However, this is not stopping the continued declaration of quality-over-quantity.

Some people might be a little puzzled why I am pushing for higher quality in online content, and why I am not content with “good enough.”

I will make the point, again, that “good enough” is strictly subjective and that Larry/Citizendium just has a different definition of what it means to be good enough.

There are tremendous amounts of data online, but the vast quantities make it difficult to find the best: the highest quality data is hidden among mountains of cruft. Most of us specifically want the highest quality data — we want the most authoritative introduction to a topic, the highest quality video, the most recent and accurate statistics, the least biased and best-informed product ratings, etc. And some of us spend huge amounts of time looking for the highest quality data; I often do. Therefore, a website like the Citizendium that aims to aggregate the best information online would — if successful — render that sort of searching unnecessary. Whatever sort of search-for-quality can be aggregated, we’ll aggregate it.

The best? Highest quality? Most authoritative?

These things are completely subjective. Many would say that the highest quality video has nothing to do with what should be made available for distribution. The people largely do not *want* the highest, most, or best – they want good enough. When the spectrum of information is more filled-out, and a variety of qualities are available at their respective price-points in the market – the consumer will seek out the level they are comfortable with and/or the one they can afford. Not unlike cars and houses and everything else in a mature market.

In fact, Dr. Sanger is placing himself squarely outside the mainstream with his definition of what is good enough for his own research purposes. He’s a “premium” consumer of information sources – an academic (I include myself). Most people do not spend huge amounts of time looking for *anything* – they try once or twice, they ask a friend, and if they don’t find the answer that satisfies them, they give up, it was too hard. If the task is somewhat more important to a searcher, then perhaps he’ll spend a little more time/effort/money looking for the answer that is “good enough”. Regardless, it’s the personal threshold that’s important.

I have watched Citizendium for over a year now and was originally going back and forth on how I thought it would fare. I haven’t changed my mind now for quite a few months. I’m fairly certain the project will never gain the type of attention or credibility it needs to remain viable.

Wikipedia changed the game. The Citizendium is trying to build a house atop a foundation made of (purposefully) constantly shifting sands.

Citizendium seemed to be headed down that path. Within a couple days of an initial announcement, hundreds of people were paying attention to this idea of an expert-led, expert-moderated compendium of the world’s knowledge. It was to be what many have been clamoring for since Wikipedia‘s public “problems” have become more and more a part of our collective understanding (I’m not convinced Wikipedia’s “problems” are not simply “features” that need a better interface). A new wiki that would withstand the fly-by editors, spam and possible subtle fact-shifting that could be present in any article at the old and tired Wikipedia.

Larry Sanger was onto something. The Citizendium project obviously touched a nerve among the masses and fostered a flaring-up of discussion by providing a public square where like minds could share opinions, concerns, and plans for improving the status quo. There really was a rallying of the troops. Hundreds of messages in the first few days.

Description Main discussion list for Citizendium, an expert-friendly fork of the Wikipedia project. Citizendium was founded by Larry Sanger.

And then it died.

Or rather, its momentum was killed – by the very person who started it only a few days before.

What’s interesting here is that one of the reasons for announcing an 8-message/day limit for the mailing list was the crushing weight of too many messages.

I confess that, while I’m truly delighted with the activity on this list, and while I don’t mean to criticize anyone, I’m increasingly frustrated with the way things are going on the list. The process is more to blame than any specific person’s abilities or carelessness. There have been many 100% signal posts, of course, but overall the signal-to-noise ratio here has never been very high.

I think everyone can agree that there has been just too much happening on the list to be of the best possible use to anyone, myself included. It’s like trying to make a civilized assembly out of an enormous roomful of extremely intelligent and opinionated people, who are constantly talking over each other.

However, there were really only about four days after the opening of the list where the message count was truly staggering. After that, it was already tapering off. People had mostly said what they came to say, and the discussion was shaping up nicely both in quality and quantity. The announcement on Sept 26 by Larry Sanger relegated the “Main discussion list for Citizendium” to basically an announcement list for Larry Sanger to share whatever it is that Larry Sanger seems to have decided in the last few hours.

And this is by no means a complaint or a finding of fault.

I am simply surprised by the move – first, because there was a very interesting and lively discussion happening where there was not one before, and second, because someone as visible and connected as Larry is in this world of many-eyes-make-good could so abruptly shut down such a viable branch of conversation.

Now, in fairness, within the same message announcing the 8-message/day limit there was the announcement of an online forum where the discussion could be moved. A quick look at the forum confirms there are currently “76 members, 624 posts” in the 17 days or so since the announcment. So the discussion has continued – just not in my inbox. And out of sight of the hundreds that were part of that initial flurry of a few days.

