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All,

It occurs to me that a few of you might not be participating on the wiki (http://pilot.citizendium.org/) because you lost your username. Well, it’s no bother for us to look it up for you. If you have forgotten yours, simply drop a quick mail to constables at citizendium.org and we’ll send it to you. Then you can easily have your password sent to you, and get involved!

–Larry

Hang on. Citizendium requires all users to register with their real names, and always has done; it’s one of the fundamental principles of the site. Not only that, but there is a standard format for all Citizendium usernames: “Firstname Lastname”.

So.. why does Larry think that people are forgetting their own names?

13. The Wikipedia Foundation did not announce a new project.
16. Admins do not have editorial authority in Wikipedia.
17. Wikia is not a Wikimedia project.

If everyone would get these points right, the pedant within me would be that much happier. I have one more, based on my own experience:

21. Yes, I did hear about “that guy on Wikipedia.” Thank you for asking.

Indeed, that’s a pretty good list to look at, and I follow a number of blogs that it lists. Among the others that get a mention are Citizendium’s official blog at number three, Geoff Burling (one of the most knowledgeable Wikipedians I know), and, surprisingly enough, Jimmy Wales. Jimmy rarely posts to his blog, but it’s usually worth reading when he does.

To go a little beyond this list, I could also point to Wikimedias who blog at Meta, or better yet, the very excellent sites Wiki Blog Planet (which seems to be identical to Open Wiki Blog Planet) and Planet Wikimedia.

Go subscribe to some lists, or something. In the meantime, I’ll ponder the question: is Jonathon Stokes the Jonathon Stokes?

If I’m lucky enough to go this year, it would be in the semi-official self-important role of “Podcaster d00d”, along with Andrew, Liam and hopefully the mysterious Tawker and others. In general, we’ll be involved with covering the event in the spirit of citizen journalism; recordings of each talk will presumably be made available online, but we’ll be concerned with recording as much of the event as we think would be interesting. That includes attendees’ comments, interviews with the speakers, and so on.

We already have a few ideas for how this could be done. Here are a few:

• We could produce a shortened episode of the podcast for each day of the conference. This would probably run for half an hour or less, and preferably include a rundown of the day’s events, ideally including a brief audio clip from each talk and perhaps a quick chat with a few speakers.
• Brief interviews with attendees, from which we could extract 3-4 soundbites to be interspersed through the day’s episode.
• Video recordings of the day. Due to bandwidth concerns, these would probably need to be limited in duration and so lend themselves best to short interviews and the like. We’ll need to find a decent camera for this.
• An audio workshop, running through our methods for recording the podcast. This would probably be of interest to the Wikiversity crowd, as that project has made heavier use of user-produced audio than most others.

I’m sure there are plenty more ideas to be had on that front. Even if I can’t personally go, Andrew will certainly be in a position to go through with at least a few of the above and probably more besides. I’ll create this page at Wikipedia in a little while so can collect a list of ideas for the event, and I’d love to hear what other people think we could do.

However, the resulting discussion thread turned out a little differently. The response was overwhelmingly negative, despite the best efforts of Citizendium’s Jason Potkanski, an Ars reader and forum denizen himself.

This is where the story gets interesting, though. It seems that Larry saw the discussion thread, which had been linked to on his site’s official blog, and decided to take a read. Here is his response (emphasis mine):

Jason, why do you waste your time in that discussion? Clearly you’re dealing with a bunch of jackals there who simply hate the idea of the project. There will be only more and more such people as we become more and more successful. No one cared much last September, so we only had a few negative reactions, all of them saying that it can’t work; but now that we’ve got over 1,000 articles, many hundreds of participants, consistently well over 500 edits per day (and pushing toward 1000 regularly), with scores of regular contributors…well, some people are evidently starting to feel threatened by us.

–Larry

Smooth.

Technorati Tags: Citizendium, Hubris, Internet, Ars Technica, Technology, Wikipedia

What is this Big Write thing, exactly? As Larry Sanger described it:

The Big Write is your chance to be credited with writing a medium-sized article (750+ words) on important topics with input from some of CZ’s editors. If you look at this page:

http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Citizendium_Pilot:The_Big_Write

under “The Topics,” you’ll see a list of a few dozen article topics you can choose from. Those topics were specifically chosen by editors as high priority articles in their fields. The goal is to develop those articles to the point where they are “a credible start”–not a trivial task, but not terribly difficult either.

