You think Net is all true? You've been punk'd
Liz Langley
Published March 30, 2007
Journalism has a rep for being full of drinkers and cynics, but if you spent precious moments of your short life triple-checking how to spell "Federline" you would slip yourself the odd Mickey, too. And sometimes, no matter how hard we try, mistakes occasionally get through. People laugh a lot of times when they see typos and screw-ups in print, but they make me wince. I'm not a fan of humiliation comedy and know that there, but for the grace of spell check, go I.
There's one exception, however, an error that was so rich the person who made it should be proud that their screw-up gave people a much-needed laugh. It was made by the venerated wire service Reuters, which told us last October that "Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the life span of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day."
It was clearly some kind of search-and-replace mess-up because where a queen bee obviously belonged Queen Elizabeth seemed to turn up, resulting in a phrase such as ". . .with its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could . . ." etc. I heard about the story on the radio and found, sadly, that Reuters had already taken it off line, making it one of the only things you can't get on the Internet.
Trolling the Web
OK, so the Reuters glitch was an accident. But this month Wikipedia's credibility was scrutinized over the deliberate falsehood of one of its contributors who turned out to be not a professor of religion as he had claimed but a college dropout from Kentucky. According to Brit paper The Telegraph's Web site, Ryan Jordan had no advanced degrees and "used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies to help him correct articles on the penitential rite or transubstantiation." About a week later the online encyclopedia was embarrassed again when it posted that comedian Sinbad had died of a heart attack when he was actually alive and well.
"Expertise is not a requirement for the encyclopedia's unpaid authors. Nearly anyone with access to the Internet can contribute entries or edit existing selections," the Sentinel's Wes Smith wrote back in January. "WikiTrolls," he wrote, slip in to sabotage the site while volunteer "admins" patrol for errors.
Before all this I had no idea that Wikipedia could be edited by anyone, which raises two questions: a) Why would anyone have occasion to look Sinbad up in an encyclopedia of any kind and thereby discover a false death report? and b) If anyone can go in and edit Wikipedia, why are there any facts in it at all? This site has everything on it from Hammurabi to Robot Chicken. It should be Candyland for people who want to punk the Web. And the best anyone can do is the death of Sinbad? Your parents were right -- TV has rotted your imaginations.
Don't tell me you don't have time. If people have time to post comments on Web sites about Britney's weight, they have time for a second job, much less a little Wikipedia contribution or two. The following are some sample entries taken from Wikipedia (heavily edited in some cases) and sabotaged like the queen bee story, only on purpose. This is much more the kind of stuff I'd expect you bright young things to come up with:
Kenny G is a substance that depresses the central nervous system (CNS), resulting in calmness, relaxation, reduction of anxiety, sleepiness, slowed breathing, slurred speech, staggering gait, poor judgment and slow, uncertain reflexes. Kenny G may be referred to as (a) tranquilizer.
Simon Cowell is a type of fully cooked, cured and sometimes smoked sausage of even texture and flavor that is softer and moister than most other sausages.
The size of a small dog, but stocky and muscular, the Mel Gibson is the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world. It is characterized by its . . . offensive odor when stressed. . . .
What sets plastic surgery apart from costumes. . . is that (it is) often designed to imitate supernatural and scary beings. Popular monsters of legend or fiction are regular themes for plastic surgery.
Paparazzi seem to have no fear of humans and have approached groups of explorers without hesitation. This is probably on account of there being no land predators . . . that attack Paparazzi.
Danielynn's paternity test results are in a bright container generally suspended on a rope from a tree branch or ceiling that is filled with candy and toys and is used during celebrations. A succession of blindfolded, stick-wielding children and some fun-loving adults will try to break the container.
Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are small marshmallow candies, sold in the United States.
The messy and largely self-entertaining game "Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell Jousting" is played with a microwave. One takes Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell and licks the right-hand side of each until sticky. A toothpick is thereby adhered to each Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell pointing forward like a jousting lance. Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are then set in a microwave, squared off against one another, and heated up. As they expand, the toothpick lances thrust toward each opponent, and the winner is the one that does not pop and deflate. Both usually are eaten after the competition.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Wikipedia: Countdown to chaos
Wikipedia: Countdown to chaos
March 30, 2007
Even at the best of times, relying on the information available on Wikipedia is a risky business. The vast majority of the articles on there are legit, and it’s certainly fine for a 30-second answer to a non-vital question. But you wouldn’t want to use it as the sole source of research for a PhD, for example.
But if there’s one day you should treat Wikipedia entries with added cynicism it’s 1 April. People are sceptical enough of the editorial teams of newspapers, magazines and websites that publish content on 1 April - fearing they might try to pull a funny April Fools' Day prank. But Wikipedia’s editorial team – anyone with an internet connection – potentially runs into the hundreds of millions, and mischief makers have used the excuse of April Fools' Day before to target the site.
There’s an entire page on Wikipedia dedicated to ‘Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense/April Fools' Day 2006’. Most of it was innocent fun, but one prankster went so far as to swap the Protect and Delete buttons on each Wikipedia page, meaning those trying to lock an entry instead deleted it.
Of course, Wikipedia hosts so many articles (1.7 million in English alone) that the chances of you stumbling across a prank post are slim. But if you’re online on 1 April and counting on a legitimate answer, it might be a good excuse to try Citizendium for the first time. The online encyclopedia was set up Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, and promises to stamp out the abuse occasionally witnessed on Wikipedia by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. See our interview with Larry Sanger.
Posted by: Paul Trotter
March 30, 2007
Even at the best of times, relying on the information available on Wikipedia is a risky business. The vast majority of the articles on there are legit, and it’s certainly fine for a 30-second answer to a non-vital question. But you wouldn’t want to use it as the sole source of research for a PhD, for example.
But if there’s one day you should treat Wikipedia entries with added cynicism it’s 1 April. People are sceptical enough of the editorial teams of newspapers, magazines and websites that publish content on 1 April - fearing they might try to pull a funny April Fools' Day prank. But Wikipedia’s editorial team – anyone with an internet connection – potentially runs into the hundreds of millions, and mischief makers have used the excuse of April Fools' Day before to target the site.
There’s an entire page on Wikipedia dedicated to ‘Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense/April Fools' Day 2006’. Most of it was innocent fun, but one prankster went so far as to swap the Protect and Delete buttons on each Wikipedia page, meaning those trying to lock an entry instead deleted it.
Of course, Wikipedia hosts so many articles (1.7 million in English alone) that the chances of you stumbling across a prank post are slim. But if you’re online on 1 April and counting on a legitimate answer, it might be a good excuse to try Citizendium for the first time. The online encyclopedia was set up Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, and promises to stamp out the abuse occasionally witnessed on Wikipedia by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. See our interview with Larry Sanger.
Posted by: Paul Trotter
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Wikipedia encyclopedia is banned at some colleges
Wikipedia encyclopedia is banned at some colleges
Issue date: 3/29/07 Section: News
Lysa Chen
The Chronicle (Duke)
(U-WIRE) DURHAM, N.C. -Although Wikipedia - like Google - has carved its way into the common vernacular, some say students should think twice before turning to the free online encyclopedia for their academic work.
Middlebury College's history department recently banned Wikipedia as a source for student papers, and professors at other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Los Angeles, have followed suit.
Although Duke University has yet to take an authoritative stance on the site, the academic ban has been supported by Wikipedia itself.
"We came out and said it was a sensible policy," said Sandra Ordonez, the Wikipedia Foundation's communications manager. "Students shouldn't be citing Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia for term papers or exams. It is not a primary source, not an authoritative source."
Sarah Deutsch, dean of social sciences and professor of history, said Wikipedia has not been a major concern with undergraduates at Duke. "Our students know better to identify sources and check the validity of information," she said.
Ordonez said Wikipedia could be helpful to students in other ways.
"It's a really good place to start your research and get a global picture of the topic," she said. "Some professors actually use Wikipedia to show students how to use different sources to conduct research."
Margaret Humphreys, professor of history and associate clinical professor of medicine, said Wikipedia might be useful as a starting point but should not be the last source students check.
"The message of unreliability should be out there," she said. "The student could have written the article. His buddy next door could have changed it just for fun. Supposedly, there are these watchdogs - but who are they?"
Professors may also view a student citing Wikipedia as lazy, Humphreys added.
"It's not immoral or bad to use it - just stupid," she said.
Junior David Fiocco said he has used Wikipedia to find background information and references for papers but added that he would never cite the encyclopedia as a source.
"It's not reliable," he said. "But if I have a question about something I'm reading, I'll definitely Wikipedia it."
Freshman Natalie Harrison said her professors have advised against using Wikipedia.
"All my professors say, 'Don't trust Wikipedia,'" she said. "At the beginning of the semester, one of my professors went on a 10-minute rant." Harrison agreed that college students should not turn to Wikipedia for their research but said she was surprised Middlebury College had to create an explicit policy.
"The school shouldn't have to tell students they shouldn't be using it in that way," she said. "They should be smart enough to realize Wikipedia is all nonsense."
Despite warnings from professors, some students said they have made the mistake of citing the source in the past.
Sophomore Nate Jones said he once cited Wikipedia on a paper, under the impression that it was similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"[My friend] told me not do it, and I never did it again," he said. "I didn't know it was easily corruptible. If a professor sees that, he'd be instantly skeptical." Jones added that he thought Encyclopaedia Britannica was "perfectly legit."
Although most professors and students acknowledged the problems with citing Wikipedia as an academic source, others nonetheless commended the site for its potential informational value.
Joshua Davis, lecturing fellow and teaching assistant professor of mathematics, who is also a Wikipedia moderator, said the site should have the same standing as any other encyclopedia.
"You don't want to use any encyclopedia as a source for research - just as a starting point," he said. He added that different subject areas might treat the use of Wikipedia differently. "I imagine it would make a big difference to a history teacher," he said. "You can't truly rely on Wikipedia on either facts or interpretations, which could be misguided or biased."
One proponent of the resource is Eric Katz, an assistant research professor of mathematics and a self-proclaimed "Wikipedia addict." He said the encyclopedia's math-related articles were relatively accurate, adding that he has often recommended the site to students.
"In one of my lessons, Wikipedia was my main reference," he said.
Davis said Wikipedia, which allows virtually anyone to edit most of its articles, has recently developed an undeserved bad reputation.
"A lot of people in the media who write about Wikipedia don't understand the many different mechanisms for increasing reliability and peer review," Davis said. "If someone vandalizes one of my articles, I can detect it quickly and fix it."
Issue date: 3/29/07 Section: News
Lysa Chen
The Chronicle (Duke)
(U-WIRE) DURHAM, N.C. -Although Wikipedia - like Google - has carved its way into the common vernacular, some say students should think twice before turning to the free online encyclopedia for their academic work.
Middlebury College's history department recently banned Wikipedia as a source for student papers, and professors at other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Los Angeles, have followed suit.
Although Duke University has yet to take an authoritative stance on the site, the academic ban has been supported by Wikipedia itself.
"We came out and said it was a sensible policy," said Sandra Ordonez, the Wikipedia Foundation's communications manager. "Students shouldn't be citing Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia for term papers or exams. It is not a primary source, not an authoritative source."
Sarah Deutsch, dean of social sciences and professor of history, said Wikipedia has not been a major concern with undergraduates at Duke. "Our students know better to identify sources and check the validity of information," she said.
Ordonez said Wikipedia could be helpful to students in other ways.
"It's a really good place to start your research and get a global picture of the topic," she said. "Some professors actually use Wikipedia to show students how to use different sources to conduct research."
Margaret Humphreys, professor of history and associate clinical professor of medicine, said Wikipedia might be useful as a starting point but should not be the last source students check.
"The message of unreliability should be out there," she said. "The student could have written the article. His buddy next door could have changed it just for fun. Supposedly, there are these watchdogs - but who are they?"
Professors may also view a student citing Wikipedia as lazy, Humphreys added.
"It's not immoral or bad to use it - just stupid," she said.
Junior David Fiocco said he has used Wikipedia to find background information and references for papers but added that he would never cite the encyclopedia as a source.
"It's not reliable," he said. "But if I have a question about something I'm reading, I'll definitely Wikipedia it."
Freshman Natalie Harrison said her professors have advised against using Wikipedia.
"All my professors say, 'Don't trust Wikipedia,'" she said. "At the beginning of the semester, one of my professors went on a 10-minute rant." Harrison agreed that college students should not turn to Wikipedia for their research but said she was surprised Middlebury College had to create an explicit policy.
"The school shouldn't have to tell students they shouldn't be using it in that way," she said. "They should be smart enough to realize Wikipedia is all nonsense."
