Since there is no forum for discussion of Citizendium, I'm just going to re-post this here.



Well, I just had to go and look at the article on atoms, after the discussion of the Wiki article here, which I think was just plain mean and ignorant.

In Citizendium's offering on Atom I ran across this gem:

.

So that's the effect of expertise, eh? FYI, the Schrödinger equation was invented in late 1925 and published in 1926, more than a dozen years after Bohr conjectured his way through his own primitive atomic model of 1913. Bohr's model is the beginning of the old quantum mechanics-- mostly wrong, but at least getting there. Heisenburg and Schrödinger are the beginning of the real and modern version of the theory. The Schrödinger wave equation makes use of the insight of de Broglie that there are waves associated with material particles. In 1913 nobody had a hint of this, including Bohr. So the history is completely wrong. The only equations Bohr solved were his own.

[re-edit: the potassium-40 "error" was actually a due to a misreading of beta+ as beta- It seems to be okay after all]

Argghh, another boner:



This makes it sound like Rutherford "noticed" that the charge on the nucleus is Z, the place of the element in the periodic table, because he noticed that Z was "often approximately half the atomic mass A". The rest of the paragraph explains why that later relationship holds. Unfortunately, it is wrong, because Rutherford had NO chance to make a repeated observations with many elements. In fact, he used only one: gold. This is heavy element in which Z is unfortunately NOT about A/2 (this relationship is true for light elements but not heavy ones), and in fact in gold A/Z is only 0.40. Rutherford found an central charge in gold of about +100 and knowing that gold's A is about 198, suggested the charge at A/2 = +98. But he did NOT suggest the charge was about Z, the atomic number, because he knew very well that gold is at position Z = 79 in the periodic table, and THAT is by definition its atomic number. The suggestion that nuclear charge is exactly Z, was made shortly after by a Dutch amateur scientist, and then proven experimentally by Moseley.

Nice try, Citizendium, but you just didn't get it right. Rutherford's crude measurement of charge gave him about +100 for gold, not the correct +79, or he might have made the connection between nuclear charge and Z (atomic number) you suggest. But it didn't, so he didn't.

Of course, on Citizendium, only the "Approved Articles" really count, and atom isn't one of those. Of course, there are only 112 of them, which just goes to show that Citizendium is really in no sense an alternative to Wikipedia. I would argue, though I haven't really studied the issue thoroughly, that the "Approved Articles" are really quite reliable. This is in direct contrast to Wikipedia where even the featured articles are not necessarily reliable (if nothing else even the most perfect article may have been vandalized and a study showed that it takes 10 hours to revert non-childish vandalism in featured articles).

Of course CZ is edited by experts... expert historical revisionists. See the bottom of this article:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Britain%2C_history/Timelines

The timeline goes:

1957-63 Harold MacMillan's Conservative Government.

1963-70 Home's Conservative Government.

1970-79 Edward Heath's Conservative Governments.

1979-1990 Thatcher's Conservative Governments.

Now can someone spot what's wrong with the above? It's been unchanged now for over 6 months. Me think User:Nick Gardner might like the conservatives a tad

That's a pretty bad one; the main article on British history is also pretty weak. Everything from obvious typos "Our present needs are the direct consequence of the fact that we ought earliest, that we fought longest and that we fought hardest." It's also missing information on absolutely anything that happened after the 1940s. The sections on the First World War, the Empire, the Industrial Revolution, the Glorious Revolution, and the Tudors are also totally devoid of content.

A short section on the interwar years exists which seems to serve largely as a way to criticize Lloyd George. The section on the Second World War is utterly baffling. Reading it, one gets absolutely no idea who Britain fought or why and whether or not they won. All that you really learn is Oswald Mosley was not arrested, which is probably the most important fact about the Second World War...

I noticed not long after CZ began that the History articles were dominated by former WP editors who were frothing conservatives or neo-conservatives, and have barely looked at it since.

The above is nuts, and way more obnoxious than even Wikipedia.