I dare suggest that forcing people who have other things to do to come to Yet Another Forum just to keep up with the discussion, is not the best idea.

We may look back on this post and laugh at my observations, my base analysis. We may wonder how I could have missed the obvious genius of Sanger’s calculated move. But I’m not convinced that’s going to happen.

I would love for Citizendium to work. I would love to know that there is a vetted place where good information is free and dependable and available to everyone. But I see too many edge cases where the two cultures, free/open/allcomers and topdown/authority/expertiseonly, will collide in Citizendium’s current model.

I still stand with Clay at this point in time. It will collapse under its own administrative weight. Experts are too expensive/hard to vet in the proposed self-identified model and the experts will not play along anyways because there is not an incentive for them to play along.

All that said – a most excellent dissection of what is happening with the bigger picture of Citizendium is posted by Mike Johnson at Modern Dragons. It is highly recommended if you want to know more.

I believe that this last issue, motivation, is one of the larger black clouds over Citizendium. My major concerns are as follows:
1. How many academics can be expected to put large amounts of time and effort into something which doesn’t (at this point) help their chances of getting tenure, nor their academic prestige?
2. Doing original research is one of the most appealing parts of being an academic, and there’s no place for original research in an encyclopedia. Might academics tend to be busy with their own projects, curiosities, and visions?
3. Do enough experts have enough collective drive to build an encyclopedia? Nobody thought amateurs could write an encyclopedia, and that may have been a significant part of why Wikipedia took off. Experts, on the other hand, know they can write an encyclopedia in principle- all encyclopedias were written by experts before Wikipedia- and don’t tend to be as hungry for validation as amateurs.

We can spots duplicates. We can fact check. We can find patterns. We can dig up information that’s been buried under time and secrecy. Together we are capable of so much. The idea that the many are greater than the few is a powerful meme that we’ve harnessed quite well since the internet came to town.

However, it is not a panacea. Our wisdom of crowds sometimes presents itself as the yelling of the loudest. Our popular pages are just that, popular.

That is what crowds do.

They do not convey the nuance of discussion. They do not reward the facts in the face of widely held opposing opinion. The democratic freedom we’ve unleashed by having everyone be a publisher, everyone be an editor, everyone having the ability to leave a comment or post a response video has lowered the signal in many ways.

When the many start to yell, sometimes it’s not rational. Sometimes the voices of reason are drowned out. Sometimes the knowledgable and the educated are overpowered by those who are not. And this is not good when the subject matter is knowledge itself.

Crowds are good at giving their opinions. We should use them for that.

Experts are good at knowing things. We should use them for that.

We should not conflate the two – and we should be more aware of which one we want at the time we build our systems.

There is debate about the new service coming online in the next few days, Citizendium. The idea is one that the founder, Larry Sanger, has had for years. He wants experts to rule the knowledge, just like I’ve said above. He wanted it when he started Nupedia and he’s wanted it to be a part of Wikipedia from the beginning. He’s now going to fork Wikipedia and try once more. But it is a flawed plan as it stands. Clay Shirky explains why:

Sanger et al. set the bar for editorship, editors self-certify, then, in order to get around the problems this will create, there will be an additional certification and de-certification process internal to the site. On Citizendium, if you are competent but uncredentialed, you will have to be vetted before you are allowed to ascend to the editor’s chair, and if you are credentialed but incompetent, you’re in until decertification. And, critically, Sanger expects that decertification will only take place in unusual cases.

This is wrong; policing certification will be a common case, and a huge time-sink. If there is a value to being an expert, people will self-certify to get at that value, not matter what their credentials. The editor-in-chief will then have to spend considerable time monitoring that process, and most of that time will be spent fighting about edge cases.

What we need is a better way. A middle way. A way where the users are still in control and the administrators won’t be caught on the edge cases. A way where the users decide who to grant more power to and perhaps more importantly, in what context that power holds.

We need the ability to grant cognitive authority to one another and have it matter when the votes come in. When the discussion comes up, those who ‘know stuff’ should have a greater say. Same as in the real world. We grant authority to those who deserve it, and they use it as it was designed.

I’m working on it. Contextual Authority Tagging.

Contextual Authority Tagging is the use of folksonomy to discover and define cognitive authority through reputation within communities of users. Authority is granted by individual users to other individual users with regard to their perceived domains of knowledge via free text tags or labels. This allows discovery of at least two things, 1) which users in a group are authority figures on a certain topic area, and 2) what areas of expertise a particular user possesses. A basic proposal is laid out along with a few examples to foster communication and thought on this new distributed way to discover cognitive authority.

Do let me know what you (all) think.