Despite warnings from professors, some students said they have made the mistake of citing the source in the past.
Sophomore Nate Jones said he once cited Wikipedia on a paper, under the impression that it was similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"[My friend] told me not do it, and I never did it again," he said. "I didn't know it was easily corruptible. If a professor sees that, he'd be instantly skeptical." Jones added that he thought Encyclopaedia Britannica was "perfectly legit."
Although most professors and students acknowledged the problems with citing Wikipedia as an academic source, others nonetheless commended the site for its potential informational value.
Joshua Davis, lecturing fellow and teaching assistant professor of mathematics, who is also a Wikipedia moderator, said the site should have the same standing as any other encyclopedia.
"You don't want to use any encyclopedia as a source for research - just as a starting point," he said. He added that different subject areas might treat the use of Wikipedia differently. "I imagine it would make a big difference to a history teacher," he said. "You can't truly rely on Wikipedia on either facts or interpretations, which could be misguided or biased."
One proponent of the resource is Eric Katz, an assistant research professor of mathematics and a self-proclaimed "Wikipedia addict." He said the encyclopedia's math-related articles were relatively accurate, adding that he has often recommended the site to students.
"In one of my lessons, Wikipedia was my main reference," he said.
Davis said Wikipedia, which allows virtually anyone to edit most of its articles, has recently developed an undeserved bad reputation.
"A lot of people in the media who write about Wikipedia don't understand the many different mechanisms for increasing reliability and peer review," Davis said. "If someone vandalizes one of my articles, I can detect it quickly and fix it."
Citizendium Fancies Itself Wikipedia With Manners
Citizendium Fancies Itself Wikipedia With Manners
With just over 1,000 articles, Citizendium isn't yet enormous, particularly in comparison with Wikipedia's 1.7 million articles.
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
March 29, 2007 06:00 AM
Last November, Citizendium, a new online encyclopedia, embarked on an effort to reinvent Wikipedia. On Tuesday, it opened to the public. But there's some doubt the upstart reference site will follow the same trajectory: After four months, it still hasn't been vandalized.
That may be because Citizendium requires that authors use their real names.
"Getting rid of anonymity solves a lot of problems, or so it appears," said Larry Sanger, Citizendium's editor-in-chief and Wikipedia co-founder, in an interview. "If someone has to take responsibility for what they say, they're going to behave better."
Sanger sees Citizendium both as a competitor to Wikipedia and as a complementary resource. "I would say it's a competing effort in the sense that we are competing for the same readers," he said. "But on the other hand, I think that a lot of people are going to want to have two different articles to compare. The world will greatly benefit by having another enormous encyclopedia to consult."
With just over 1,000 articles, Citizendium isn't yet enormous, particularly in comparison with Wikipedia's 1.7 million articles. In terms of content, however, a comparison between Citizendium and Wikipedia is particularly apt. Many of Citizendium's articles derive from Wikipedia entries.
Sanger said that about one-third of Citizendium's 1,000 or so articles are either what he calls "unimproved" -- from somewhere else -- or are from Wikipedia. "But that's not really a good measure of our progress," he insisted. "We'll probably be deleting a lot of those."
Beyond sharing articles, Citizendium share's Wikipedia's nonprofit business model, in contrast with commercial competitors like Helium. Sanger sees that sameness as a good thing. "If you're going to do crowd-sourcing, those projects should be in the hands of the participants," he said, adding that once Citizendium becomes firmly established, he plans to step down as editor-in-chief and turn control over to the site's community "to set a good precedent."
Citizendium offers three possible roles for users who want to do more than simply read articles: author, editor, and constable. Authors can write, edit, and discuss articles; editors moderate content; and constables moderate user behavior.
Citizendium's identity verification system has worked so far, but it doesn't scale. That's why the site is working to make its registration process more automated. Sanger expects Citizendium will soon have an e-mail address-verification mechanism in place. He said that would-be community members are required to submit their real names and short bio of at least 50 words, preferrably from an e-mail service that isn't free. (There's more than a little irony in a nonprofit exhibiting suspicion of free e-mail.)
As to why anyone would want to write for Citizendium rather than Wikipedia, Sanger said, "You're working as part of a more civil community that has higher aims. For a lot of people, that's going to be very important."
With just over 1,000 articles, Citizendium isn't yet enormous, particularly in comparison with Wikipedia's 1.7 million articles.
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
March 29, 2007 06:00 AM
Last November, Citizendium, a new online encyclopedia, embarked on an effort to reinvent Wikipedia. On Tuesday, it opened to the public. But there's some doubt the upstart reference site will follow the same trajectory: After four months, it still hasn't been vandalized.
That may be because Citizendium requires that authors use their real names.
"Getting rid of anonymity solves a lot of problems, or so it appears," said Larry Sanger, Citizendium's editor-in-chief and Wikipedia co-founder, in an interview. "If someone has to take responsibility for what they say, they're going to behave better."
Sanger sees Citizendium both as a competitor to Wikipedia and as a complementary resource. "I would say it's a competing effort in the sense that we are competing for the same readers," he said. "But on the other hand, I think that a lot of people are going to want to have two different articles to compare. The world will greatly benefit by having another enormous encyclopedia to consult."
With just over 1,000 articles, Citizendium isn't yet enormous, particularly in comparison with Wikipedia's 1.7 million articles. In terms of content, however, a comparison between Citizendium and Wikipedia is particularly apt. Many of Citizendium's articles derive from Wikipedia entries.
Sanger said that about one-third of Citizendium's 1,000 or so articles are either what he calls "unimproved" -- from somewhere else -- or are from Wikipedia. "But that's not really a good measure of our progress," he insisted. "We'll probably be deleting a lot of those."
Beyond sharing articles, Citizendium share's Wikipedia's nonprofit business model, in contrast with commercial competitors like Helium. Sanger sees that sameness as a good thing. "If you're going to do crowd-sourcing, those projects should be in the hands of the participants," he said, adding that once Citizendium becomes firmly established, he plans to step down as editor-in-chief and turn control over to the site's community "to set a good precedent."
Citizendium offers three possible roles for users who want to do more than simply read articles: author, editor, and constable. Authors can write, edit, and discuss articles; editors moderate content; and constables moderate user behavior.
Citizendium's identity verification system has worked so far, but it doesn't scale. That's why the site is working to make its registration process more automated. Sanger expects Citizendium will soon have an e-mail address-verification mechanism in place. He said that would-be community members are required to submit their real names and short bio of at least 50 words, preferrably from an e-mail service that isn't free. (There's more than a little irony in a nonprofit exhibiting suspicion of free e-mail.)
As to why anyone would want to write for Citizendium rather than Wikipedia, Sanger said, "You're working as part of a more civil community that has higher aims. For a lot of people, that's going to be very important."
Experts: Citizendium Will Replace Wikipedia
Experts: Citizendium Will Replace Wikipedia
By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency
Jerusalem ---- March 28, 2007..... Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia, has had a flood of serious errors, juvenile vandalism and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane. The most recent example of Wikipedia's damage to providing accurate, objective on-line information was the case of Essjay. Under the Wikipedia user name Essjay, the contributor edited over 20,000 of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.
To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old college drop out named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.
Jordan's deception came to public attention on Feb. 26 when The New Yorker published a rare editors' note saying that when it wrote about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, "neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay's real name," and that it took Essjay's credentials and life experience at face value. "People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments," said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator.
In addition to his professional credentials and work on articles concerning Roman Catholicism, Essjay was described in the magazine's article, perhaps oddly for a religious scholar, as twice removing a sentence from the entry on the singer Justin Timberlake that "Essjay knew to be false." After the article appeared, the head of a Wikipedia watchdog organization, Daniel Brandt contacted The New Yorker about Essjay's real identity, which Jordan had disclosed with little fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit company.
In an e-mail message last Friday, The New Yorker's deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: "We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia's confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay's identity beyond what he told us." The New Yorker editors' note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site's growth. "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it," he said of Jordan's alter ego.
Complicating matters for Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a community manager by Wikia, which Wales helped to found in 2004. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.
But where Wales has no problem with Essjay and Wikipedia lying to the world, many academics, researchers and journalists do.
This week, Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger took off the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism, slander, libel and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be non-profit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different — not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
To be sure, Wikipedia's false egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few). However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by Wikipedia administrators such as Gili Bar-Hillel and Guy Chapman who have been accused of libel and censorship by users of Wikipedia.
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself — not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."
Whatever authority the system does have has been erased by such discoveries of blatant libel such as the case of John Seigenthaler Sr., a USA Today senior editor who was accused on Wikipedia of assassinating John Kennedy and his brother Bobby.
Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's 9/11 article. A Tel Aviv translator of Harry Potter books, Gili Bar-Hillel had openly stated to to a Wikipedia editor that he was dangerous to her children, even though Bar-Hillel did not know the user.
In fact, the innocent Wikipedia user that Bar-Hillel aka Wikipedia user Woggly attacked on-line with the support of Wikipedia administrators Guy Chapman aka Wikipedia user JzG, Josh Gordon aka Wikipedia user:Jpgordon, Jimbo Wales and former employee of Wikipedia Danny Wool was in fact a respected father's and children's rights activist in Israel.
Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility — and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK. Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia — or any other single source — as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists — anyone who could enhance the project's credibility. He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a pornographic Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief. Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. But the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust. After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online. But he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse.
When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork. A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output. In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.
Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised $35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. But he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.
"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."
Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 1,000 authors and 300 editors. The site has 2,000 articles, with over 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.
Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has. Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Many of the those Wikipedia users have been blocked or banned by other Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" — they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" — those who worked on more than 100 items — numbered 4,330.
"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think." But Sanger allows himself an even grander dream — that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."
Wikipedia has been shown to support extreme left wing views while censoring moderate to right wing comments. Wikipedia continues to refer to Islamic terror groups such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "militants', supporting the incitement of Al-Jazeera while deleting several Israel news sites and blogs labeling them "propaganda."
Many academics, researchers and journalists see Citizendium replacing Wikipedia.
Most colleges and universities have banned Wikipedia as a credible, accountable source. Professional journalists would never even think of touching Wikipedia. When they expose Wikipedia as an easy source to libel or slander anyone, journalists at international news media outlets from NBC News to the Israel News Agency get banned.
Now there is talk of a "Wikipedia Contest" taking place which will provide financial rewards for creating funny errors on Wikipedia. Organizers of the The Wikipedia Contest state that their objective is to stop Wikipedia from hurting any more people by engaging the open source encyclopedia using methods for which Wikipedia policies actually encourage.
Recently two members of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the Wikipedia Web site, have resigned their posts. Danny Wool, the No. 2 man at Wikimedia under founder Jimmy Wales, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, both announced their resignations late last week in emails to the organization's mailing list. Patrick had tendered his resignation to the board of the foundation earlier in the month but opted to publicly announce it Thursday. Neither disclosed the reasons for their resignations in the emails, nor did they respond to requests for comment.
Sources close to Wikipedia say that the two had resigned as part of settling several class action lawsuits which document that they were responsible for supporting several cases of libel and slander at Wikipedia.
One such case, that Wikipedia watch dog WikiTruth exposed, is that of literary agent Barbara Bauer who has sued the Wikimedia Foundation, for defamation because of their involvement in making or publicizing allegations that Bauer's respected services are a scam because she insists on payment up front from authors (where normal industry practice is for agents to collect only after the author's works sell). She has demanded a billion dollars for unauthorized use of her name as the title of a forum thread asking a question about her business practices.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes he's not much of a businessman. After securing about US$4 million in venture capital from a range of investors and additionally received US$10 million from online book seller Amazon, Wales states: "I'm not much of a businessperson. I just think, if we provide something people enjoy, they'll come and we'll figure out how to make money. How much money? I don't know. "I don't really get analysts on these things, I just do what I think sounds cool," he said. But unlike recent commercial hits such as YouTube or MySpace, Wikipedia is yet to draw a long list of suitors.
The encyclopedia is part of the charitable Wikipedia Foundation and does not contain any online advertising unlike Wikia, which features more specific content. He said the novelty of the jet-set life has yet to wear off and that he would likely travel more. "I go to parties with Bono and things like that," says Wales.
The Israel News Agency believes that Wales is far better going off to parties and continuing to create pornographic Web sites as Larry Sanger develops a truly accurate, objective encyclopedia.
Larry Sanger deserves our deepest gratitude. After being slandered and libeled by so many on Wikipedia, an entity that he did co-found, he was brave enough to move forward and make the Net a better place. Wikipedia was never the "online encyclopedia that anyone can edit" rather it is ruled by several anonymous administrators who slander, libel, abuse and censor. Sanger brings back the word accountability in Citizendium. For those of us who have edited Wikipedia, we witnessed how so many good, innocent people and organizations were hurt for no reason.
