CZ:An extended introduction to the Citizendium

<x-large>Citizendium: A New Vision for Online Knowledge Communities</x-large> Familiar territory Five or ten years ago, if I were introducing a new wiki encyclopedia project, I would have to argue and explain at great length about the advantages of mass collaboration. And you all would be very skeptical. I would explain how people can come together online from around the world and donate their labor to create something that everyone can access freely, and which is controlled by the contributors themselves. I would have to teach lessons about bottom-up methods and free content. But today, most of you are all firm believers that enormous amounts of reasonably good, if not perfect, content can be created by online communities. Everybody knows what giant online communities can create, because everyone can see the results in Wikipedia, YouTube, and the many other community-built websites. So my task isn't to explain everything about how the Citizendium, this new project, works, because in many ways it works similarly to many other Internet community content projects. It is open to everyone--or, everyone willing to work under our rules, anyway. It is built collaboratively, by people working together on a wiki. It is built bottom-up, which means no one is assigning articles, and generally, no one in authority needs to be consulted except when really difficult disputes need to be resolved; instead, the people who make decisions about an article are the people who happen to show up. The resulting content is free, meaning anyone can read and republish it, at will and free of charge. And it is run by a non-profit. This is familiar territory. It would be boring and banal for me to point out that collaboration on free content represents an interesting opportunity. Of course it does. The Internet has been exploiting that opportunity for almost ten years, at least ever since the Open Directory Project got started in 1998. The real question is whether there are any interesting new free content opportunities. And there is, I think. The most interesting unexploited opportunity before the Internet today is high quality and high relevance. In short, if developing sheer quantity of content was the big exciting problem ten years ago, we've licked that one. The big exciting problem now is quality: how to create enormous amounts of high-quality and highly-relevant content. And this is--I guarantee it--a much more difficult problem, and one that not nearly as many online projects will be able to solve. The problem of quality and relevance This is a problem that just cannot be solved by "more of the same." For example, simply throwing more people at the problem of quality will not solve it, for the simple reason that many people do poor quality work in the existing community content systems. Simply look at the results that come up from a typical Google search. It is estimated that there are over one billion people online now. If number of people were the answer to the problem of high quality, wouldn't we have a brilliantly pristine Internet? But, of course, we don't. Instead, the Internet reflects a wonderfully diverse humanity, from the lows of porn websites on up to professionally edited, highly interesting content collections, written by some of the most brilliant minds. Now, please don't get me wrong. I think that, for example, Wikipedia is very useful, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of amateurs is crucial to its usefulness. But there is a big difference between being highly useful, on the one hand, and of really high quality, on the other. The problem of quality and relevance won't be solved by more of the same. You could make projects even more free--you could release them into the public domain, instead of using a Creative Commons license. But this would not solve the quality problem. And again, you could make projects as wonderfully collaborative as you want--even more collaborative than Wikipedia is now--but that still wouldn't help establish reliability or relevance. Three principles Clearly, something really important has been left out of the Web 2.0 equation. What? What needs to be added so that our communities produce content that is not merely abundant, useful, and interesting, but also reliable and relevant? I have three principles, which I will state briefly first but then elaborate, because it is very easy to misunderstand in all three cases. They are: Find a meaningful role for experts within the project. Require contributors to use their real-world identities. Establish the rule of law by committing contributors to a social contract that makes them full partners in the project. Adopting these three principles will help transform Web 2.0 into Web 3.0. Leveraged intelligently, these principles will allow an online community to produce high quality and relevance, without necessarily compromising high productivity. They will, in short, help the Internet to grow up. Let's consider these principles each briefly in turn. A role for experts First, experts are needed to play meaningful roles, in short, because only they can recognize when some content represents the latest expert knowledge. Amateurs and dilettantes are very capable of creating excellent and reliable material on many subjects; but they are inconsistent in doing so, and they generally lack the expert's ability to judge when some content actually represents the latest expert opinion on a subject. It seems obvious that the intelligent use of experts in a collaborative project can help to improve the quality of the output. To this there are some common reactions, which I want to address directly, though I don't have time to do them justice. Whenever I suggest that experts need a place in some online communities, one of the first things someone says in reply is that there's no way to tell who the experts are. But I find this very puzzling. Society has many ways to identify experts. And not all of them are jokes! There are even better ways than "a person from out of town with slides." To identify its expert editors, the Citizendium asks people to send a CV and we have certain objective criteria, such as terminal degrees and publishing, and other relevant evidence of expertise. A second thing that people often imply, or assume, is that if one makes a place for experts, that will make the community a top-down, command-and-control system, which is a step backwards. Now, I fully admit that professionals of all sorts have a bit of a fetish for hierarchy and bureaucracy. But that doesn't mean that they cannot participate in a relatively flat, bottom-up community. And this is what the Citizendium does. Our editors have the general authority to make decisions about articles, but they rarely "pull rank." They can also approve articles. Neither of these functions compromises the bottom-up, collaborative, productive nature of the project. Third, there is the confused thought, which is alarmingly common, that the very concept of expertise is somehow passe, and that experts have been somehow rendered unnecessary in a world that could produce Wikipedia. This sentiment is very confused, as I say. It stems from the insight that the open source community, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and so forth have all been able to produce enormous amounts of interesting, useful stuff--all without experts. This is actually incorrect. All of those Internet projects have produced interesting, useful