I offered to help Sanger with articles about publicly-traded corporations, with the stipulation that (perhaps) I would be seeking financial assistance from various corporations, trade associations, consumer bureaus, etc.

He responded that he would rather not have my volatile history with Wikipedia interfering with his new project's focus.

So, currently, there are no articles in Citizendium about IBM, Dell, or Cisco Systems. Nothing about Domino's, Pizza Hut, or Papa John's. Nothing regarding British Airways, KLM, or Lufthansa.

Thus, I mentally put Sanger into a class just one notch above Jimbo Wales. They're both failures at building encyclopedias, but at least Sanger is sincere about what he hoped to accomplish.

They're not here to build an encyclopedia?

Someone finally noticed those errors after reading WR, and changed it. There is another relevant website which lists other article problems on CZ:

http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Citizendium#Crank_magnet

That's true, it actually looked way more cranky than WP when I first saw it. CZ had been adopted by some of most out-there exiles from Wikipedia. I spotted Ed Poor arguing about Global Warming in the early days of CZ, and figured the place was doomed.

It's quite interesting that this happened, though.

I maintain that Wikis are very poor collaboration tools and Wikipedia is just one branch of that. You get a lot of content, but most of it is simply shit. ("1963-70 Home's Conservative Government" - ridiculous!)

is there no hope ? I find this so depressing !

What do you suggest instead of wikis for collaboration? In any given large-scale project involving many editors, you're bound to end up with some conflicts.

There's a lot to be said for definite authorship. Ideally, a massive collaboration would involve one or two experts writing an article about something they are very knowledgeable on. One or two others would write about another topic and so on. You can still have millions of contributors and millions of articles, but you don't have people pushing their uninformed views on subjects about which they essentially know nothing. Just about any wiki encourages people to write about things that they have no business writing about.

Except Sanger tried this and it does not work.

Being "informed" or "uninformed" is not a binary thing. For example, I know far more physics than nearly anybody save a physicist, but compared to a professional physicist, I myself am uninformed. So what work would there be for me, on physics-related articles? Well, I can do far more than word edit. In fact, I can get most of these not heavily mathematical to the point that they need only a real pro to clean them up just a bit, and that's it.

So, you say-- just get a physicist. Well, Citizendium doesn't even have ONE yet. All their "officially edited" or Approved Ariticles in physics are actually physical chemistry, and in fact are the same articles that are "Approved"for chemistry, by their chemist. See the problem? I can see all kinds of problems with their unedited and non-approved physics articles, but they'll simply make an excuse for that, being that they have ZERO non-chem physics articles that are approved. Well, sorry, but that doesn't cut it. Not after all this time.

It confirms that which I've already written about - that wiki-style collaborative editing is the wrong model to create encyclopedic content which is scholarly and authoritative.

Nothing surprises me about Citizendium including the fact that it has been landed on by pseudoscientific loons including the Church of Scientology, and the fact that it is producing full articles at a constant (not exponential) rate.

The next thing to happen with Citizendium is that it will go bust.

Although such a view might bring a sneer to the face of Jimbo Wales, Citizendium is doomed.

What is the correct model? The one that's been working for hundreds of years.

The one that's been working for hundreds of years to produce encyclopedias? Sorry, but encyclopedias are going the way of the vinyl record and (shortly) the high quality journalism article. The way we've always encyclopedias (since Diderot and pals) no longer works. A better way must be found or we will have no more encyclopedias. Or any kind of other reference books either, if truth were told.

There is no way to pay people to produce article-length print works of high quality (meaning a lot of work and research has gone into them). Such things are ripped off the moment they appear. Thus, the market for people to spend time to produce 100 kB high quality print articles no longer exists, essentially. When the market no longer exists, the product will disappear (except for a few performance artists who do it for free). That has just happened. The internet did it.

A solution must be found. Bad money has driven out good. There is not going back to the old way while the computer and net exists, and they are here to stay.