Citizendium defines a true collective effort providing honest and objective information. A credible, on-line free encyclopedia for which students, academics, teachers, researchers and journalists can finally rely upon.
Citizendium equals real names and real facts.
With Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press
By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency
Jerusalem ---- March 28, 2007..... Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia, has had a flood of serious errors, juvenile vandalism and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane. The most recent example of Wikipedia's damage to providing accurate, objective on-line information was the case of Essjay. Under the Wikipedia user name Essjay, the contributor edited over 20,000 of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.
To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old college drop out named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.
Jordan's deception came to public attention on Feb. 26 when The New Yorker published a rare editors' note saying that when it wrote about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, "neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay's real name," and that it took Essjay's credentials and life experience at face value. "People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments," said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator.
In addition to his professional credentials and work on articles concerning Roman Catholicism, Essjay was described in the magazine's article, perhaps oddly for a religious scholar, as twice removing a sentence from the entry on the singer Justin Timberlake that "Essjay knew to be false." After the article appeared, the head of a Wikipedia watchdog organization, Daniel Brandt contacted The New Yorker about Essjay's real identity, which Jordan had disclosed with little fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit company.
In an e-mail message last Friday, The New Yorker's deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: "We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia's confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay's identity beyond what he told us." The New Yorker editors' note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site's growth. "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it," he said of Jordan's alter ego.
Complicating matters for Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a community manager by Wikia, which Wales helped to found in 2004. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.
But where Wales has no problem with Essjay and Wikipedia lying to the world, many academics, researchers and journalists do.
This week, Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger took off the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism, slander, libel and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be non-profit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different — not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
To be sure, Wikipedia's false egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few). However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by Wikipedia administrators such as Gili Bar-Hillel and Guy Chapman who have been accused of libel and censorship by users of Wikipedia.
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself — not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."
Whatever authority the system does have has been erased by such discoveries of blatant libel such as the case of John Seigenthaler Sr., a USA Today senior editor who was accused on Wikipedia of assassinating John Kennedy and his brother Bobby.
Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's 9/11 article. A Tel Aviv translator of Harry Potter books, Gili Bar-Hillel had openly stated to to a Wikipedia editor that he was dangerous to her children, even though Bar-Hillel did not know the user.
In fact, the innocent Wikipedia user that Bar-Hillel aka Wikipedia user Woggly attacked on-line with the support of Wikipedia administrators Guy Chapman aka Wikipedia user JzG, Josh Gordon aka Wikipedia user:Jpgordon, Jimbo Wales and former employee of Wikipedia Danny Wool was in fact a respected father's and children's rights activist in Israel.
Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility — and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK. Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia — or any other single source — as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists — anyone who could enhance the project's credibility. He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a pornographic Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief. Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. But the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust. After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online. But he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse.
When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork. A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output. In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.
Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised $35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. But he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.
"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."
Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 1,000 authors and 300 editors. The site has 2,000 articles, with over 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.
Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has. Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Many of the those Wikipedia users have been blocked or banned by other Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" — they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" — those who worked on more than 100 items — numbered 4,330.
"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think." But Sanger allows himself an even grander dream — that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."
Wikipedia has been shown to support extreme left wing views while censoring moderate to right wing comments. Wikipedia continues to refer to Islamic terror groups such as Al-Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "militants', supporting the incitement of Al-Jazeera while deleting several Israel news sites and blogs labeling them "propaganda."
Many academics, researchers and journalists see Citizendium replacing Wikipedia.
Most colleges and universities have banned Wikipedia as a credible, accountable source. Professional journalists would never even think of touching Wikipedia. When they expose Wikipedia as an easy source to libel or slander anyone, journalists at international news media outlets from NBC News to the Israel News Agency get banned.
Now there is talk of a "Wikipedia Contest" taking place which will provide financial rewards for creating funny errors on Wikipedia. Organizers of the The Wikipedia Contest state that their objective is to stop Wikipedia from hurting any more people by engaging the open source encyclopedia using methods for which Wikipedia policies actually encourage.
Recently two members of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the Wikipedia Web site, have resigned their posts. Danny Wool, the No. 2 man at Wikimedia under founder Jimmy Wales, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, both announced their resignations late last week in emails to the organization's mailing list. Patrick had tendered his resignation to the board of the foundation earlier in the month but opted to publicly announce it Thursday. Neither disclosed the reasons for their resignations in the emails, nor did they respond to requests for comment.
Sources close to Wikipedia say that the two had resigned as part of settling several class action lawsuits which document that they were responsible for supporting several cases of libel and slander at Wikipedia.
One such case, that Wikipedia watch dog WikiTruth exposed, is that of literary agent Barbara Bauer who has sued the Wikimedia Foundation, for defamation because of their involvement in making or publicizing allegations that Bauer's respected services are a scam because she insists on payment up front from authors (where normal industry practice is for agents to collect only after the author's works sell). She has demanded a billion dollars for unauthorized use of her name as the title of a forum thread asking a question about her business practices.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes he's not much of a businessman. After securing about US$4 million in venture capital from a range of investors and additionally received US$10 million from online book seller Amazon, Wales states: "I'm not much of a businessperson. I just think, if we provide something people enjoy, they'll come and we'll figure out how to make money. How much money? I don't know. "I don't really get analysts on these things, I just do what I think sounds cool," he said. But unlike recent commercial hits such as YouTube or MySpace, Wikipedia is yet to draw a long list of suitors.
The encyclopedia is part of the charitable Wikipedia Foundation and does not contain any online advertising unlike Wikia, which features more specific content. He said the novelty of the jet-set life has yet to wear off and that he would likely travel more. "I go to parties with Bono and things like that," says Wales.
The Israel News Agency believes that Wales is far better going off to parties and continuing to create pornographic Web sites as Larry Sanger develops a truly accurate, objective encyclopedia.
Larry Sanger deserves our deepest gratitude. After being slandered and libeled by so many on Wikipedia, an entity that he did co-found, he was brave enough to move forward and make the Net a better place. Wikipedia was never the "online encyclopedia that anyone can edit" rather it is ruled by several anonymous administrators who slander, libel, abuse and censor. Sanger brings back the word accountability in Citizendium. For those of us who have edited Wikipedia, we witnessed how so many good, innocent people and organizations were hurt for no reason.
Citizendium defines a true collective effort providing honest and objective information. A credible, on-line free encyclopedia for which students, academics, teachers, researchers and journalists can finally rely upon.
Citizendium equals real names and real facts.
With Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press
Citizendium - project from the other Wikipedia guy goes live
Citizendium - project from the other Wikipedia guy goes live
Tuesday March 27 2007
By Bobbie Johnson / Internet 06:21pm
Larry Sanger has already gone down in history for some web wonks as the other guy from Wikipedia (the one who isn't Jimmy Wales). But, as we reported in our interview with him last year, he wants to make a new impression with a new version of Wikipedia.
Looks like things are moving forward, with Citizendium. It is, so the site claims an attempt to "improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names."
First impressions aren't bad - but they're not that good either. Not only does it have a god awful name (which is at least as bad as Wikipedia) but it's decided to opt for the basic wiki look, and therefore bears a striking resemblance to its major rival.
A quick browse around showed the articles were OK - but plenty of them seemed remarkably close to the Wikipedia version (cf this Geoffrey Chaucer and that Geoffrey Chaucer).
It's more likely that the real test will really come after a longer period of time when the public's allowed in to muck around.
What do you think?
Tuesday March 27 2007
By Bobbie Johnson / Internet 06:21pm
Larry Sanger has already gone down in history for some web wonks as the other guy from Wikipedia (the one who isn't Jimmy Wales). But, as we reported in our interview with him last year, he wants to make a new impression with a new version of Wikipedia.
Looks like things are moving forward, with Citizendium. It is, so the site claims an attempt to "improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names."
First impressions aren't bad - but they're not that good either. Not only does it have a god awful name (which is at least as bad as Wikipedia) but it's decided to opt for the basic wiki look, and therefore bears a striking resemblance to its major rival.
A quick browse around showed the articles were OK - but plenty of them seemed remarkably close to the Wikipedia version (cf this Geoffrey Chaucer and that Geoffrey Chaucer).
It's more likely that the real test will really come after a longer period of time when the public's allowed in to muck around.
What do you think?
Q&A: Wikipedia co-founder tweaks 'ignore all rules' philosophy in new project
Q&A: Wikipedia co-founder tweaks 'ignore all rules' philosophy in new project
March 28, 2007 -- Larry Sanger's answer to Wikipedia is a new online encyclopedia called Citizendium, which was launched to the public on Tuesday. Sanger, Citizendium's editor in chief and co-founder of Wikipedia, recently spoke to Computerworld about the launch and why this time around he is tweaking the "ignore all the rules" philosophy he urged others to take when building Wikipedia.
What does Citizendium offer that you can't get with Wikipedia? The world needs something in addition to Wikipedia. The world needs a better, more reliable free encyclopedia. There is little chance that Wikipedia is going to change the policies that I think are responsible for its lack of authoritativeness. A lot of people -- and I don't mean just experts -- have contributed to Wikipedia and come away with a bad taste in their mouth. The problem is that their work tends to be dismissed, and they are often treated disrespectfully. There really needs to be a place that is more inclusive. Wikipedia, by being open to all sorts of abusive and anonymous people, actually makes itself closed to people who don't want to work in that kind of atmosphere.
Why are you changing the "ignore all rules" philosophy you championed at Wikipedia? I am the author of the "ignore all rules" rule on Wikipedia. Some months after I humorously proposed that, I rejected it because other people were taking it seriously. The intent behind the rule initially was that people should not worry about getting formatting right and getting every single detail of policy under their belts before they started contributing. You could say that because I also encourage people to be bold on Citizendium and because I want them to place their own comfort level and their own motivation uppermost when they log on to do work, I actually am in favor of not ignoring the rules -- but [also] not being too fastidious. It's OK if you don't bold the subject of the article. Someone else will fix it, and you will learn simply by being corrected. That is all I meant by "ignore all rules." I certainly didn't mean that you can behave like a jerk and no one will care.
Did you create Citizendium to wipe out Wikipedia? It is very, very unlikely that our existence will lead to Wikipedia's demise. Wikipedia already has enormous momentum and an enormous group of people who really like the polices they have in place. As long as they stay within the law and within the guides of good ethical practice, I am all in favor of their continuing to grow and thrive.
What are some of Citizendium's important policies and processes? We want to have processes in place that allow us to quickly and easily rein in bad behavior. For example, not too long ago, there was one professional contributor who took another professional contributor to task saying that a certain article was simply bad work. One of our constables came along and erased the comment and put in a message to the effect of we have a policy of professional behavior and then linked to the policy page. If someone is obnoxious to other contributors, we will remove them and have done that already.
The most important other policy would be the real names policy. We require all contributors to use their own real names. I think the fact that we require people to use their real names has had a beneficial effect on the level of civility in the project, and it also increases the credibility of the results.
Who has volunteered so far to work with Citizendium? It is a huge diversity of people. We have distinguished tenured professors on down to very bright teenagers. A lot of the people who are at working on it every day are experts and professionals. On the other hand, there are also a lot of people who aren't particular experts in anything. It is pretty diverse bunch, and that is how we like it.
March 28, 2007 -- Larry Sanger's answer to Wikipedia is a new online encyclopedia called Citizendium, which was launched to the public on Tuesday. Sanger, Citizendium's editor in chief and co-founder of Wikipedia, recently spoke to Computerworld about the launch and why this time around he is tweaking the "ignore all the rules" philosophy he urged others to take when building Wikipedia.
What does Citizendium offer that you can't get with Wikipedia? The world needs something in addition to Wikipedia. The world needs a better, more reliable free encyclopedia. There is little chance that Wikipedia is going to change the policies that I think are responsible for its lack of authoritativeness. A lot of people -- and I don't mean just experts -- have contributed to Wikipedia and come away with a bad taste in their mouth. The problem is that their work tends to be dismissed, and they are often treated disrespectfully. There really needs to be a place that is more inclusive. Wikipedia, by being open to all sorts of abusive and anonymous people, actually makes itself closed to people who don't want to work in that kind of atmosphere.