content in part because they have experts who are comfortable working in a perfectly open system. What is true is that those projects generally do not have expert supervisors, people chosen specifically because they are qualified to manage content of a certain type. But more importantly, the mere fact that interesting, useful content can be created without expert supervision simply doesn't mean that humanity can't do any better. It is very obvious to me that can do better than Wikipedia, YouTube, and all the rest. Why real names The second of the three principles I stated above is that we should require contributors to use their real-world identities. In other words, when you contribute to a project, you can't call yourself "hipster45"; you have to use your own real name and identity. You can't lie about who you are. I don't say that this is necessary for every Internet community. After all, there are some people who will simply never contribute under their own identities, because they are concerned about privacy matters; or they don't want to be embarrassed later by their bad behavior online. Sometimes it might be better not to require the use of real-world identities. I admit that. But in the case of strongly collaborative knowledge community like the Citizendium, it makes good sense to require real names. There are at least three reasons. First, it improves the credibility of the output: people can see who contributed some content, and whether they appear to know anything about the subject. Second, by making people take real-world personal responsibility for their contributions, it becomes possible to enforce rules. When problem contributors can make up a new pseudonym as soon as they get out of line, this makes it in principle impossible to enforce rules effectively. But if you can enforce rules effectively, you can do the work of a project a lot more efficiently. Third, people do tend to behave themselves better when their identities are known and their behavior is out in the open, and good behavior is crucial to a smoothly running knowledge community. Again, however, there are some common objections to the principle that I want to address. Some people assume that I think there should never be anonymity online. That is simply wrong; I think that anonymity is one of the great advantages of the Internet, actually, and I believe it reinforces the value of free speech. I merely think that, in knowledge communities like the Citizendium, the advantages of requiring real names strongly outweighs the advantages of permitting pseudonyms. Some might find it unusual that I would claim that the advantage lies in requiring real names. After all, one might well point out that many people will never contribute to the Citizendium simply because we do require real names. And I do have to admit that there are probably quite a few people involved in Wikipedia who will never get involved in the Citizendium precisely because they can't use a pseudonym. How do I respond to that? Well, I have no data to back me up on this, of course, because it is speculative, but I think that in the long run, there will be more people willing to work as identified, responsible members of an Internet community connected to the real world, than as unidentified avatars, disconnected from the real world. In fact, in the long run, I think there could be more people who will insist on a real names requirement, precisely because it makes the community more mature, and REWRITE those who hide behind a fake name are not at an advantage, as it were, over those who do not. There are also some understandable questions about how we can manage to confirm a person's real name on the Internet. I don't have time to go into that in great detail, but suffice it to say that we merely require some proof, and EDIT THIS we don't pretend to have an fallible system, which I would agree would be impossible to have, in a truly open system. But so far, we have had very, very few contributors EDIT exposed as other than who they really are. The rule of law in online communities Now to the third principle. Anyone who has spent a lot of time working in online communities is familiar with certain types of problematic characters and certain patterns of bad behavior. Governance of online communities, according to Internet scholar Clay Shirky, is a "certified hard problem." I agree. But what makes it hard is that such communities are generally volunteer communities of equals, and in such communities, it is hard to get buy-in from participants for resting some decisionmaking authority in anyone's hands. I actually think that this is a problem about the Internet's radical egalitarianism. As political philosophers sometimes observe, if you take egalitarianism to an extreme, you've got anarchy. After all, if everyone is supposed to be totally equal, they should all be equal in power; and that means that no one can be a decisionmaking authority, because the decisionmaking authority would have more power than the average person. Well, I don't mean to go into that, as much as I'd like to. I only wanted to bring up that subject to explain why I think it is so important that online communities adopt constitutions, as it were, just as real, offline communities do. If you think about it, it is bizarre that online communities don't demand this more often, just as offline communities do. Of course, there are many online communities that announce basic ground rules in advance--especially listservs (mailing list discussions). I think that online communities should go beyond basic ground rules. I think they should require their members to sign onto the rules explicitly, and then give the members a key stake in the governance of the project. In my experience, giving members an active stake in governance gets them personally invested, and great things can result. But this isn't how many Web 2.0 projects work. Many of them are actually for-profit businesses that essentially exploit their contributors. This has struck me increasingly as a very strange and morally problematic situation. I think that we could be accomplishing a great deal more, and potentially avoid many abuses that plague MySpace and YouTube, if there were mature community governance. But probably, the owners of such websites would not stand for it. The consequences of these principles These might appear to you to be three unrelated principles, but they are in fact closely related and mutually supporting, and together they represent a different vision of what online communities should look like. EDIT I've devoted considerable time to the problem of getting experts involved in open projects. It's not an easy problem to solve, because experts tend not to take a venue seriously unless it is closed and exclusive. I do note that Wikipedia has had a fair bit of expert involvement, largely owing to the broad influence that it has a resource, being #8 in the Alexa rankings; but I also note that they tend not to stick around for a very long time, with notable exceptions of course. Experts are not going to stay involved in an open project if their views are not respected, and frankly, their views aren't going to be respected unless it is a project policy that their views be respected. On the Citizendium, while we still probably have more active authors than expert editors, there is a lot higher proportion of expert involvement than on Wikipedia. … The growing opportunity … That is the opportunity that the Citizendium project leverages.