it. There's some good criticisms of Wikipedia, and there are some bad ones, and that's one of the bad ones. That's simply a bit of snobbery that I don't share.

Fuzheado: Well, I think it's great, because the impression a lot of folks have with Citizendium is being more - I guess, the thing is when you had a lot of essays talking about elitists, it was kind of associated with snobbery. And here, you've kind of separated the two - they're not related at all.

Larry: Well, I'm not an elitist in the slightest - I'm just not an anti-elitist.

Fuzheado: I guess there's a lot of parsing we need to do with your essays with a lot of these things! But it makes sense.

Larry: Well, if you look at what I've written, you'll see it's all perfectly consistent with everything I've said. There's all kinds of people who read in all kinds of things to what I write. I can try to be absolutely as clear as possible, and they will still get it wrong. And, you know, I don't mean to toot my horn or anything, but I'm a philosopher. It's part of my job as a philosopher to get things absolutely clearly. And I think I'm pretty good at that, but people will be almost perverse in ways that they misunderstand it.

Panel: Well a lot of it, I guess, comes from the initial media reaction that - I don't know about everybody else, but the first time I saw '50 trillion point rival to Wikipedia', and sort of the whole impression of elitism. I got the impression of more of a traditional paper encyclopedia-type project. That was the impression that the media, at least, was giving out, and now things seem to be quite the opposite. I think a lot of people are a little bit confused, to say the least.

Larry: Well, I'd say that you shouldn't go with your first impressions!

Panel: Well, of course not! Which is why we're on this conference, why we're having this podcast.

Fuzheado: Yeah, that's why it's very valuable to talk about this, because you get a more intricate understanding of what you've been talking about. So the original essay you had was 'Why Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism', which, as you said, could be misconstrued to say that you believe you should be elitist, but that's not what you're saying. Is that correct?

Larry: Didn't I actually say that in the essay? But at any rate, yeah, that's correct.

Fuzheado: But - yeah, you're right, but the headline grabs you more than the fifth paragraph, I guess.

Larry: It's not a subtle logical point, you know. If you want to get rid of non-X, that doesn't mean you want to embrace X.

Fuzheado: Right, very logically true. But, as you said, hard to digest from just the headline...

Larry: Alright, anyway. Very good.

Panel: One of the things that's been said about Citizendium is that because it's been released under the GNU Free Documentation License, like Wikipedia, its content could be shared around other websites and the like. So people are starting to think perhaps content could be shared between the two sites, and shifted between the two. So Wikipedia could merge content from Citizendium...

Larry: Yeah, this is one thing that I think Wikipedians don't realise quite yet. If the Citizendium takes off, we practically guarantee the long-term survival of Wikipedia itself. Because we will have to have linkbacks to the Wikipedia articles. If Wikipedia then wants to make use of our changed versions of articles, of course, you'll have to return us the favour and link to us. It's not going to be only one way. So the two sets of articles are going to be closely interlinked. So I imagine what a lot of people will do is go look at the Citizendium article, and say, 'OK, that's very nice, let's see what those people over at Wikipedia have to say now', and get their take. And then, of course, there will be (?) that show the diffs between articles, and then discuss the diffs. Who knows, it seems possible. Maybe the diffs aren't going to be that significant, and maybe they won't be that interesting.

Panel: That's an interesting point, because sites like Answers.com copy, well, verbatim, a huge amount of Wikipedia content, and don't attempt to change it very much at all. But Citizendium would be one-upping that, wouldn't they?

Larry: Obviously - we're not interested in being a mirror of Wikipedia. In the end, frankly, I hope that the two sets of articles don't converge, but they radically diverge to offer people the greatest diversity of content, basically. And, of course, I hope that Wikipedia survives and thrives, for the same reason.