Why are you changing the "ignore all rules" philosophy you championed at Wikipedia? I am the author of the "ignore all rules" rule on Wikipedia. Some months after I humorously proposed that, I rejected it because other people were taking it seriously. The intent behind the rule initially was that people should not worry about getting formatting right and getting every single detail of policy under their belts before they started contributing. You could say that because I also encourage people to be bold on Citizendium and because I want them to place their own comfort level and their own motivation uppermost when they log on to do work, I actually am in favor of not ignoring the rules -- but [also] not being too fastidious. It's OK if you don't bold the subject of the article. Someone else will fix it, and you will learn simply by being corrected. That is all I meant by "ignore all rules." I certainly didn't mean that you can behave like a jerk and no one will care.
Did you create Citizendium to wipe out Wikipedia? It is very, very unlikely that our existence will lead to Wikipedia's demise. Wikipedia already has enormous momentum and an enormous group of people who really like the polices they have in place. As long as they stay within the law and within the guides of good ethical practice, I am all in favor of their continuing to grow and thrive.
What are some of Citizendium's important policies and processes? We want to have processes in place that allow us to quickly and easily rein in bad behavior. For example, not too long ago, there was one professional contributor who took another professional contributor to task saying that a certain article was simply bad work. One of our constables came along and erased the comment and put in a message to the effect of we have a policy of professional behavior and then linked to the policy page. If someone is obnoxious to other contributors, we will remove them and have done that already.
The most important other policy would be the real names policy. We require all contributors to use their own real names. I think the fact that we require people to use their real names has had a beneficial effect on the level of civility in the project, and it also increases the credibility of the results.
Who has volunteered so far to work with Citizendium? It is a huge diversity of people. We have distinguished tenured professors on down to very bright teenagers. A lot of the people who are at working on it every day are experts and professionals. On the other hand, there are also a lot of people who aren't particular experts in anything. It is pretty diverse bunch, and that is how we like it.
TWO TOP WIKIPEDIA EXECUTIVES RESIGN
TWO TOP WIKIPEDIA EXECUTIVES RESIGN
Wikipedia has received a jolt as two of senior executives have just quit the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is undergoing certain re-organisations after the resignation. Danny Wool, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, have given in their papers. The departure of Patrick was known to the board earlier in the month but he chose to make it public now.
The reason of the resignations is not known as none of the executives made comments about it.
"This community understands implicitly that people of goodwill can (and do) have strong differences of opinion about important matters," Patrick wrote in his e-mail. "It is my earnest hope that everyone who cares about the foundation, but has concerns about what is happening at the Foundation now, will say so. This community is strongest when it is vocal, not silent."
Danny Wool has stated that he would stand for election for a position on the board of trustees of the foundation in June.
"At that time, I will make known my position on how the Wikimedia Foundation should operate and what mistakes I perceive are being made at present," Wool wrote. "So let's leave the gossip and second-guessing behind us and get on with the real task at hand -- building the largest and most reliable repository of knowledge ever created."
The announcements of the resignations come post the unveiling of the identity of Essjay, who edited thousands of Wikipedia articles under false credential claiming he was a Professor of religious studies but was really a 24-year-old college student.
Wikipedia has become one of the widely viewed sites in recent times due to secular nature of its contents, but has been stubbornly rejecting advertisements that has hurt it economically. Recently a senior official went about telling how its weak financial position was hurting it deeply. With hundreds of new contents being added everyday, Wikipedia needs money to buy servers but the donation it gets is far less to sustain itself.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, had earlier this year announced that the Wikipedia foundation will start a for-profit, ad-supported search engine called as Wikiasiri that will show results generated by users of the site rather than algorithms that Google, Yahoo currently use.
Wikipedia has received a jolt as two of senior executives have just quit the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is undergoing certain re-organisations after the resignation. Danny Wool, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, have given in their papers. The departure of Patrick was known to the board earlier in the month but he chose to make it public now.
The reason of the resignations is not known as none of the executives made comments about it.
"This community understands implicitly that people of goodwill can (and do) have strong differences of opinion about important matters," Patrick wrote in his e-mail. "It is my earnest hope that everyone who cares about the foundation, but has concerns about what is happening at the Foundation now, will say so. This community is strongest when it is vocal, not silent."
Danny Wool has stated that he would stand for election for a position on the board of trustees of the foundation in June.
"At that time, I will make known my position on how the Wikimedia Foundation should operate and what mistakes I perceive are being made at present," Wool wrote. "So let's leave the gossip and second-guessing behind us and get on with the real task at hand -- building the largest and most reliable repository of knowledge ever created."
The announcements of the resignations come post the unveiling of the identity of Essjay, who edited thousands of Wikipedia articles under false credential claiming he was a Professor of religious studies but was really a 24-year-old college student.
Wikipedia has become one of the widely viewed sites in recent times due to secular nature of its contents, but has been stubbornly rejecting advertisements that has hurt it economically. Recently a senior official went about telling how its weak financial position was hurting it deeply. With hundreds of new contents being added everyday, Wikipedia needs money to buy servers but the donation it gets is far less to sustain itself.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, had earlier this year announced that the Wikipedia foundation will start a for-profit, ad-supported search engine called as Wikiasiri that will show results generated by users of the site rather than algorithms that Google, Yahoo currently use.
Several colleges push to ban Wikipedia as resource
Several colleges push to ban Wikipedia as resource
By: Lysa Chen
Issue date: 3/28/07 Section: News
Although Wikipedia-like Google-has carved its way into the common vernacular, some say students should think twice before turning to the free online encyclopedia for their academic work.
Middlebury College's history department recently banned Wikipedia as a source for student papers, and professors at other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Los Angeles, have followed suit.
Although Duke has yet to take an authoritative stance on the site, the academic ban has been supported by Wikipedia itself.
"We came out and said it was a sensible policy," said Sandra Ordonez, the Wikipedia Foundation's communications manager. "Students shouldn't be citing Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia for term papers or exams. It is not a primary source, not an authoritative source."
Sarah Deutsch, dean of social sciences and professor of history, said Wikipedia has not been a major concern with undergraduates at Duke.
"Our students know better to identify sources and check the validity of information," she said.
Ordonez said Wikipedia could be helpful to students in other ways.
"It's a really good place to start your research and get a global picture of the topic," she said. "Some professors actually use Wikipedia to show students how to use different sources to conduct research."
Margaret Humphreys, professor of history and associate clinical professor of medicine, said Wikipedia might be useful as a starting point but should not be the last source students check.
"The message of unreliability should be out there," she said. "The student could have written the article. His buddy next door could have changed it just for fun. Supposedly, there are these watchdogs-but who are they?"
Professors may also view a student citing Wikipedia as lazy, Humphreys added.
"It's not immoral or bad to use it-just stupid," she said.
Junior David Fiocco said he has used Wikipedia to find background information and references for papers but added that he would never cite the encyclopedia as a source.
"It's not reliable," he said. "But if I have a question about something I'm reading, I'll definitely Wikipedia it."
Freshman Natalie Harrison said her professors have advised against using Wikipedia.
"All my professors say, 'Don't trust Wikipedia,'" she said. "At the beginning of the semester, one of my professors went on a 10-minute rant."
Harrison agreed that college students should not turn to Wikipedia for their research but said she was surprised Middlebury College had to create an explicit policy.
"The school shouldn't have to tell students they shouldn't be using it in that way," she said. "They should be smart enough to realize Wikipedia is all nonsense."
Despite warnings from professors, some students said they have made the mistake of citing the source in the past.
Sophomore Nate Jones said he once cited Wikipedia on a paper, under the impression that it was similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"[My friend] told me not do it, and I never did it again," he said. "I didn't know it was easily corruptible. If a professor sees that, he'd be instantly skeptical." Jones added that he thought Encyclopaedia Britannica was "perfectly legit."
Although most professors and students acknowledged the problems with citing Wikipedia as an academic source, others nonetheless commended the site for its potential informational value.
Joshua Davis, lecturing fellow and teaching assistant professor of mathematics, who is also a Wikipedia moderator, said the site should have the same standing as any other encyclopedia.
"You don't want to use any encyclopedia as a source for research-just as a starting point," he said. He added that different subject areas might treat the use of Wikipedia differently. "I imagine it would make a big difference to a history teacher," he said. "You can't truly rely on Wikipedia on either facts or interpretations, which could be misguided or biased."
One proponent of the resource is Eric Katz, an assistant research professor of mathematics and a self-proclaimed "Wikipedia addict." He said the encyclopedia's math-related articles were relatively accurate, adding that he has often recommended the site to students.
"In one of my lessons, Wikipedia was my main reference," he said.
Davis said Wikipedia, which allows virtually anyone to edit most of its articles, has recently developed an undeserved bad reputation.
"A lot of people in the media who write about Wikipedia don't understand the many different mechanisms for increasing reliability and peer review," Davis said. "If someone vandalizes one of my articles, I can detect it quickly and fix it."
By: Lysa Chen
Issue date: 3/28/07 Section: News
Although Wikipedia-like Google-has carved its way into the common vernacular, some say students should think twice before turning to the free online encyclopedia for their academic work.
Middlebury College's history department recently banned Wikipedia as a source for student papers, and professors at other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Los Angeles, have followed suit.
Although Duke has yet to take an authoritative stance on the site, the academic ban has been supported by Wikipedia itself.
"We came out and said it was a sensible policy," said Sandra Ordonez, the Wikipedia Foundation's communications manager. "Students shouldn't be citing Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia for term papers or exams. It is not a primary source, not an authoritative source."
Sarah Deutsch, dean of social sciences and professor of history, said Wikipedia has not been a major concern with undergraduates at Duke.
"Our students know better to identify sources and check the validity of information," she said.
Ordonez said Wikipedia could be helpful to students in other ways.
"It's a really good place to start your research and get a global picture of the topic," she said. "Some professors actually use Wikipedia to show students how to use different sources to conduct research."
Margaret Humphreys, professor of history and associate clinical professor of medicine, said Wikipedia might be useful as a starting point but should not be the last source students check.
"The message of unreliability should be out there," she said. "The student could have written the article. His buddy next door could have changed it just for fun. Supposedly, there are these watchdogs-but who are they?"
Professors may also view a student citing Wikipedia as lazy, Humphreys added.
"It's not immoral or bad to use it-just stupid," she said.
Junior David Fiocco said he has used Wikipedia to find background information and references for papers but added that he would never cite the encyclopedia as a source.
"It's not reliable," he said. "But if I have a question about something I'm reading, I'll definitely Wikipedia it."
Freshman Natalie Harrison said her professors have advised against using Wikipedia.
"All my professors say, 'Don't trust Wikipedia,'" she said. "At the beginning of the semester, one of my professors went on a 10-minute rant."
Harrison agreed that college students should not turn to Wikipedia for their research but said she was surprised Middlebury College had to create an explicit policy.
"The school shouldn't have to tell students they shouldn't be using it in that way," she said. "They should be smart enough to realize Wikipedia is all nonsense."
Despite warnings from professors, some students said they have made the mistake of citing the source in the past.
Sophomore Nate Jones said he once cited Wikipedia on a paper, under the impression that it was similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"[My friend] told me not do it, and I never did it again," he said. "I didn't know it was easily corruptible. If a professor sees that, he'd be instantly skeptical." Jones added that he thought Encyclopaedia Britannica was "perfectly legit."
Although most professors and students acknowledged the problems with citing Wikipedia as an academic source, others nonetheless commended the site for its potential informational value.
Joshua Davis, lecturing fellow and teaching assistant professor of mathematics, who is also a Wikipedia moderator, said the site should have the same standing as any other encyclopedia.
"You don't want to use any encyclopedia as a source for research-just as a starting point," he said. He added that different subject areas might treat the use of Wikipedia differently. "I imagine it would make a big difference to a history teacher," he said. "You can't truly rely on Wikipedia on either facts or interpretations, which could be misguided or biased."
One proponent of the resource is Eric Katz, an assistant research professor of mathematics and a self-proclaimed "Wikipedia addict." He said the encyclopedia's math-related articles were relatively accurate, adding that he has often recommended the site to students.
"In one of my lessons, Wikipedia was my main reference," he said.
Davis said Wikipedia, which allows virtually anyone to edit most of its articles, has recently developed an undeserved bad reputation.
"A lot of people in the media who write about Wikipedia don't understand the many different mechanisms for increasing reliability and peer review," Davis said. "If someone vandalizes one of my articles, I can detect it quickly and fix it."
A brainiac version of Wikipedia
A brainiac version of Wikipedia
By VIVIAN SONG
Wed, March 28, 2007
Readers may recall a recent experiment conducted by Sun Media that altered the text of a Wikipedia entry to read that the waters of the Rocky Mountains are known to turn people into furless rodents if consumed between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
It was a cheeky experiment that would be unlikely to see the light of day on a new online encyclopedia project headed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger that launched this week.