Milton

I don't doubt that EB will have to change the style and format of its articles when it comes to the web.

My point was that EB had fine-tuned how to publish authoritative and scholarly output over hundreds of years and that no-one has come up with a better model.

If someone wanted to outperform Wikipedia, then the EB model is the one that works.

I don't see anyone, not Larry Sanger, nor anyone else, actually setting themselves up to become a proper academic publisher on the Net. Collaboration doesn't work in encyclopedia writing any more than open collaboration works in University (where its called collusion and plagiarism).

I suppose I was a bit unclear on what I mean by "authorship". I mean a system where an article begins with a byline "World War II by John Doe and Jim Smith" and ends with an "About the Author" (e.g., John Doe is associate professor of History at Yale University and the author of X,Y,Z. Jim Smith is Professor of International Relations at Tufts University and the article of T,W,V". People don't publish crap when their own name and affiliation is right next to it (generally). Citizendium does little better on this than Wikipedia, though perhaps its editors are a step in the right direction.

The two common arguments against trying to get experts to do something like this is "they won't do it for free" and something about a place called Nupedia. The "won't do it for free" crowd is just plain wrong. No one publishes any academic piece of work for the money (journal, book, or otherwise). Most journals don't pay their contributors. Academics don't publish for the money or the girls, they do it for love of knowledge and because it's professionally expected. Nupedia failed because well who is going to submit something to a place run by a pornographer (adult entertainer?) and an absolutely no name ABD philosophy student (and later no name philosophy PhD).

As a matter of fact, such an encyclopedia already exists, and existed before Wikipedia did, in the form of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a very high quality work. The only problem with the SEP is that it is limited to Philosophy. Imagine such a work across disciplines. I will further note that experts are happy to publish in the SEP, as it is considered something of an honor to be asked to write for it. The difference between SEP and Nupedia, of course, is that Edward Zalta is a highly-regarded philosopher and scholar. The editorial board is also composed of many of the best philosophers of the current time. So yes, expert-written, expert-reviewed free encyclopedia content is viable, we just need people who are willing to make it happen in other disciplines.

Yes.


And Yes.

I remember noting in the past that the Stanford article on Charles Sanders Peirce actually featured below the Wikipedia equivalent on google. The Wiki version became beset by problems, first when Jon Awbrey (who was working on the article) got attacked by sockpuppets who couldn't even spell Peirce correctly, and then when Wiki-warriors went after Awbrey for his criticisms of WP at this site. Yet it still features above the accomplished Stanford version.


I don't care about collaboration, or providing for the addictions of Wiki obsessives. I just don't want a load of half-baked crap masquerading as an encyclopedia appearing at the top of every google search. Y'know - timelines on British history that deliberately omit all Labour governments and replace them with bogus extended Conservative terms. Or biographies of people that are so false the innocent subjects find themselves arrested at Toronto airport on suspicion of terrorism. That kind of thing.

Just as a data point, EB (if you mean Encyclopedia Britannica) already has come to the web. It's just that it's a mix of free and paid content. If you are a blogger, you can get a comp subscription... I have one, and I've written about EB (or at least mentioned it) on my blog 4 times. Hope that's helpful.

There were some perceptive early ideas of Andrew Odlyzko on electronic publishing: see his publications. He commented that the traditional role of a learned society was twofold: dissemination and validation. The internet has made dissemination essentially trivial but has made validation harder. Anyone can set up a web site and call themselves a learned journal. I have to admit we did not foresee anything like WP.

Wikis can be effective collaboration tools but only when used by a community that already has experience working collaboratively effectively. What you cannot do is take a bunch of people who have no talent or desire to collaborate and inspire them to do so merely by putting a wiki in front of them. Both Citizendium and Wikipedia have no shortage of community members who lack the requisite talent, desire, or (in many cases) both.