Panel: Well, more diversity in the information people can receive is definitely going to create a more healthy society - If you look at some of the initial media reports to compete with Wikipedia, and now, in the last 20 minutes, the picture's completely changed, well at least for me. We're going to be more complementary, rather than competitive. We're not going to be competing for eyeballs, the two projects, we're eventually going to help each other out and improve on each other. And there's room for both projects.

Larry: Actually, we've been saying that - you've been saying that, actually, various Wikimedia spokespeople - right after Citizendium was first Slashdotted. Which I greatly appreciated, by the way.

Panel: So you don't believe that Citizendium would ever become, like, a de facto improvement process for Wikipedia? You think it's more of a standalone encyclopedia.

Larry: A defector?

Panel: De facto.

Larry: Oh, de facto...

Fuzheado: Well, 'defecter' could be accurate, too.

Larry: OK! A de facto replacement - well, I think for a lot of people, it will be a replacement. There will be people who will start using Citizendium and not look back, and those are the people who don't like the Wikipedia model at all - so, not me. But there will be all the other people who like choice, and like to have the unofficial view, so to speak. Maybe that will be the Wikipedia slogo in the future - 'The unofficial view!' - or something like that.

Fuzheado: Right, exactly. Is there anything you can say publicly right now about funding, or backers of Citizendium?

Larry: Um, all I can say right now is what I've already said in the blog, which is that I've had meetings and conversations with a number of different foundations already - I actually had a meeting with a major foundation earlier today, and I'm going to be meeting another one in a couple of days. They're interested in supporting it, but the problem at this point is that we're not at this point a (?). But that being said, we do have money in the Citizendium account. One benefactor has made a major contribution that's actually helped pay some people, and some bills, so - not me, by the way.

Panel: When do you think there's going to be a public release of Citizendium?

Larry: It depends. It depends on how quickly we can get the support for more servers - we've got one corporation that's interested in supplying us with that, but we need to actually make a proposal. And then, who knows how much support we'll get from Steadfast - I think that's their name, it's in Chicago. They're supplying us with a server and bandwidth right now. I doubt that we can count on them very much in the long-term. So at any rate, the point is, we're going to have to get the hardware in place. Already we need another server, and that's for our tech guys' sake. So we're going to be putting in another server. We've gotta do that, and then we'l have to install whatever number of servers our guys judge is enough. There's other stuff that we do have to have in place first. We've gotta have the help pages and more of the policy pages written out. We have no help pages yet, we need to rewrite a whole bunch of Wikipedia stuff. Frankly the Wikipedia help pages are too, too big - there's just too much stuff there! So we're going to probably simplify that quite a bit, and we'll also be writing out sort of general policy instructions. A lot of that nitty-gritty policy has't even been written. We don't necessarily have to have that all worked out before a public release, but we definitely have to have more than we have up there right now. We could be ready to go by the beginning of December, but, you know, that might be too ambitious. I definitely want to have it out by the end of the year, but it's going to be the real world requirements that determine when we actually go public. We'll go public as soon as we're able - we won't wait around.

P: Are you going to include links to a Wikipedia article in Citizendium? Or are you going to refrain from doing that? So are you going to have 'View the article on Wikipedia?'

L: I believe so, I think we're going to be linking back. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I don't know what our legal obligations are about this, but my impression was that we actually need to link back to the actual article. Maybe there isn't anything absolute said about that. At any rate, we'll do what we must, and probably link back to the article, be cause that will be useful to the user. But in many cases this is going to be kind of difficult, because we'll probably have to have a special meditative feel associted with the article, in those many cases where we will redirect our own version of the article.

H: Right, thanks a lot Larry, we appreciate you talking to us. We hope you'll come back and talk to us again when you have the thing launched to the entire world.

L: Sure, no problem.

[interview ends: 38:11]

Daveydweeb: Well that's the end of our special episode of Wikipedia Weekly. We'll be back in a few days with Episode 5. Until then, this episode is off to be saved and edited. Goodbye.

[transcript ends: 38:29]