Unlike Wikipedia, which of late has been scandal-plagued and hemorrhaged users because of editing wars and questionable information, Sanger said Citizendium requires all contributors to use their real names, provide resumes and web links where possible to prove their identities.
While the premise of Wikipedia is that "anyone can edit" articles, entries on citizendium.org will be more academically accountable, with "expert editors who work shoulder to shoulder with the rank and file authors," Sanger said in a phone interview from Ohio.
So far, the site has 180 expert editors and 820 authors who have worked on 1,100 articles. It has a lot of catching up to do if, as Sanger hopes, the site grows to house millions of articles like Wikipedia.
"The idea is to have a significant number of those approved by editors. A giant source of information that people can rely on," he said. "I'd like to have an accurate representation of how we understand the universe, with not just mainstream views but also minority views." Citizendium has already poached former Wikipedia users, malcontent with its vulnerability to automated "vandalbots."
"I think Larry's concept is great in principle," wrote professor Shane Pinder, a registered Canadian user now teaching at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. "I tried for a while to monitor the ever-changing content of a few Wikipedia articles, but there are just too many people making changes and I have a job that I have to devote my time to -- which is more than I can say of some Wikipedia contributors."
Critics have slammed Citizendium, calling it elitist, undercutting the point of a community project like Wikipedia.
"The more certain you are about a site, the less you engage in conversation about it, the less you interpret it and the less you think about it," pointed out Jim Paul, an associate professor at the University of Calgary.
'ALTERNATIVES'
Soon there will be "alternatives to alternatives," he predicted, and a return to increasingly scholarly websites filled with jargon and knowledge exclusive to the privileged few and already available in academic journals. "Of course you're going to solve the problem of Wikipedia, but you're also going to get a culture of experts re-emerging," Paul said.
By VIVIAN SONG
Wed, March 28, 2007
Readers may recall a recent experiment conducted by Sun Media that altered the text of a Wikipedia entry to read that the waters of the Rocky Mountains are known to turn people into furless rodents if consumed between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
It was a cheeky experiment that would be unlikely to see the light of day on a new online encyclopedia project headed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger that launched this week.
Unlike Wikipedia, which of late has been scandal-plagued and hemorrhaged users because of editing wars and questionable information, Sanger said Citizendium requires all contributors to use their real names, provide resumes and web links where possible to prove their identities.
While the premise of Wikipedia is that "anyone can edit" articles, entries on citizendium.org will be more academically accountable, with "expert editors who work shoulder to shoulder with the rank and file authors," Sanger said in a phone interview from Ohio.
So far, the site has 180 expert editors and 820 authors who have worked on 1,100 articles. It has a lot of catching up to do if, as Sanger hopes, the site grows to house millions of articles like Wikipedia.
"The idea is to have a significant number of those approved by editors. A giant source of information that people can rely on," he said. "I'd like to have an accurate representation of how we understand the universe, with not just mainstream views but also minority views." Citizendium has already poached former Wikipedia users, malcontent with its vulnerability to automated "vandalbots."
"I think Larry's concept is great in principle," wrote professor Shane Pinder, a registered Canadian user now teaching at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. "I tried for a while to monitor the ever-changing content of a few Wikipedia articles, but there are just too many people making changes and I have a job that I have to devote my time to -- which is more than I can say of some Wikipedia contributors."
Critics have slammed Citizendium, calling it elitist, undercutting the point of a community project like Wikipedia.
"The more certain you are about a site, the less you engage in conversation about it, the less you interpret it and the less you think about it," pointed out Jim Paul, an associate professor at the University of Calgary.
'ALTERNATIVES'
Soon there will be "alternatives to alternatives," he predicted, and a return to increasingly scholarly websites filled with jargon and knowledge exclusive to the privileged few and already available in academic journals. "Of course you're going to solve the problem of Wikipedia, but you're also going to get a culture of experts re-emerging," Paul said.
Wikipedia braces itself for April Fools' Day
Wikipedia braces itself for April Fools' Day
Jenny Kleeman
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian
Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes.
The online encyclopaedia anyone can edit has been the target of joke contributions since its launch in 2001, but April Fools' Day has proved an irresistible opportunity for internet pranksters, as well as normally trustworthy contributors inspired to let their hair down.
Wikipedia braces itself for April Fools' Day
Jenny Kleeman
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian
Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes.
The online encyclopaedia anyone can edit has been the target of joke contributions since its launch in 2001, but April Fools' Day has proved an irresistible opportunity for internet pranksters, as well as normally trustworthy contributors inspired to let their hair down.
On April 1 2004 someone reworked the page on the Conservative party, redefining it as "a political think-tank" that "has been particularly influential on the ruling New Labour party". In April 2005 a posting on the front page claimed that Wikipedia had been taken over by Encyclopaedia Britannica, and would henceforth be known as Wikipaedia Britannica. Last year the pranksters got technical and swapped the "protect" and "delete" buttons on every page, so that anyone trying to guard an article from future editing would inadvertently delete it.
Some Wikipedians aren't laughing. "This is getting out of hand," huffed disgruntled editor Shanes in 2005. "It seems as if every Wikiuser feels they should have their own April Fools' prank somewhere. I'm thinking maybe the best joke would be to let Wikipedia not be editable today."
But Wikipedia intends to fight back with a joke of its own this year. Dozens of contributors have been debating this Sunday's front page since early January, planning to showcase articles that are true but unusual enough to sound like a joke. At the time of writing, editors are choosing between Red Rain in Kerala, The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid and Exploding Toads as the day's featured article.
They hope that if the site acknowledges the occasion, then visitors will be less inclined to mess it up. But it's unlikely that their joke will be funny enough to stop pranksters.
Jenny Kleeman
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian
Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes.
The online encyclopaedia anyone can edit has been the target of joke contributions since its launch in 2001, but April Fools' Day has proved an irresistible opportunity for internet pranksters, as well as normally trustworthy contributors inspired to let their hair down.
Wikipedia braces itself for April Fools' Day
Jenny Kleeman
Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian
Spare a thought for Wikipedia editors this Sunday. While most of us are leafing through the newspapers and enjoying a long lunch, they will be stationed in front of their computers, bracing themselves to defend the site against the annual onslaught of April Fools' hoaxes.
The online encyclopaedia anyone can edit has been the target of joke contributions since its launch in 2001, but April Fools' Day has proved an irresistible opportunity for internet pranksters, as well as normally trustworthy contributors inspired to let their hair down.
On April 1 2004 someone reworked the page on the Conservative party, redefining it as "a political think-tank" that "has been particularly influential on the ruling New Labour party". In April 2005 a posting on the front page claimed that Wikipedia had been taken over by Encyclopaedia Britannica, and would henceforth be known as Wikipaedia Britannica. Last year the pranksters got technical and swapped the "protect" and "delete" buttons on every page, so that anyone trying to guard an article from future editing would inadvertently delete it.
Some Wikipedians aren't laughing. "This is getting out of hand," huffed disgruntled editor Shanes in 2005. "It seems as if every Wikiuser feels they should have their own April Fools' prank somewhere. I'm thinking maybe the best joke would be to let Wikipedia not be editable today."
But Wikipedia intends to fight back with a joke of its own this year. Dozens of contributors have been debating this Sunday's front page since early January, planning to showcase articles that are true but unusual enough to sound like a joke. At the time of writing, editors are choosing between Red Rain in Kerala, The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid and Exploding Toads as the day's featured article.
They hope that if the site acknowledges the occasion, then visitors will be less inclined to mess it up. But it's unlikely that their joke will be funny enough to stop pranksters.
Wikipedia-Killer Goes Live
Wikipedia-Killer Goes Live
By Heather Havenstein
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 10:29:01 AM PST
Citizendium, an online encyclopedia started by a founder of Wikipedia, will announce today that the wiki has been opened for public use. The project, which was first launched as a pilot in November, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring contributors to use their real names, the organization said. Since November, 180 expert editors and 800 authors have joined the project to work on 1,000 articles. "The modest success of our pilot project shows that there is hope that we can correct exactly the sort of abuses that people demonize Web 2.0 for," said Larry Sanger, editor in chief of Citizendium and a co-founder of Wikipedia. "You don't have to choose between content and accountability. We have shown that we can create open and credible content. We can, in fact, be open to all sorts of participants but still hold people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community." Wikipedia came under fire earlier this month when a popular contributor claiming to be a professor was revealed to be a college student. Last week, two officials from the foundation that manages Wikipedia resigned their posts without disclosing why. As part of Citizendium, which is part of the non-profit incubator Tides Center, authors start new articles and edit existing articles. Meanwhile, editors make decisions about how an article should read and can approve specific versions of articles. ‘Constables’ aim to make the community run smoothly by alerting users if they make a mistake and explaining what’s wrong. Constables make decisions about behavior, not content, the organization said.
By Heather Havenstein
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 10:29:01 AM PST
Citizendium, an online encyclopedia started by a founder of Wikipedia, will announce today that the wiki has been opened for public use. The project, which was first launched as a pilot in November, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring contributors to use their real names, the organization said. Since November, 180 expert editors and 800 authors have joined the project to work on 1,000 articles. "The modest success of our pilot project shows that there is hope that we can correct exactly the sort of abuses that people demonize Web 2.0 for," said Larry Sanger, editor in chief of Citizendium and a co-founder of Wikipedia. "You don't have to choose between content and accountability. We have shown that we can create open and credible content. We can, in fact, be open to all sorts of participants but still hold people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community." Wikipedia came under fire earlier this month when a popular contributor claiming to be a professor was revealed to be a college student. Last week, two officials from the foundation that manages Wikipedia resigned their posts without disclosing why. As part of Citizendium, which is part of the non-profit incubator Tides Center, authors start new articles and edit existing articles. Meanwhile, editors make decisions about how an article should read and can approve specific versions of articles. ‘Constables’ aim to make the community run smoothly by alerting users if they make a mistake and explaining what’s wrong. Constables make decisions about behavior, not content, the organization said.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Wikipedia rival takes to the web
Wikipedia rival takes to the web
Candace Lombardi CNET News.com
Published: 27 Mar 2007 15:00 BST
A new rival to Wikipedia launched its public beta on Monday.
Citizendium, a self-proclaimed "citizens' compendium" of general knowledge, works much like Wikipedia in that anyone can submit information. This community encyclopedia, however, requires users to register with their real names, and its articles are governed by an editorial board.
The wiki encyclopedia was started by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, according to his own biography.
Citizendium seeks to improve on the wiki model by offering encyclopedic content with "gentle expert oversight", according to its main page.
The content, which has more than 1,100 articles as of this publication, includes imported Wikipedia articles that Citizendium volunteers and editors are in the process of "cleaning up" and outfitting with templates that track an article's status.
Sanger, who started private testing of Citizendium in November 2006, claims to now have approximately 820 authors and 186 editors participating in the project. Authors can start or edit articles. Editors decide which version of articles are approved and are required to have an academic background in a particular area of expertise.
Anyone who registers with their full name is free to contribute. But those contributions will be monitored by constables. A "CZ Constable" is a volunteer who is required to have an undergraduate degree and be "at least 25 years old". These constables (Sanger is one of them) will have the authority to ban inappropriate contributors.
Articles that have been vetted by Citizendium editors and constables are marked as "CZ Live".
This gives Citizendium control over what's posted and avoids some of the problems that have plagued Wikipedia.
Because of its free-form nature, Wikipedia has experienced some problems with defamation and vandalism, in addition to factually incorrect entries. Wikipedia banned American comedian Stephen Colbert from its site, after he encouraged fans to make funny edits to entries in order to illustrate the vulnerability of an open wiki encyclopedia.
Candace Lombardi CNET News.com
Published: 27 Mar 2007 15:00 BST
A new rival to Wikipedia launched its public beta on Monday.
Citizendium, a self-proclaimed "citizens' compendium" of general knowledge, works much like Wikipedia in that anyone can submit information. This community encyclopedia, however, requires users to register with their real names, and its articles are governed by an editorial board.
The wiki encyclopedia was started by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, according to his own biography.
Citizendium seeks to improve on the wiki model by offering encyclopedic content with "gentle expert oversight", according to its main page.
The content, which has more than 1,100 articles as of this publication, includes imported Wikipedia articles that Citizendium volunteers and editors are in the process of "cleaning up" and outfitting with templates that track an article's status.
Sanger, who started private testing of Citizendium in November 2006, claims to now have approximately 820 authors and 186 editors participating in the project. Authors can start or edit articles. Editors decide which version of articles are approved and are required to have an academic background in a particular area of expertise.
Anyone who registers with their full name is free to contribute. But those contributions will be monitored by constables. A "CZ Constable" is a volunteer who is required to have an undergraduate degree and be "at least 25 years old". These constables (Sanger is one of them) will have the authority to ban inappropriate contributors.
