CZ:Myths and Facts

For whatever reason, the Citizendium is widely misunderstood. This page is devoted to correcting all the errors about us.

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Myth: we're experts-only.

Fact: we love experts--we admit it. And we want more of them. But this is still a remarkably open project. You can be an author with no degrees and only a basic facility with English. We agree heartily with the larger "Web 2.0" crowd that most reasonably well educated people have something to contribute to a project like this. Our youngest registered members are 13, and we have some active high school students who have done good work.

For further reading, see The Editor Role and The Author Role.

Myth: we're a top-down project, with expert editors giving orders to underlings.

Fact: we're bottom-up. We're a wiki--yes, we really are. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. No editor can simply delete your contributions without a good explanation, and such deletions rarely happen in any case. We are a strongly, "radically," collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody "owns" and "gives orders" about anything here. Of course, we aren't the first to use this concept. It really gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric Raymond, who compared communities that create things collaboratively to "bazaars," as opposed to the old-fashioned "cathedral" model where everyone has a role and a function, and orders are given from the top down. (See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added "village elders" wandering the bazaar. Their presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.

For further reading, see Group Editing and How to collaborate.

Myth: edits appear on the Citizendium only if they have been specifically approved by editors.

Fact: editors do not approve edits before they appear on the website. Once you're signed up, you can immediately change any article (or, for approved articles, article draft--example). Yes, you can. You really, really can. Editors are not standing over your shoulder. Nor do they want to do so. They have their own projects here. Another author is as likely to critique and edit your work as an editor. It's like we said. This is a wiki--a real, robust, bottom-up wiki.

For further reading, see The Editor Role. There's nothing there about approving individual edits!

Myth: we're Serious. We accept only your most careful, painstaking work. Writing here is like writing a term paper--no fun. We take ourselves Very Seriously.

Reality: this is a particularly insidious myth for new recruits, especially younger people who aren't sure of themselves. You're welcome here. You really are. We're a work in progress, and we have fun! Yes, we have a lot of overeducated people here, who are regularly writing really wonderful prose as if it costs them no effort. But we also have no problem whatsoever with you making a rough start on any topic, as long as somebody else will be able to pick up where you left off. We are permanently under construction. You do not have to be painfully careful, as if we you might break something and people will start screaming at you, or will freeze you out socially, if you do. We're much more relaxed than that. We want everybody to be bold, not so careful that you never make any mistakes. If you're not making any mistakes, you're not participating hard enough. And you don't have to write a whole term paper to start an article. It's OK with us if you start a relatively short article, just a paragraph or two (we call these "stubs").

For further reading, see Be Bold, Under Construction, and Stubs.

Myth: since real names are required, nobody will participate. Maybe nobody should--participant privacy will be violated, as our bios will be accessible from Google!

Reality: the fact that we have 200+ participants every month makes it obviously false that nobody will participate in a project in which real names are required. We admit that we might get more participants if pseudonyms were widely permitted. (Note: we do permit pseudonyms for certain special reasons, e.g., political dissidents in repressive countries. We have given out ~10 pseudonyms.) As to privacy, biographies are not indexed by Google (or any other search engine that respects the "noindex" tag).

We feel that the advantages of real names outweigh the small sacrifice of allowing our work-in-progress to be viewed publicly. On the one hand, using real names makes people behave themselves more civilly; on the other hand, it makes our articles more credible, since readers know that there are people willing to put their names behind them. Besides, you're far more likely to impress your friends and employers by posting publicly here than on, say, FaceBook, where many people do use their real names!

For further reading, see CZ:Statistics and this paper from Larry Sanger, delivered at Harvard Law School.

Myth: since this is an academic project, we are not open to articles about pop culture stuff.

Reality: we are open to pop culture topics. Don't believe us? See Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin song) and Metal Gear Solid. We are better described as a hybrid academic/public project. Think of it like this: we reject both the idea that knowledge belongs exclusively in the academy, and the idea that, after Wikipedia, the academy has no special role to play in explaining what we know. We think the most productive and reliable system involves the marriage of expertise with wide-ranging public interests. So, sure. As long as we can expect to maintain a full set of articles of a certain category, then go to town! If snobs try to shut you down, have them talk to Larry Sanger, Editor-in-Chief, who is a confirmed "inclusionist"!

For further reading, see Maintainability or look at Category:Games Workgroup, Category:Hobbies Workgroup, and Category:Media Workgroup.

Myth: the Citizendium is just Nupedia all over again. Or: it's not different enough from Wikipedia.

Reality: this is a really egregious error made by those familiar enough with the history of Wikipedia and Nupedia to be "a little dangerous," but not familiar enough to be accurate. Nupedia wasn't collaborative; CZ is. Nupedia was top-down in many respects (e.g., articles were assigned); CZ is bottom-up. (Nupedia itself is widely misunderstood, but that's another matter.) Since Nupedia was allowed to wither and die, the comparison to Nupedia is used to suggest subtly that CZ, too, will wither and die. This is obviously false, since CZ has produced many thousands of article drafts, where Nupedia produced only a few hundred in the same amount of time, and because CZ has accelerated its growth significantly and will probably continue to do so.

As to Wikipedia, our main differences are that we use real names, make a special role for experts in the system, and require contributors to digitally sign a "social contract." These differences really make a difference. We have no vandalism. We have very few appalling articles, and many of our articles, even our "developing" articles, are really quite excellent, despite our project's toddlerhood; after five years, we will probably have left Wikipedia entirely in the dust, in terms of quality. We really are a different sort of community, one that takes a commitment to professional behavior seriously. We have our disputes--what vibrant community could be without them?--but they are very rarely the sort of bizarre, Kafkaesque affairs that are so common on Wikipedia.

For further reading, see We aren't Wikipedia, and Sanger's Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir.

Myth: there is no point to the Citizendium, because Wikipedia exists.

Reality: Wikipedia has uneven quality, and is extremely off-putting to most experts--indeed, to most people, period--who might otherwise contribute to it. We believe that, in the end, a lot more people will be comfortable with and attracted to the open, yet sensible CZ model. Some of expect a tipping point to come in the next year or two, in which CZ will be flooded with more and more people who are now firmly persuaded that we are a force to contend with. There is no danger whatsoever of our giving up. Your work here will be well used as part of a project with tens of thousands, and then probably hundreds of thousands, of articles.

Besides, we're sure you'll agree--the world can use more than one go-to source for free reference information. We are the best hope for a real alternative!

For further reading, see Why Citizendium? and Workgroup Weeks.