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Citizendium: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?

March 26th, 2007

Wikipedia is the greatest organized, easily-accessible compendium of information known to Humankind. I spend at least twenty minutes or more per day either looking up information on that site, or–even better–contributing information to the site. (Virtually every page dealing with H. P. Lovecraft or his works has felt my editorial touch at one time or another, for instance.) Presently offering 1,706,156 articles in English dealing with everything from “The Letter A” to “Zzyzx“, Wikipedia is a nearly-bottomless treasure trove of massively-crossreferenced data, trivia, and silliness which can easily lead one to wasting hours just clicking link after link after link until one’s short-term memory buffers are packed to the last neural bit with random knowledge! Don’t believe me? Check out XKCD’s handy-dizzandy infographic, “The Problem with Wikipedia,” for sheer truthiness.

But…can Wikipedia be trusted? IS there a demonstrable truthiness to the site’s content?

The short answer is so simple it needs but one qubit to represent it: Yes and No.

This is manifestly not an article dealing with the reliability of Wikipedia–or…well, not entirely. There are thousands of such articles already pinging and ponging back and forth around the Web. Every other month, another “Wikipedia scandal” (such as half-forgotten comedian Sinbad’s recent brush with Wikipedian death) calls the site’s reliability into question yet again, and yet another university bans students from citing Wikipedia on their papers, blah blah blah….But this is all inherent in the very nature of Wikipedia: if you open up a website to contributions from anybody, you are simply bound to end up with moments of vandalism, clandestine character assassination, disinformation, and so forth.

Is there anyone with at least half a brain Out There in InternetLand who does not know this? The truthiness of such a realization should be manifest to anybody the second they see the site’s front page slogan, identifying it as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Use a little logic, people:

Anyone = people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t.

Wikipedia’s greatest strength, its open informational architecture, is also its greatest weakness–but that latter weakness is usually overcome by that former strength. For every juvenile joker or politician’s spin control agent who defaces a Wikipedia article with disinformation, there’s some responsible, knowledgeable person who will quickly step in and clean up the bullshit or rectify the errors. Of course, this can–and frequently does–lead to ongoing arguments over hotly-debated or ambiguous topics (take a look at “Islam“’s discussion page to get an idea of just how crazy it can get)…but, ultimately, Truth Will Out.

Most of the time.

Usually.

Wikipedia is, in essence, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth–a clearing-house for vast amounts of info…but it’s not your One Stop Shop for Everything. It is, after all, an encyclopedia. A reference work. In other words…a starting point where you can begin researching a topic. Don’t know a damn thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Get thee to a Wikipedia page! You can learn a great deal of generalized information about Hamlet there…but it makes no more sense for, say, a student writing an ENG 102 essay on Hamlet to cite the Wikipedia page as his/her primary source of information than it does to cite an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Start at the Wikipedia page, familiarize yourself with the material presented there, then shuffle on over to Google, Google Scholar, EBSCOHost, PROQuest, or whatever other online search tool you like and use your new basic knowledge of Hamlet to find some stone-cold primary sources from reliable journals and scholars. That’s how Wikipedia–and all encyclopedias–work.

But is the Britannica, in either its (rare) print or online form, inherently more reliable that Wikipedia? “Well, duh,” some say. “The good Ol’ Brit’s got an editorial board of ‘Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, the leading scholars, writers, artists, public servants, and activists who are at the top of their fields’ to oversee the folks writing up entries for it.” In 2005, however, a study conducted by science journal Nature and reported here

revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

So…what does that say about Ol’ Brit’s editorial board of PhD’s, Nobel Laureates, and Pulitzer Prize Winners? That they’re less reliable than Joe Blutz and Derek C. F. Pegritz, Wikipedia Citizen Editors? NO. Not one bit. If anything, it shows that both the Britannica and Wikipedia are more or less equal in terms of reliability. The study simply shows that–god, must I say it again?–encyclopedias are not primary sources. They are BEGINNERS’ REFERENCE MATERIALS. The End. Got it? OK, let’s move on.

Wikipedia is obviously more popular than Britannica.com. Why? Let’s see….Wikipedia’s got close to two million articles. Britannica Online has…well, they don’t say–but I’ll bet they, too, offer a fairly gigantic number of entries. Wikipedia is free, but Britannica.com isn’t.

Ah. And there it is. Freeness.

Britannica Online is a wonderful site–I use it all the time, just as I use Wikipedia. BO’s equipped with some wonderful educational resources, as well, to help learners of all ages discover the wonderful wide world of online information. I would never disparage it. But…it ain’t free.

Furthermore, Wikipedia owes its position at the top of the online encyclopedia heap to its easy-to-use interface and its (almost-)universal editability. Anyone with expertise in a particular subject can contribute his or her knowledge to appropriate entries: adding new information as it comes to light, correcting erroneous information, and just generally keeping Wikipedia as honest as it possibly can be. Wikipedia does have a board of editors: the community of scholars and knowledgeable folks, worldwide, who take part in its überdemokratischer functionality.