Articles that have been vetted by Citizendium editors and constables are marked as "CZ Live".
This gives Citizendium control over what's posted and avoids some of the problems that have plagued Wikipedia.
Because of its free-form nature, Wikipedia has experienced some problems with defamation and vandalism, in addition to factually incorrect entries. Wikipedia banned American comedian Stephen Colbert from its site, after he encouraged fans to make funny edits to entries in order to illustrate the vulnerability of an open wiki encyclopedia.
Wikipedia Cofounder Launches Rival Citizendium
Wikipedia Cofounder Launches Rival Citizendium
Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger has launched Citizendium, a self-proclaimed "citizens' compendium" of general knowledge.
The site will work like Wikipedia in that anyone can submit information; however, contributors must submit their real names, CNET reports. In addition, an editorial board will exercise "gentle expert oversight" of submitted articles.
Sanger started private testing of Citizendium in November 2006 and claims to now have approximately 820 authors and 186 editors contributing to the project. Authors can start or edit articles and editors can decide which version of an article is approved and which requires an academic background in a particular area of expertise.
The site hopes to have more control over how content is created and edited, in an effort to avoid many of the problems with defamation and vandalism that have sometimes plagued Wikipedia entries.
Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger has launched Citizendium, a self-proclaimed "citizens' compendium" of general knowledge.
The site will work like Wikipedia in that anyone can submit information; however, contributors must submit their real names, CNET reports. In addition, an editorial board will exercise "gentle expert oversight" of submitted articles.
Sanger started private testing of Citizendium in November 2006 and claims to now have approximately 820 authors and 186 editors contributing to the project. Authors can start or edit articles and editors can decide which version of an article is approved and which requires an academic background in a particular area of expertise.
The site hopes to have more control over how content is created and edited, in an effort to avoid many of the problems with defamation and vandalism that have sometimes plagued Wikipedia entries.
Rival to Wikipedia goes live
Rival to Wikipedia goes live
One of Wikipedia's founder members, Larry Sanger has launched a rival online encyclopedia, with the hope of improving on the original by avoiding the vandalism and inconsistency which affects some of its entries.
Sanger believes that allowing anyone to edit entries anonymously has caused problems for the original site, and plans to solve this by asking contributors to provide their real names.
The new site, called Citizendium, also aims to improve the quality of entries by having experts check them for accuracy. Approved articles will receive a green tick to indicate their reliability.
According to Sanger:
Sanger said he didn't expect that having people identify themselves and leave a short biography will avoid every abuse of the system, but he hopes it will significantly reduce the problem and lead to more reliable entries.
As well as having the same look and layout as Wikipedia, Citizendium will be non- profit, free of advertising, and free to read and edit.
One of Wikipedia's founder members, Larry Sanger has launched a rival online encyclopedia, with the hope of improving on the original by avoiding the vandalism and inconsistency which affects some of its entries.
Sanger believes that allowing anyone to edit entries anonymously has caused problems for the original site, and plans to solve this by asking contributors to provide their real names.
The new site, called Citizendium, also aims to improve the quality of entries by having experts check them for accuracy. Approved articles will receive a green tick to indicate their reliability.
According to Sanger:
"If there’s going to be a free encyclopaedia, I’d like there to be a better free encyclopaedia.
“It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are mis-using in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving.”
Sanger said he didn't expect that having people identify themselves and leave a short biography will avoid every abuse of the system, but he hopes it will significantly reduce the problem and lead to more reliable entries.
As well as having the same look and layout as Wikipedia, Citizendium will be non- profit, free of advertising, and free to read and edit.
Citizendium's Solution for Wikipedia's Woes
Citizendium's Solution for Wikipedia's Woes
By Brian Bergstein
AP
03/27/07 4:00 AM PT
Like Wikipedia, online encyclopedia Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy. "If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Larry Sanger, founder of Citizendium.
In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.
To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable -- and relatively small -- price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.
However, Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Sanger -- who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a cofounder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) -- its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.
That's precisely what Sanger hopes to change.
Enter Citizendium
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. However, this is different -- not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
Diluting the Real Expertise
To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few).
However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. However, Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself -- not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."
The Essjay Affair
Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name "Essjay" had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology Ph.D. he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.
Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's article on the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility -- and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. However, he says most Wikipedians who adopt pseudonyms want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would with their names.
Plus, he says, an online identity -- or none at all, since participants can opt to be tagged merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses -- frees contributors to leave their "real world" baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content.
"I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site," he says. "I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."
A Handle on Vandals
A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.
Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.
Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. However, the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Sliding Into Wiki
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia -- or any other single source -- as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right.
That's where these guys really diverge. Wales argues for self-improvement, with Wikipedians constantly tweaking the rules that guide them. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists -- anyone who could enhance the project's credibility.
He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief.
Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. However, the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust.
A Fork in the Road
After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online.
However, he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse. When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork.
A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output.
In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.
Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised US$35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. However, he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.
"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."
A Credible Competitor?
Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors. The site has 1,100 articles, with 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.
Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has.
Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" -- they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" -- those who worked on more than 100 items -- numbered 4,330.
"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think."
However, Sanger allows himself an even grander dream -- that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."
© 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© 2007 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.
By Brian Bergstein
AP
03/27/07 4:00 AM PT
Like Wikipedia, online encyclopedia Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy. "If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Larry Sanger, founder of Citizendium.
In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.
To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable -- and relatively small -- price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.
However, Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Sanger -- who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a cofounder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) -- its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.
That's precisely what Sanger hopes to change.
Enter Citizendium
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. However, this is different -- not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
Diluting the Real Expertise
To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few).
However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. However, Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself -- not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."
The Essjay Affair
Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name "Essjay" had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology Ph.D. he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.
Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's article on the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility -- and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. However, he says most Wikipedians who adopt pseudonyms want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would with their names.
Plus, he says, an online identity -- or none at all, since participants can opt to be tagged merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses -- frees contributors to leave their "real world" baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content.
"I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site," he says. "I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."
A Handle on Vandals
A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.
Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.
Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. However, the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Sliding Into Wiki
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia -- or any other single source -- as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right.
That's where these guys really diverge. Wales argues for self-improvement, with Wikipedians constantly tweaking the rules that guide them. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists -- anyone who could enhance the project's credibility.
He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief.
Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. However, the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust.
A Fork in the Road
After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online.
However, he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse. When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork.
A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output.
In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.
Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised US$35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. However, he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.
"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."
A Credible Competitor?
Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors. The site has 1,100 articles, with 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.
Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has.
Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" -- they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" -- those who worked on more than 100 items -- numbered 4,330.
"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think."
However, Sanger allows himself an even grander dream -- that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."
© 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© 2007 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.
Wikipedia founder launches rival site
Wikipedia founder launches rival site
27.03.2007 - Citizendium, unveiled on 25 March by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, is also an open-source online community encyclopaedia.
This new site comes at a time when two Wikipedia officials have resigned and some colleges have banned their students from using the site as a reference, claiming that allowing anyone to edit an entry on the site renders it a factually unreliable source.
Sanger’s site claims to bypass this problem by providing “gentle expert oversight” and requiring all contributors to use their real names.
Anyone may contribute to the site but it will be moderated by a group of expert editors, with suitable academic qualifications, or equivalent for non-academic or hobbyist subjects.
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 and is based on wikis, or open source editing software, that allows anyone to create or modify an entry.
The site contains over 1.7 million articles in English alone. It is ranked by Alexa Internet, a US-based web stats company, as one of the 11th most visited sites on the internet.
However, Wikipedia has faced libel charges in the past, the most notable being from former USA Today editor John Seigenthaler. A wiki entry falsely linked him to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and was left on the site for over four months before Wikipedia editors spotted it.
Earlier this month a high-profile editor on Wikipedia was found to be a 24-year-old Kentucky man with no academic qualifications who was posing as a professor of philosophy.
Wikipedia has recently received criticism from such respected news organisations as the BBC and Reuters due to its vulnerability to factual errors as well as acts of vandalism.
By Marie Boran
27.03.2007 - Citizendium, unveiled on 25 March by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, is also an open-source online community encyclopaedia.
This new site comes at a time when two Wikipedia officials have resigned and some colleges have banned their students from using the site as a reference, claiming that allowing anyone to edit an entry on the site renders it a factually unreliable source.
Sanger’s site claims to bypass this problem by providing “gentle expert oversight” and requiring all contributors to use their real names.
Anyone may contribute to the site but it will be moderated by a group of expert editors, with suitable academic qualifications, or equivalent for non-academic or hobbyist subjects.
Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 and is based on wikis, or open source editing software, that allows anyone to create or modify an entry.
The site contains over 1.7 million articles in English alone. It is ranked by Alexa Internet, a US-based web stats company, as one of the 11th most visited sites on the internet.
However, Wikipedia has faced libel charges in the past, the most notable being from former USA Today editor John Seigenthaler. A wiki entry falsely linked him to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and was left on the site for over four months before Wikipedia editors spotted it.
Earlier this month a high-profile editor on Wikipedia was found to be a 24-year-old Kentucky man with no academic qualifications who was posing as a professor of philosophy.
Wikipedia has recently received criticism from such respected news organisations as the BBC and Reuters due to its vulnerability to factual errors as well as acts of vandalism.
By Marie Boran
Wikipedia competitor debuts
Wikipedia competitor debuts
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
Citizendium, a project aimed at creating a new free encyclopedia online, announced today that a beta version is now available to the general public.
The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring contributors to register with their real names and by adding "gentle expert oversight" from editors who are knowledgeable in their field.
The project’s Editor-in-Chief, Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger believes that the anonymity of Wikipedia allowed it to grow quickly but also opened the door to significant problems such as vandalism and inaccuracy. Citizendium thinks its new registration requirements combined with expert editors, who have greater control on what actually gets published, will help the site prevent and mediate many of the problems experienced by Wikipedia.
The Citizendium will have three types of contributors: Authors, Editors and Constables. Here is how the website describes them.
Authors: authors constitute the majority of Citizendium’s population. Authors can start new articles, edit existing articles and talk things over on the discussion page.
Editors: Editors, who are experts in their fields, work shoulder-to-shoulder with authors and other editors. Editors, however, have two special functions over authors - they may make decisions when needed about how an article should read and may approve specific versions of articles.
Constables: Constables are friendly, hard-working folks who make sure the community runs smoothly. If you break a rule, a constable might gently tap you on the shoulder and explain what's wrong. Constables make decisions solely about behavior, not about content, which is the domain of editors.
Citizendium says that to date, over 180 editors and 800 authors have joined the project and have worked on over 1000 articles. The site says that it is now ready for the general public to participate in the community and begin reading and editing content. To prepare for increased traffic once the doors are open, Citizendium recently installed four additional servers for a total of five.
Visit Citizendium.
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
Citizendium, a project aimed at creating a new free encyclopedia online, announced today that a beta version is now available to the general public.
The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by requiring contributors to register with their real names and by adding "gentle expert oversight" from editors who are knowledgeable in their field.
The project’s Editor-in-Chief, Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger believes that the anonymity of Wikipedia allowed it to grow quickly but also opened the door to significant problems such as vandalism and inaccuracy. Citizendium thinks its new registration requirements combined with expert editors, who have greater control on what actually gets published, will help the site prevent and mediate many of the problems experienced by Wikipedia.
The Citizendium will have three types of contributors: Authors, Editors and Constables. Here is how the website describes them.
Authors: authors constitute the majority of Citizendium’s population. Authors can start new articles, edit existing articles and talk things over on the discussion page.
Editors: Editors, who are experts in their fields, work shoulder-to-shoulder with authors and other editors. Editors, however, have two special functions over authors - they may make decisions when needed about how an article should read and may approve specific versions of articles.
Constables: Constables are friendly, hard-working folks who make sure the community runs smoothly. If you break a rule, a constable might gently tap you on the shoulder and explain what's wrong. Constables make decisions solely about behavior, not about content, which is the domain of editors.
Citizendium says that to date, over 180 editors and 800 authors have joined the project and have worked on over 1000 articles. The site says that it is now ready for the general public to participate in the community and begin reading and editing content. To prepare for increased traffic once the doors are open, Citizendium recently installed four additional servers for a total of five.
Visit Citizendium.
Wikipedia Cofounder Launches Citizendium
Wikipedia Cofounder Launches Citizendium
By Jennifer LeClaire
March 27, 2007 10:11AM
Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research, said he sees a place for Citizendium on the social-media scene, and noted that corporations are extremely frustrated with Wikipedia's policies. "Companies have had real challenges getting their perspective on the facts addressed in Wikipedia," he explained. "You can file a complaint but there is no real protection against inaccuracies."