Er, that's a short form of saying it's for the money or the girls, inasmuch as if you don't do what's professionally expected, you don't have a job. Or you forever have a crappier academic job like teaching 300 student undergrad classes and never getting tenure. As for "girls" I have noted that they seem to be unimpressed by unemployment, but I don't have statistics. Do you doubt the hypothesis?

An invited article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy might work to pad your CV (and they do count your publications in a promotions review), but this is generally NOT the case. Review articles usually don't count at all, or count far less than original research. By definition, the kind of thing you write for encyclopedias is unlikely to advance your career much. Most review articles in the science literature really are done as labors of love, usually as a way of doing something with a literature review you just had to do ANYWAY, for a grant-proposal.


Philosophy, if you think about it, is a rather odd subject. A lot of it is not verifiable, like work in the natural or formal sciences. The idea that writing articles in a hypothetical encyclopedia of sciences would manage to earn you the same CV points as writing philosophy articles seems unlikely. And most of what's in an encyclopedia couldn't even be imagined to be stuff that would contribute to your CV in most academic fields. Perhaps there are exceptions in theology or aesthetics or something where you're playing to a crowd on matters of taste or opinion-only; but this could not be the general case.

So in short, I reject your countering example as an intrinsic anomally. There are review articles in the most highly regarded journals in all the sciences. Academically, they already count little. Your argument is thus already disproven, without even the existence of a hypothetical encyclopedia to contain them.

First of all, you're conveniently glossing over "the love of knowledge" which I think is what really motivates most scholars. Admittedly I am myself a social scientist, but I have found in many years of asking academics to do things for free, that you can email just about any professor in any field with a research request that takes an hour or so of his/her time and he/she will respond. Also, I don't know what your background is, but I will say that in my experience, even in the academy, it's not what you know it's who you know. If someone who is a titan in their field (whatever that field might be) asks you to write an article, you're going to respond. In particular, if you're an ABD, a young assistant professor, etc. and someone who holds tenure at Stanford (and might well play a role in the hiring process and/or sit on a tenure board) asks you to write an article, you'd be an idiot not to. It's not just about listing the publications on your CV. This is true in all parts of the academy. Many people volunteer their time to referee papers for journals; in return they get nothing.

For a true expert (not just someone with a PhD relevant to the general discipline, but rather someone who has published and done research on the specific topic at hand), it is not particularly challenging to write a high-quality article in a short period of time. Once you have command of the literature (and a lifetime of experience at writing and fluffing), it doesn't take long to write a piece on something about which you're passionate. Furthermore, nearly all of the academics I know genuinely think what they do is important, and want people to know about it. They see the intrinsic value in educating the public and this would contribute to a general willingness to write articles.

I also think, as suggested by recent studies, that some professions are coming to the realization that Wikipedia has become the general public's major source of information, and that something needs to be done about this fact (either by improving Wikipedia or providing an alternative). I think this is particularly significant in the health field. In this space, WebMD is a strong alternative (but their rather bizarre policy on linking hurts them) and combines a paid staff with many volunteers. Working with WebMD doesn't help anyone's CV, but physicians and medical researchers acknowledge the importance of providing accurate information to the public, so they make it happen.

Finally, as this is rapidly becoming tl;dr, I will note that the 10,000 contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (a superb reference work) all received no compensation for their work(though they can buy the book at a discount, but I am sure that few actually did so). If 10,000 people, many of them excellent scholars, and a small paid staff can produce such a work of biographies from all walks of life, why could these people not be convinced to write something similar for an online encyclopedia?

My (third party) experience of publishing by scholars is that it is the method by which they "copyright" or "trademark" their theory or dissertion (or whatever). As a published manuscript copies are then deposited in the national libraries of various nations, and are cataloged. Scholars, scientists and the like do not publish for the love of knowledge (since it is rarely the case that the stuff published nowadays can be understood by anyone but other experts in the same field) but to evidence the work that they have done.

