CZ:Biology Workgroup/Biology Week/Academic recruitment/Letter

Subject: Wiki Encyclopedia Invites Biologists to a Weeklong Open House

Biology Week, an online "open house" for biologists, biology students, and anyone else interested, begins September 22 on Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/), the next-generation wiki encyclopedia started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.

We want to extend a special invitation to biologists at research institutes, colleges and universities across the world. The Citizendium project needs your specialist knowledge to become an up-to-date and reliable general reference work.

What makes Citizendium “next-generation”?

Online knowledge projects, of which the Wikipedias are the most prominent, have shown that the internet is fertile ground for swiftly accumulating and sharing information.

There are clear advantages to contributing to online resources. Unlike traditional works, online information need never go out of date. Paper reference works are limited in scope, but online encyclopedias are able to accommodate comprehensive articles on every subject. Furthermore, being online virtually eliminates publishing costs, and, like Wikipedia, the Citizendium is free. Free reference works may prove to be an invaluable resource for educators, students and private citizens worldwide.

In the wake of Wikipedia’s wild success, many other knowledge projects have sprung up, from collections of pop culture trivia to earnest, specialist projects such as Scholarpedia and the Encyclopedia of Earth.

As academic users know, however, the Wikipedia model is far from perfect. Citizendium was founded on the proposition that we can do better. In particular, the Citizendium believes that if a reference work is to be truly useful, it must be reliable. Though anyone can write articles for us, we want and need experts to help insure that our information is correct and up-to-date.

We grade our articles according to their reliability, and put a disclaimer at the top of all of our articles with unverified information. Credibility is lent to an article in a very traditional way, i.e. by means of approval by experts ("editors"). So that readers know the articles they read are reliable, approved versions are closed to editing, but can be worked on further out of the public eye (on “Draft” pages); these drafts may themselves become approved later on.

By being online, our articles can be associated with large amounts of supplementary information. Of course, this includes the usual multimedia suspects: pictures, videos, timelines and so on. The Citizendium also strives to provide our articles with annotated bibliography, and, when the subject matter demands it, high-level, technical discussions of a topic (“Advanced” articles).

Though Citizendium is still fairly young (just under two years old) but has made significant progress. We have more than 8,000 articles in various stages of development and well over six million words in content.

Biology at Citizendium

CZ covers many fields, both academic and beyond, but activities in the biomedical fields have been especially visible: Biology is second to history in terms of number of articles (followed by health sciences), and second to computers in terms of number of authors (followed by history) and fourth (after computers, engineering and health sciences) in number of editors (for details, see the CZ statistics .

"Biology" was the first article to be approved in Citizendium (on December 15, 2006, half a year after the launch of the project). The article Biology makes good use of subpages for related articles, bibliography, external links, gallery, videos and signed articles. This article's development also highlights how experts and non-experts work shoulder on shoulder at Citizendium, and makes clear that public-expert collaboration works, and works well. A further opportunity for this kind of work will be "Biology Week" -- the first of a whole series of topic-dedicated weeks at Citizendium.

What is Biology Week?

"Biology Week" will be held during September 22 to September 28, 2008. For all biologists, this is a chance to start sharing their expertise by creating and improving biology articles, or to satisfy their curiosity by browsing (and contributing to) articles on other subjects. Editors and authors from the Biology Workgroup at Citizendium will be on help with the registration process, to answer questions, and to help new contributors get started. Citizendium is open to all contributors, expert and amateur alike, but we particularly need the participation of academics and researchers. Please join us for Biology Week!