One of Wikipedia's founders is setting out to build a better online encyclopedia. Called Citizendium, the new site is now in beta and open to the public.
Dr. Larry Sanger, Citizendium's Editor-in-Chief, aims to improve upon the Web 2.0 encyclopedia model he helped develop by bringing more accountability and academic-quality articles to the concept. Citizendium, for example, requires contributors to use their real names.
"The modest success of our pilot project shows that there is hope that we can correct exactly the sort of abuses that people demonize Web 2.0 for. You don't have to choose between content and accountability," Sanger said in a statement.
Citizendium, he added, has demonstrated that a wiki-based encyclopedia can create open and credible content while still holding people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community.
Wikipedia 2.0?
Citizendium arrives in the wake of several Wikipedia scandals that have put a blemish on the concept.
In early March, a poster going by the screen name "Essjay" and claiming to be a professor of theology was really a 24-year-old college dropout named Ryan Jordan. The New Yorker brought the fraud to light in an editorial note admitting that its 2006 magazine profile of the community had misreported Essjay's academic credentials.
And in January, Rick Jelliffe, an O'Reilly Network blogger who offers his insights on XML issues, pondered an offer from Microsoft to make entries on Wikipedia on its behalf.
According to various news reports, Microsoft contracted Jelliffe to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's competing Office Open XML format. Jelliffe publicized the offer on his blog and stirred accusations of anti-ethical behavior. Wikipedia found itself in the middle.
Citizendium Beta
"Anonymity can certainly speed up the development cycle of online projects, but it also opens the door to the significant problems like vandalism and inaccuracy, as we've seen highlighted recently in the news," Sanger said, noting that Citizendium hasn't had any vandalism either before or after the short period in which developers tested out a self-registration system.
"We've discovered that it's a good thing to have human beings take part in screening other human beings because it gives you the ability to prevent and mediate many of these types of problems," Sanger added.
More than 180 expert editors and 800 authors have joined the project and have already worked on over 1,000 articles. Citizendium said that in the upcoming weeks it will implement a semi-automated registration system that will still rely on human interaction for final approval.
Corporations Appeased?
Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research, said he sees a place for Citizendium on the social-media scene, and noted that corporations are extremely frustrated with Wikipedia's policies. "Companies have had real challenges getting their perspective on the facts addressed in Wikipedia," he explained. "You can file a complaint but there is no real protection against inaccuracies."
Although Bernoff said he is sure that no one would want to read on Citizendium only what companies want told, he said there is room for more balance. Bernoff, for one, is betting consumers will appreciate having a choice.
Of course, that doesn't mean Citizendium won't have challenges of its own in separating fact from fiction. "If you try to develop another way to define the truth it's also going to have flaws," he said. "There is no automatic truth algorithm in the world."
Wikipedia could not immediately be reached to comment on the competing site.
By Jennifer LeClaire
March 27, 2007 10:11AM
Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research, said he sees a place for Citizendium on the social-media scene, and noted that corporations are extremely frustrated with Wikipedia's policies. "Companies have had real challenges getting their perspective on the facts addressed in Wikipedia," he explained. "You can file a complaint but there is no real protection against inaccuracies."
One of Wikipedia's founders is setting out to build a better online encyclopedia. Called Citizendium, the new site is now in beta and open to the public.
Dr. Larry Sanger, Citizendium's Editor-in-Chief, aims to improve upon the Web 2.0 encyclopedia model he helped develop by bringing more accountability and academic-quality articles to the concept. Citizendium, for example, requires contributors to use their real names.
"The modest success of our pilot project shows that there is hope that we can correct exactly the sort of abuses that people demonize Web 2.0 for. You don't have to choose between content and accountability," Sanger said in a statement.
Citizendium, he added, has demonstrated that a wiki-based encyclopedia can create open and credible content while still holding people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community.
Wikipedia 2.0?
Citizendium arrives in the wake of several Wikipedia scandals that have put a blemish on the concept.
In early March, a poster going by the screen name "Essjay" and claiming to be a professor of theology was really a 24-year-old college dropout named Ryan Jordan. The New Yorker brought the fraud to light in an editorial note admitting that its 2006 magazine profile of the community had misreported Essjay's academic credentials.
And in January, Rick Jelliffe, an O'Reilly Network blogger who offers his insights on XML issues, pondered an offer from Microsoft to make entries on Wikipedia on its behalf.
According to various news reports, Microsoft contracted Jelliffe to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's competing Office Open XML format. Jelliffe publicized the offer on his blog and stirred accusations of anti-ethical behavior. Wikipedia found itself in the middle.
Citizendium Beta
"Anonymity can certainly speed up the development cycle of online projects, but it also opens the door to the significant problems like vandalism and inaccuracy, as we've seen highlighted recently in the news," Sanger said, noting that Citizendium hasn't had any vandalism either before or after the short period in which developers tested out a self-registration system.
"We've discovered that it's a good thing to have human beings take part in screening other human beings because it gives you the ability to prevent and mediate many of these types of problems," Sanger added.
More than 180 expert editors and 800 authors have joined the project and have already worked on over 1,000 articles. Citizendium said that in the upcoming weeks it will implement a semi-automated registration system that will still rely on human interaction for final approval.
Corporations Appeased?
Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research, said he sees a place for Citizendium on the social-media scene, and noted that corporations are extremely frustrated with Wikipedia's policies. "Companies have had real challenges getting their perspective on the facts addressed in Wikipedia," he explained. "You can file a complaint but there is no real protection against inaccuracies."
Although Bernoff said he is sure that no one would want to read on Citizendium only what companies want told, he said there is room for more balance. Bernoff, for one, is betting consumers will appreciate having a choice.
Of course, that doesn't mean Citizendium won't have challenges of its own in separating fact from fiction. "If you try to develop another way to define the truth it's also going to have flaws," he said. "There is no automatic truth algorithm in the world."
Wikipedia could not immediately be reached to comment on the competing site.
Citizendium: A More Accountable Wikipedia?
Citizendium: A More Accountable Wikipedia?
Monday, March 26, 2007
Posted by Amy Gahran 4:19:52 PM
Are you, like many journalists, squeamish about Wikipedia's anyone-can-edit, no-real-name-required approach? You might want to check out Citizendium, an intriguing Wikipedia rival that formally debuted Mar. 25.
Citizendium is the project of Larry Sanger, one of the pioneers of Wikipedia. AP reports on the new project: "Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be non-profit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy."
As of this writing, Citizendium offers over 1100 "live" (vetted) articles. Here is Citizendium's definition of CZ Live status: "An article is live if (1) we started it ourselves; or (2) it is externally-sourced (e.g., from Wikipedia), and there have been at least three significant changes in three different places to the wording of an article. ...Only significant changes, which involve adding or completely rewriting sentences, can make an externally-sourced article CZ Live."
For quite a while, I expect that Wikipedia's substantial head start on content and community will make it a far more useful and popular resource than Citizendium. Over time, over course, that lead can narrow.
It remains to be seen whether Citizendium will prosper -- quite possibly its vetting model may prove too cumbersome or vulnerable to the inevitable cliquishness that develops within any large online community. And, of course, every system can and will be spoofed. However, it could become a preferred and authoritative resource -- at least on on some topics or for some communities.
We'll see. In the meantime, if you're interested in the Citizendium approach, remember that you get out of it what you put into it. I strongly encourage journalists who use either Citizendium or Wikipedia to contribute content to, or edit, those resources. Expertise and accountability are not spectator sports.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Posted by Amy Gahran 4:19:52 PM
Are you, like many journalists, squeamish about Wikipedia's anyone-can-edit, no-real-name-required approach? You might want to check out Citizendium, an intriguing Wikipedia rival that formally debuted Mar. 25.
Citizendium is the project of Larry Sanger, one of the pioneers of Wikipedia. AP reports on the new project: "Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be non-profit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy."
As of this writing, Citizendium offers over 1100 "live" (vetted) articles. Here is Citizendium's definition of CZ Live status: "An article is live if (1) we started it ourselves; or (2) it is externally-sourced (e.g., from Wikipedia), and there have been at least three significant changes in three different places to the wording of an article. ...Only significant changes, which involve adding or completely rewriting sentences, can make an externally-sourced article CZ Live."
For quite a while, I expect that Wikipedia's substantial head start on content and community will make it a far more useful and popular resource than Citizendium. Over time, over course, that lead can narrow.
It remains to be seen whether Citizendium will prosper -- quite possibly its vetting model may prove too cumbersome or vulnerable to the inevitable cliquishness that develops within any large online community. And, of course, every system can and will be spoofed. However, it could become a preferred and authoritative resource -- at least on on some topics or for some communities.
We'll see. In the meantime, if you're interested in the Citizendium approach, remember that you get out of it what you put into it. I strongly encourage journalists who use either Citizendium or Wikipedia to contribute content to, or edit, those resources. Expertise and accountability are not spectator sports.
Citing trouble: Profs frown on Wikipedia
Citing trouble: Profs frown on Wikipedia
No local colleges prohibit using online tool, but officials don’t recommend it.
KRIS WERNOWSKY kwernowsky@timesleader.com
If you believe everything you read on Wikipedia, then golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is a pill-popping, wife-beating drunk; comedian Sinbad died of a heart attack; and the prime minister of Norway is a pedophile.
Believe with caution, scholars warn.
The free online service Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as an open-source encyclopedia with content submitted and edited by volunteers.
There is little, or no, academic editorial oversight of Wikipedia and its 1.68 million articles unlike its paper-bound predecessors that, while not perfect, were vetted and subject to peer review.
This disturbs college professors who notice increased citations of Wikipedia articles in research papers submitted by students. The history department at one Vermont college recently developed a policy that forbids the use of the online service.
Brian A. Pavlac, chairman of the King’s College history department, said students should never use Wikipedia as a primary source for research. If a student must use the site, Pavlac suggests using Wikipedia as a tertiary source, or a guidepost to lead students to other forms of more credible information.
“It has its value, but you have to be very careful with it,” said Pavlac, who teaches a research methods course at King’s. “Be aware of its limitations.”
While no area colleges forbid the use of Wikipedia for research, Middlebury College in Vermont took strict action in telling students they could not use it as a source for papers and exams.
Neil Waters, professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury, said he started to notice the trend last semester when his students’ final exams featured “the same nuggets of misinformation.” He drafted the policy, took it to the department and it passed.
A disclaimer on the Web site warns users that all articles are not of “encyclopedic quality from the start” and says that “many articles start their lives as partisan, and it is after a long process of discussion, debate and argument, that they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus.” In other words, even if an article contains some misinformation, it’s up to users and volunteers to weed out bad information in exchange for something truthful.
“I think, when Wikipedia works the way it’s supposed to, you can have a crummy article on Wikipedia and people can contribute what they know and it will get better and better,” Waters said. “My view of human nature is not quite so optimistic. The same people who can improve things and make them better; other people can jump in, out of ignorance or malcontent can contribute to its inaccuracy.”
Of course comedian Sinbad isn’t dead, but this past weekend, a Wikipedia posting claimed the actor who starred in the television series “A Different World” and the film “Jingle All The Way” died on the morning of March 14 as a result of a heart attack.
“Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again,” the funnyman told an Associated Press reporter.
Golfer Zoeller didn’t take too kindly to his place in Wikipedia. He filed a lawsuit, not against the Web service, but against the Miami-based company that owns a computer where an article claiming the golfer abused drugs and alcohol was written.
The stalwart weekly news publication The New Yorker recently admitted one of its writers cited a Wikipedia administrator who edited articles and claimed to be a tenured theologian with a Ph.D. The administrator was actually a 24-year-old community college dropout.
Kevin Norris, a reference librarian at the University of Scranton who teaches a course in electronic research, said Wikipedia’s use by college students says less about online encyclopedia, and more about the students who choose to use it.
“I think most students know it’s not the best source, but it’s easy to do an Internet search,” Norris said. “We all remember what it was writing research papers in college. They’re usually started the night before they’re due. People don’t always pick the best sources, but sometimes they pick the easiest sources.”
No local colleges prohibit using online tool, but officials don’t recommend it.
KRIS WERNOWSKY kwernowsky@timesleader.com
If you believe everything you read on Wikipedia, then golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is a pill-popping, wife-beating drunk; comedian Sinbad died of a heart attack; and the prime minister of Norway is a pedophile.
Believe with caution, scholars warn.
The free online service Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as an open-source encyclopedia with content submitted and edited by volunteers.
There is little, or no, academic editorial oversight of Wikipedia and its 1.68 million articles unlike its paper-bound predecessors that, while not perfect, were vetted and subject to peer review.