When a published paper is picked up by a learned journal of whatever science or practice and lauded to the rest of the community, then the author gets bragging rights... Generally, the scholars, scientists, researchers, etc. who publish their theories and treatises are not the ones who bring these insights to the general (or even the fairly expert) public. It is the journals, the periodicals, and - yes - the encyclopedia's that brought the new ideas to the attention of the masses.

I'm a subscriber to EB myself under the same scheme.

The problem with EB is how to change the product to meet the Web without compromising what makes EB such a great product.

But my premise stands: great scholarship does not come from the mob, and I'm sick and tired of being told what to believe by a bunch of obsessive half-wits.

Making intelligent noises for a change ... this real is the crux of the matter.

One cannot stop idiocy. It is one resource humanity is surfeit in. It is just that idiocy of so many natures were never given such a loud, prominent and global voice before. In the old days, you had at least to be an idiot ... or a highly ambitious and competent individual ... with lots of money and a clear political agenda before you could publish your pamphlets, newspaper or journals. So ...

• Has Google been properly engaged in this dialogue?
• Why their love affair with the Wikipedia?
• Is it just 'technical', i.e. lots of links and page changes exciting the Google spiders into action?
• Or it is small 'p' political, e.g. Google policy to underscore the values of the Pee-dia?

You have emphasized before the vanity attraction of the Pee-dia. I imagine for the wrong sort of person, its all about "me'n'my avatar", country, cult or whatever, ranking on a top three Google search. If the Pee-dia languished on page 9 of Google, no one would really care or bother and, perhaps, the drama seekers head off elsewhere. For others it is obviously about me'n'my cockie, or girlfriends doo-dahs, sitting on a top three Google search.

So, you make some very serious points Kato. However, rather than just being armchair critics, is it possible to;

• Engage Google in this discussion?
• If not at present, what is necessary to be done in order to do so?
• What powerful allies does Wikipedia Review have, or can bring together, in order to bring about change?

Even accepting the Pee-dia as the raw materials ... yes.

My feeling is that if the topic pages were "fixed" by such scholars and locked, allowing for as much discussion and new fact finding on the back, something good could come out of it. All the stubs, non-notable pages and masturbation material could also then remain in the non-public area until they rose to a level of genuine worth.

Of course it would be less "fun", but that would be the point. These are very serious matters.

Letters and advocacy aimed at the funding trusts, in the first place, would be the best place to target limit resources ... followed by public cream pie attacks aimed at Larry Page. Sergey Brin and their major shareholders. In fact, probably the Google shareholders are the ones to go for. Far more likely to be social conscious, caring of their public images and conservative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LeonardGSiffleet.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Siffleet

removed huge gratuitous image of leonard being executed - kamryn

Well congratulations Cock-up and Milton Roe. You killed an interesting thread stone dead.

Pat yourselves on the back for a job well done.

Excuse me for reacting late. I only learned of this forum today.

Milton Roe pointed out on August 6 that Niels Bohr could not have used the Schrödinger equation in 1913, as erroneously was written in a Citizendium (CZ) article. Milton was right and I adapted the CZ text. Thank you for spotting this. Two comments:
1. It shows that anybody can edit CZ, not only experts, as is sometimes believed.
2. The article had status 2, which means that it was not yet in an "approvable state" (which are articles with status 1).

Milton mentioned other issues with CZ physics articles, I'm interested to hear them and will try to fix them. (I already rephrased the "atomic number article" somewhat to meet some of Milton's objections).

Paul Wormer's professionalism in responding to critical review stands in stark contrast to the arrogance and amateurishness of Wikipedia editors.

As is doctrine on Citizendium. This is a self-explanatory argument. But it does require unpacking.


If we could only think of some way to get the status 2 articles to status 1.



Thank you, Dean Wormer. And as for the professional academic record on WP and here at WR, Delta House didn't actually intend to leave the dead horse in your office. It died of a heart attack after a pistol went off. The Double Secret Probation is unnecessary for us, and is only appropriate for Everyking, who has worked long and hard for it, and deserves it.

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took ...


-- Flounder

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