Lately, Wikipedia has been taking steps to curb abuse by “locking down” certain pages (such as “Abortion“), restricting editing privileges to only established, well-known users in order to prevent any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a rabid pro-life or pro-choice grudge from slipping weighted statements into the articles. There has also been talk of employing a number of professional editors to help oversee the clamor–a great idea, if you ask me. As much as I love the power inherent in a highly-democratized source of information like Wikipedia, I fully realize that there’s a fine line between democratic sharing of information and mob rule. In order to prevent abuse, there has to be someone “at the top” keeping an eye on things…and one cannot fully trust the council of one’s peers to always be ready, willing, and able–like minutemen of the mind–to come a-runnin’ the second some jackass changes the name of the The Republic of Iraq to The Republic of Bootystan.

So what does all of this have to do with something called “Citizendium”?

<Borat voice>It is-a the simple</Borat voice>: Citizendium is new “experimental wiki project”, initiated by a founder of Wikipedia itself (Larry Sanger*), that “aims to improve on that model by adding ‘gentle expert oversight’ and requiring contributors to use their real names.” In short, Citizendium is Wikipedia with a professional editorial staff and an application process that hopes to vet out non-experts and uneducated hacks by requiring anyone applying for an authorial or editorial position (for some reason they have the two separated) to verify their credentials with a CV, proof of expertise, etc. As of today (26 March 2007), Citizendium has just taken their beta version public and has already been receiving a great deal of interest. The front page even notes that they have “over 1,100 articles” in process. And, as with Wikipedia, it’s free as can be!

So, does this mean that Citizendium will become the “more reliable free encyclopedia” that the world so desperately, desperately needs?

No. In fact, I’ll wager anyone $5 or a cookie of their choice that Citizendium is little more than a footnote in Web history by the end of the year. Why? <THESIS ALERT!> Because it just is not necessary </THESIS ALERT!>

I can understand Herr Sanger wanting to do his thang on his own–but there’s a big problem with that. Who needs another Wikipedia? The Citizendium process is a great idea–but why start a whole new separate project in order to implement it? Even if Citizendium has gone public with a respectable deck of 1,100 articles ready for viewing, it’s still…oh, about 1,705,394 articles to go before they catch up to Wikipedia–and that’s downright impossible, since Wikipedia’s content is growing exponentially. Citizendium may very well offer more “certifiably reliable” information than Wikipedia, but it also offers far, far less. And besides…if Britannica, one of the oldest encyclopedic resources in the world, is not appreciably more reliable than Wikipedia, than who honestly expects Citizendium to be any better?

I’ve been exploring Citizendium all day (at least until the site’s newfound popularity hosed its servers), and my initial impressions of the site are entirely positive. Because it’s Wikipedia with a slightly different site layout and design. In a blind taste test, scientists here at Pegritz Laboratories replaced your favorite coffee Wikipedia with Folger’s crystals Citizendium, and four out of five people didn’t know the difference! In the future, I plan on providing you, Dear Readers, with text examples from similar Wikipedia and Citizendium pages to allow you to compare/contrast the overwhelming similarities between the two…but, as I noted, the site’s dead for now.

At any rate, Citizendium looks to be little more than a test-bed for ideas that, hopefully, if they play out–and I sincerely hope they do–will be gently incorporated into Wikipedia. Citizendium as its own entity, competing with Wikipedia? Not a chance in hell.

Citizendium is facing the same kind of competition that smaller, specialized search engines like Clusty face when going up against the insurmountable might of Google. Google is universally known. Google is astonishingly competent at what it does (hence the reason it’s got such name-recognition under its belt). And Google is simple to use. Wikipedia is the same: easy-to-use, information-rich, and known ’round the world as the place to start when looking for organized, basic, encyclopedic information. Anytime you do a Google search for, say, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” guess which site is right there at the top of the first page of links? Wikipedia.

Citizendium could offer the best, most reliable information in the world. Its entry on “Hawking radiation” could be written by Stephen Hawking himself, but that still won’t give it a chance against Wikipedia–because Wikipedia’s gigantic, universally-known, FREE shadow lies heavy upon the land as the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Plus, it is a sure bet that if some new information appears stamped and certified 100% Truthful on Citizendium’s “Hawking radiation” page, what’s to stop a true citizen editor on Wikipedia from adapting that information and adding it to the Wikipedia page on the same topic? All information on both sites is offered up under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2, after all….

So, really…will Citizendium still be around by the end of the year? I doubt it. Will it have an impact on the basic idea of the wiki? Very likely. I certainly hope so, because Wikipedia could be a bit more controlled.

But will Citizendium ever grow to be an actual challenger to Wikipedia? Not a chance in hell. Like a primitive mitochondria being absorbed and integrated into early bacteria as energy pumps, so will Citizendium be swallowed whole by the mighty Wikipedia, and perhaps will energize the great beast to truly become The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth.

——————

*Whom Wikipedia frontman and Whiny Bitch Extraordinaire Jimmy Wales claims was little more than his subordinate. You’d think the fella generally regarded as Top Dog at Wikipedia would have much better things to do than creech and cry incessantly about his competitors and their various supposed schoolyard attacks on him, but…hey, what do I know?