I will use this space to do Larry Sanger the favor that he asked of me in the note below. It is better for me to work things out on a wiki as it allows me to be more thoughtful and to clarify things in an incremental fashion over a more reflective interval of time. It may take me a week or so to get a reasonable draft hammered out, as I have a pressing deadline on another responsibility, and I will not be able to work on this task except in the odd bits of spare time.
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ 26 Oct 2006)
Jon -- well, do me a favor and sum up, maybe in a few paragraphs, your main criticisms. I'll definitely read that. I'm still 100% baffled about what your beef is. Well, I have heard some vague noises about your thinking that there is now a cabal, or something.
I will not post hostile personal criticism, or flamebait of any sort, on the list. That's been my policy for over a decade. That way lies trolling.
If you want to make a positive difference, you'll speak plainly and directly to me, or you'll reword your criticisms in a clear and non-flamebait sort of way.
--Larry
0. Abstract of main points
- Nota Stubbe. It may take a while to refine the materials that accumulate below. I will use this space to summarize the essential elements as they precipitate out.
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ April 2006)
Strong collaboration and its many possibilities
Strong, or radical, collaboration is crucially different from old-fashioned collaboration. Many people who have not worked much with open source software, or with Wikipedia, do not realize this. Old-fashioned collaboration generally involves two or more people working serially on a single work, or each on a different part of a work, and the work is then put together by an editor and perhaps approved by committee. This frequently produces boring, unadventurous, and confusing work, as everybody knows; the phrase "written by committee" stands for "stitched together incoherently like a Frankenstein monster".
Strongly collaborative works are not written by committee, in this way. Anyone who tries to replicate the success of Wikipedia, for example, by using committees just has not got the concept of strong collaboration.
Instead, strong collaboration involves a constantly changing roster of interchangeable people, and changing mainly at the whim of the participants themselves. For the most part at least, collaborators are not pre-assigned to play special roles in the project. There is just one main role -- that of collaborator. And anyone who shows up and fits the requirements (bear in mind that some projects have almost no requirements at all) can play that role. Moreover, to the extent to which work is strongly collaborative, everyone has equal rights over the product. Everyone feels equal ownership and feels equally emboldened to make changes.
2. Problems with recruitment and viability
Citizendium will need a whole lot of able-minded people to do the job that has been projected for it. Anything that places unnecessary constraints on the ability and the willingness of the needed people to contribute to the project will constitute a threat to its viability.
3. Problems with adoption in general
- Failure to understand the cultures of resource communities
- Failure to understand roles and rewards of professionals
- Trying to sell people something that they do not need
- Trying to get something for nothing
The word "community" gets tossed about rather loosely these days, but real communities take years, if not generations to form. Real communities do not come when they are called, at the mere sound of a word, nor do they spring into being at a fingers' snap, at least, not the fingers of any visible hand.
When it comes to communities as market commodities, there are at first cut three types of players:
- People who are trying to sell you another community.
- People who are in the market for another community.
- People who need another community like they need another iron chain around their neck.
- Failure to differentiate Citizendium from other wikis
- Failure to define objectives
- Failure to define procedures
- Principled cynicism due to failure of other projects
- Failure to differentiate Citizendium from Wikipedia
Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to the members of these groups trying any new wiki project is that they are only too familiar with the substandard treatment that Wikipedia has given the topics of their special interest.
In cases that I know about, the discussion of Wikipedia eventually came to focus mainly on the utter futility that the early adopters of the group experienced in trying to improve the quality of Wikipedia content and coverage on the topics of group interest. The interest in the wiki medium has long ago become a dead horse in these early adopter groups.
It will take something truly novel to overcome that, and anything that has the sound of yet another Wikipedia will simply not fly.
3.2. Problems with late adopters
- Unfamiliarity with the wiki medium
- Principled skepticism about wikis
4. Problems with the endorsement clause
Subsequent to my last message to the Citizendium List, an off-list correspondent asked me to clarify my description of Larry Sanger's mandatory endorsement requirement as a "loyalty oath". I gave approximately the following response to that query, which may help to explain my reservations about pledging any such thing as a condition of working on the project.
The way I read it, Larry Sanger's Call For Applications requires the applicant to endorse his Statement Of Fundamental Policies, and to include an explicit statement to this effect with the application.
This in turn, among a number of other things, requires the applicant to sign off on a particular version of a very long and very involved policy with regard to a Neutral Point Of View.
There are two sorts of problems here:
- Problems for applicants who agree in spirit with the fundamentals
- Problems for applicants who may have different points of view on the fundamentals
5. Problems with importing Wikipedia policies
Recommendation. Participants in the the Citizendium Project need to articulate a set of guidelines that are clear, simple, succinct, stated independently of Wikipedia policies, and which derive their value from established norms of publication, research, and scholarship -- norms that are already accepted by the various resource constituencies.
This last condition may be regarded as the "No Original Guideline" guideline. That is, when it becomes evident that Citizendium guidelines are leading the project to deviate from the standards and practices of the larger community, then it is almost certain to be the Citizendium guidelines that will need to be adjusted and brought into compliance with the embedding society's prior claims.
5.1. Wikipedia Neutral Point Of View (WP:NPOV)
- New-Fangled NPOV : Neuts On The Minute, Every Minute
- Old-Fangled NPOV : Neuts In The Pot, Five Years Old
- New-Fangled NOR : Getting Less Non-Original Every Day
- Old-Fangled NOR : The Rise and Fall of Non-Originality
- 5.3.1. Wikipedia : Verifiability (WP:VER)
- 5.3.2. Wikipedia : Reliable Sources (WP:RS)
- 5.3.3. Wikipedia : Vanity (WP:VAIN)
- Editorial Policy : Data And Discussions
- Accessibility, Audience Levels, Reader Models
- Grounded Research And Verifiable Information
- Larry Sanger (Dec 2001), "Neutral Point Of View", Wikimedia Meta-Wiki
- Larry Sanger (Apr 2006), "Text and Collaboration" (On Strong Collaboration)
- Larry Sanger, "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge"
- Larry Sanger, "The Citizendium Project"
- Citizendium FAQ
- Statement Of Fundamental Policies
- Call For Applications