This disturbs college professors who notice increased citations of Wikipedia articles in research papers submitted by students. The history department at one Vermont college recently developed a policy that forbids the use of the online service.
Brian A. Pavlac, chairman of the King’s College history department, said students should never use Wikipedia as a primary source for research. If a student must use the site, Pavlac suggests using Wikipedia as a tertiary source, or a guidepost to lead students to other forms of more credible information.
“It has its value, but you have to be very careful with it,” said Pavlac, who teaches a research methods course at King’s. “Be aware of its limitations.”
While no area colleges forbid the use of Wikipedia for research, Middlebury College in Vermont took strict action in telling students they could not use it as a source for papers and exams.
Neil Waters, professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury, said he started to notice the trend last semester when his students’ final exams featured “the same nuggets of misinformation.” He drafted the policy, took it to the department and it passed.
A disclaimer on the Web site warns users that all articles are not of “encyclopedic quality from the start” and says that “many articles start their lives as partisan, and it is after a long process of discussion, debate and argument, that they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus.” In other words, even if an article contains some misinformation, it’s up to users and volunteers to weed out bad information in exchange for something truthful.
“I think, when Wikipedia works the way it’s supposed to, you can have a crummy article on Wikipedia and people can contribute what they know and it will get better and better,” Waters said. “My view of human nature is not quite so optimistic. The same people who can improve things and make them better; other people can jump in, out of ignorance or malcontent can contribute to its inaccuracy.”
Of course comedian Sinbad isn’t dead, but this past weekend, a Wikipedia posting claimed the actor who starred in the television series “A Different World” and the film “Jingle All The Way” died on the morning of March 14 as a result of a heart attack.
“Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again,” the funnyman told an Associated Press reporter.
Golfer Zoeller didn’t take too kindly to his place in Wikipedia. He filed a lawsuit, not against the Web service, but against the Miami-based company that owns a computer where an article claiming the golfer abused drugs and alcohol was written.
The stalwart weekly news publication The New Yorker recently admitted one of its writers cited a Wikipedia administrator who edited articles and claimed to be a tenured theologian with a Ph.D. The administrator was actually a 24-year-old community college dropout.
Kevin Norris, a reference librarian at the University of Scranton who teaches a course in electronic research, said Wikipedia’s use by college students says less about online encyclopedia, and more about the students who choose to use it.
“I think most students know it’s not the best source, but it’s easy to do an Internet search,” Norris said. “We all remember what it was writing research papers in college. They’re usually started the night before they’re due. People don’t always pick the best sources, but sometimes they pick the easiest sources.”
Wikipedia Becomes Intelligence Tool And Target For Jihadists
Wikipedia Becomes Intelligence Tool And Target For Jihadists
Last year, an Internet user posted a message to a jihadist Web site titled "Why Don't We Invade Wikipedia?"
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
March 22, 2007 05:00 PM
Wikipedia, like Switzerland, wants to be neutral. But the new bankers of the Net's knowledge face foes invested in partisan points of view.
It's not just the Congressional staff members, special interest groups, and Microsoft making changes to Wikipedia entries. Islamic jihadists fancy themselves editors, too.
On Dec. 9th of last year, an Internet user posted a message to a jihadist Web site titled, "Why Don't We Invade Wikipedia?"
The forum participant advised Muslims to contribute to the online encyclopedia, "and in this way, and through an Islamic lobby, apply pressure on the encyclopedia's material, as is the case with most of the other participants," according to news summary distributed by the Open Source Center of the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
Wikipedia says that "The DNI Open Source Center was established Nov. 1, 2005, and, operating under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is intended to improve the availability of open sources to intelligence officers and other government officials."
One such source is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia "has steadily grown in popularity, credibility, and influence to the point that it is now used and referenced in U.S. Government intelligence products," explained Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a group that monitors government information policy, in a recent blog post.
For example, a March 21 OSC profile of Rajnath Singh, president of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, says that it was sourced from wikipedia.org, the official BJP website, and Indian media Web sites including Zee News, Indian Express, and The Times of India.
Aftergood sees the government's increasing use of Wikipedia for intelligence as both perilous and promising. "Everyone recognizes the limitations of Wikipedia, that it's only as good as its contributors, but it's a starting point," he said. "And in many cases it can be a source of first resort. If you have 30 seconds to check something, it can be the best place to turn."
On the whole, Aftergood sees the government's willingness to look to new sources of intelligence as "a welcome development," even if it means approaching Wikipedia entries with caution.
As to the invasion of Wikipedia, last year's call to arms hasn't resulted in a noticeable increase in vandalism or partisan editing, according to a Wikipedia spokesperson Sandra Ordonez. However, she acknowledges that Wikipedia is working on developing better reporting and anti-vandalism tools, which at least suggests the issue hasn't gone away.
Ordonez maintains that edits to articles that alter the neutral point of view will be addressed by the Wikipedia community.
Asked whether the defense community was aware of concerted efforts by jihadists to alter Wikipedia, Maj. Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, said, "I have no information on this particular case to pass along. However, as we have seen, terrorists continue to use the Internet to conduct distributed operations, recruit, raise funds and spread false information."
Last year, an Internet user posted a message to a jihadist Web site titled "Why Don't We Invade Wikipedia?"
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
March 22, 2007 05:00 PM
Wikipedia, like Switzerland, wants to be neutral. But the new bankers of the Net's knowledge face foes invested in partisan points of view.
It's not just the Congressional staff members, special interest groups, and Microsoft making changes to Wikipedia entries. Islamic jihadists fancy themselves editors, too.
On Dec. 9th of last year, an Internet user posted a message to a jihadist Web site titled, "Why Don't We Invade Wikipedia?"
The forum participant advised Muslims to contribute to the online encyclopedia, "and in this way, and through an Islamic lobby, apply pressure on the encyclopedia's material, as is the case with most of the other participants," according to news summary distributed by the Open Source Center of the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
Wikipedia says that "The DNI Open Source Center was established Nov. 1, 2005, and, operating under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is intended to improve the availability of open sources to intelligence officers and other government officials."
One such source is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia "has steadily grown in popularity, credibility, and influence to the point that it is now used and referenced in U.S. Government intelligence products," explained Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a group that monitors government information policy, in a recent blog post.
For example, a March 21 OSC profile of Rajnath Singh, president of India's Bharatiya Janata Party, says that it was sourced from wikipedia.org, the official BJP website, and Indian media Web sites including Zee News, Indian Express, and The Times of India.
Aftergood sees the government's increasing use of Wikipedia for intelligence as both perilous and promising. "Everyone recognizes the limitations of Wikipedia, that it's only as good as its contributors, but it's a starting point," he said. "And in many cases it can be a source of first resort. If you have 30 seconds to check something, it can be the best place to turn."
On the whole, Aftergood sees the government's willingness to look to new sources of intelligence as "a welcome development," even if it means approaching Wikipedia entries with caution.
As to the invasion of Wikipedia, last year's call to arms hasn't resulted in a noticeable increase in vandalism or partisan editing, according to a Wikipedia spokesperson Sandra Ordonez. However, she acknowledges that Wikipedia is working on developing better reporting and anti-vandalism tools, which at least suggests the issue hasn't gone away.
Ordonez maintains that edits to articles that alter the neutral point of view will be addressed by the Wikipedia community.
Asked whether the defense community was aware of concerted efforts by jihadists to alter Wikipedia, Maj. Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, said, "I have no information on this particular case to pass along. However, as we have seen, terrorists continue to use the Internet to conduct distributed operations, recruit, raise funds and spread false information."
Two top Wikipedia officials resign
Two top Wikipedia officials resign
Heather Havenstein, Computerworld
27/03/2007 08:40:40
Two members of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the Wikipedia Web site, have resigned their posts.
Danny Wool, the No. 2 man at Wikimedia under founder Jimmy Wales, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, both announced their resignations late last week in e-mails to the organization's mailing list. Patrick had tendered his resignation to the board of the foundation earlier in the month but opted to publicly announce it Thursday.
Neither disclosed the reasons for their resignations in the e-mails, nor did they respond to requests for comment.
"This community understands implicitly that people of goodwill can (and do) have strong differences of opinion about important matters," Patrick wrote in his e-mail. "It is my earnest hope that everyone who cares about the foundation, but has concerns about what is happening at the Foundation now, will say so. This community is strongest when it is vocal, not silent."
Wool noted in his e-mail that he plans to run for a position on the board of trustees of the foundation in June.
"At that time, I will make known my position on how the Wikimedia Foundation should operate and what mistakes I perceive are being made at present," Wool wrote. "So let's leave the gossip and second-guessing behind us and get on with the real task at hand -- building the largest and most reliable repository of knowledge ever created."
Wool noted that he plans on remaining an active editor on various projects at the foundation.
The resignations come on the heels of the unmasking of a high-profile editor at Wikipedia who had posed as a professor of religious studies but was really a 24-year-old college student who had fabricated his credentials.
Heather Havenstein, Computerworld
27/03/2007 08:40:40
Two members of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the Wikipedia Web site, have resigned their posts.
Danny Wool, the No. 2 man at Wikimedia under founder Jimmy Wales, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, both announced their resignations late last week in e-mails to the organization's mailing list. Patrick had tendered his resignation to the board of the foundation earlier in the month but opted to publicly announce it Thursday.
Neither disclosed the reasons for their resignations in the e-mails, nor did they respond to requests for comment.
"This community understands implicitly that people of goodwill can (and do) have strong differences of opinion about important matters," Patrick wrote in his e-mail. "It is my earnest hope that everyone who cares about the foundation, but has concerns about what is happening at the Foundation now, will say so. This community is strongest when it is vocal, not silent."
Wool noted in his e-mail that he plans to run for a position on the board of trustees of the foundation in June.
"At that time, I will make known my position on how the Wikimedia Foundation should operate and what mistakes I perceive are being made at present," Wool wrote. "So let's leave the gossip and second-guessing behind us and get on with the real task at hand -- building the largest and most reliable repository of knowledge ever created."
Wool noted that he plans on remaining an active editor on various projects at the foundation.
The resignations come on the heels of the unmasking of a high-profile editor at Wikipedia who had posed as a professor of religious studies but was really a 24-year-old college student who had fabricated his credentials.
Wikipedia Co-Founder Seeks to Start Over
Wikipedia Co-Founder Seeks to Start Over
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN
AP Technology Writer
Posted March 25 2007, 9:41 PM EDT
In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.
To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable -- and relatively small -- price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.
But Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Sanger -- who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) -- its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.
And that's precisely what Sanger hopes to change.
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different -- not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few).
However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself -- not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."
Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name "Essjay" had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology Ph.D. he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.
Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's article on the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility -- and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. But he says most Wikipedians who adopt pseudonyms want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would with their names.
Plus, he says, an online identity -- or none at all, since participants can opt to be tagged merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses -- frees contributors to leave their "real world" baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content.
"I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site," he says. "I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."
A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.
Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.
Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia -- or any other single source -- as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right.
That's where these guys really diverge. Wales argues for self-improvement, with Wikipedians constantly tweaking the rules that guide them. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists -- anyone who could enhance the project's credibility.
He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief.
Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. But the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust.
After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online.
But he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse. When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork.
A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output.
In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.
Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised $35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. But he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.
"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."
Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors. The site has 1,100 articles, with 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.
Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has.
Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" -- they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" -- those who worked on more than 100 items -- numbered 4,330.
"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think."
But Sanger allows himself an even grander dream -- that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN
AP Technology Writer
Posted March 25 2007, 9:41 PM EDT
In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.
To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable -- and relatively small -- price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.
But Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Sanger -- who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) -- its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.
And that's precisely what Sanger hopes to change.
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different -- not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few).
However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself -- not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."
Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name "Essjay" had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology Ph.D. he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.
Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's article on the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility -- and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. But he says most Wikipedians who adopt pseudonyms want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would with their names.
Plus, he says, an online identity -- or none at all, since participants can opt to be tagged merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses -- frees contributors to leave their "real world" baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content.
"I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site," he says. "I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."
A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.
Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.
Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia -- or any other single source -- as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right.
That's where these guys really diverge. Wales argues for self-improvement, with Wikipedians constantly tweaking the rules that guide them. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists -- anyone who could enhance the project's credibility.
He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief.
Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. But the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust.
After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online.
But he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse. When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork.
A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output.
In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.
Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised $35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. But he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.
"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."
Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors. The site has 1,100 articles, with 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.
Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has.
Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" -- they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" -- those who worked on more than 100 items -- numbered 4,330.
"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think."
But Sanger allows himself an even grander dream -- that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."
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