Since the initiative began three days ago, Editors have suggested 44 articles that need to be written — although the next day Larry allowed Authors (the rank-and-file of Citizendium contributors) to make suggestions, too. Counting the two Author-suggested topics, that brings us to a total of 46 in need of writing.

How many suggested articles have been started in that time? The answer is two: “distributed computation” and “wiki“, the latter being the work of Larry Sanger himself.

There are hundreds of articles that Citizendium really “needs”; the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki has a list of articles every Wikipedia should have, which would make a good start for Citizendium to focus on; alternatively, many local versions of the popular website maintain their own lists, as so individual Wikiprojects at the English Wikipedia and others.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to try my hand at writing another article at Citizendium. Since nobody seemed to notice Larry’s request for an article on hubris, I’ve started writing it myself.

Technorati Tags: Citizendium, Internet, Technology, University, Wikipedia

Vandalism at Citizendium

Let’s cut right to the chase, here: how many people were blocked shortly after joining, as vandals? Let’s compare the 899 new users for the last 24 hours with a quick look at the IP Block list at the pilot, which reports that 108 users were blocked in the same time period; this drops the number of new users down to 791, which is still an impressive enough figure. On the other hand, a 12% block rate is not impressive, and may produce major problems if it isn’t corrected in the future.

The figures also indicate that the rate of vandalism at Citizendium is much worse than it was the first time around:

Not only has the number of users spiked considerably, but the number of blocked accounts has done the same. Considering that the number of users capable of fighting vandalism has remained largely the same throughout, this represents a significant increase in those individuals’ workloads.

One point that I should make about the above graph is that the number of user accounts created on the 15th and 16th of February is very difficult to determine, because starting at 17:14, 15 February 2007, Citizendium was hit by an account creation bot that created approximately 11,000 dummy accounts before it was stopped — nineteen hours later. Call me skeptical, but that’s not the kind of lightning-fast emergency response that Citizendium really needs.

Here’s a screenshot of the activity, which was officially acknowledged by Citizendium’s Jason Potkanski today.

Building the encyclopedia

Now, how many contributions are the 791 new users helping with? The recent changes list at Citizendium tells us exactly how many edits have been made to articles in the last 24 hours, and combined with the graphs from my last post on the topic we have a wider picture of how the project is coming along (full size):

The conclusion for the current slashdotting will take a few days to become clear, but it’s certain that the previous one produced little change — if any — in the rate at which the encyclopedia expands. Despite the good publicity it’s been receiving, it appears that little has changed.

One possible reason for this was put forward by Aaron Schwartz in “Who Writes Wikipedia?“, in which he argued that the vast majority of edits (spelling and grammar corrections, formatting, and so on) came from a small core of registered users, but that the majority of the site’s content came directly from anonymous users.

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

This has some serious implications for Citizendium. If content is ultimately produced by anonymous users, then refined by the few that register, Citizendium’s enforced registration could present a significant barrier to its own growth; the “real names policy” that the site also attempts to enforce adds to that, by requiring that normally-anonymous users divulge more information about themselves than they may be willing to.

Conclusion

The past two slashdottings at Citizendium have gone a long way to demonstrating that more is needed to reach Release Day than just good publicity. Even with these two appearances at Slashdot in less than a week, and numerous other articles besides, the number of article edits per day has hardly budged. Indeed, the number of edits we saw after the first slashdotting was fewer than just a few days before it, underscoring the fact that good press does not translate directly into new content.

As for the current appearance at Slashdot, I expect the result to be much the same as with the last. While it’ll take a few days for the data to become available, my prediction — and I think it’s a very safe one — is that Citizendium will ultimately be unable to convert the thousands of interested people flocking to their site into new contributors without significant changes to their editing policies. The real names policy and enforced login, for a start.

Technorati Tags: Citizendium, Internet, Technology, Wikipedia