Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
One of Wikipedia’s founders, Larry Sanger, says he plans to rewrite it — as Citizendium, a “citizens’ compendium”.
To succeed, he will probably need to attract many of the people who contribute, or used to contribute, to Wikipedia. But whether the “new Wikipedia” will avoid the problems of the old one, or just create new ones of its own, remains to be seen.
Wikipedia has been amazingly successful, fostering the production of a huge database with a surprising level of quality and accuracy. Google’s PageRank system for determining the order of search results makes Wikipedia pages very prominent in Google and rival search engines also afford them a level of authority they don’t always deserve.
It’s not just petty vandalism; most won’t accept Tony Blair’s middle name is Whoop-de Doo or that Robbie Williams “makes his money by eating domestic pets in pubs in and around Stoke”. But there have been more serious errors — most famously, a defamatory entry about a distinguished US newspaperman, John Seigenthaler Sr.
Such cases stimulated action to retain Wikipedia’s virtues and avoid the problems. There is already a Scholarpedia, a lot like Wikipedia, except “each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public)”. Citizendium hopes to better it by “forking” Wikipedia.
Open source software projects “fork” — break into two divergent paths — when groups that develop them cannot agree on the future direction for development. In such cases, “forking” is seen as a last resort; generally, one or the other will wither in the end.
Initially, the content of Wikipedia and Citizendium will be identical, and Citizendium will take updates from Wikipedia. But once an article has been changed at Citizendium, it will continue to develop separately.
Wikipedia is fundamentally anarchical: in principle, any idiot can edit any page at random, whether they know about the subject or not. By contrast, Citizendium’s contributors will have to log in using their real names, and editors will be asked to submit their credentials. Unlike Wikipedia, it will value expertise.
In his manifesto, Sanger writes: “Where Wikipedia shares the culture of anonymity found in the broader Internet, the Citizendium will have a culture of real-world, personal responsibility.”
You can imagine an anonymous student introducing errors into a Wikipedia article on physics to deceive a gullible friend writing a paper. Not as likely if you have a named physics professor writing or approving changes to an article; and even students have reputations to protect.
Signing up to Citizendium will mean agreeing to the rules in its charter, and there will be “constables” to enforce them. “Constables will rapidly eject the project’s inevitable, tiresome trolls, without going through a long, painful process of the sort Wikipedia suffers under —which it euphemistically calls its arbitration’ process,” says Sanger.
Wikipedia has around five million articles, including 1.3 million in the English language version. It will take a very long time to rewrite them, unless there’s a mass movement of disaffected Wikipedia contributors to Citizendium. Still, debating the point on the Slashdot website, Sanger remarked: “If the articles that CZ has worked on are better than the corresponding WP articles (and that’s the hope), then the CZ will at least be better than WP to that extent. That’s nothing to sneeze at, is it?”
Another alternative is to involve the academic and commercial worlds. Wikipedia is one of the web’s top 20 most visited sites and what it says is repeated across the web. Given its impact, its content must be taken seriously.
In a blog conversation over the weekend, Byron Saltysiak wrote: “The public sector shouldn’t try to resist Wikipedia, because it’s futile; they shouldn’t resist because embracing would be much more productive. Instead of wasting time trying to fight back with standards and other methods to out compete Wikipedia, groups could fix the data, set up alerts on content changes, and get free hosting to boot.”
The example raised was finding the population of Canadian provinces. Who has more reason to care if the Wikipedia pages on Ontario are correct than the government of Ontario? Who has better access to the facts and the resources to devote to watching Wikipedia than public sector bodies? That goes for most notable companies, universities, and quite a few individuals, too. Though what goes for the government of Ontario also goes for the those of China and Zimbabwe, criminal rings and cults. Wikipedians could be in for some interesting times.
Users can’t actually write anything they like, because Wikipedia forbids “original research” and relies on citations from reputable sources. But while editing remains open, it will be hard to stem the tide.
