I agree with Larry Sanger about expertise mattering when compiling ideas and opinions about a subject. I’ve said as much before – Democracy is for opinion, not for knowledge. But I strongly disagree with Larry Sanger about how those experts shall be identified and whether their expertise itself should be a proxy for facts that should stand on their own. Facts should be sourced and they should be able to hold their ground on their own terms. If it is true that 97% of credentialed experts agree on view A, then the job of an encyclopedia is to publish the statistic directly following the discussion of what view A is. Whether an expert is the one who picked the particular turn of phrase is inconsequential.

Sanger also conveniently ignores the passage of time as contributing factor for Truth. Wikipedia is not a snapshot. It is not a bound book shipped across the country and sold door to door. It does not come with a year proudly stamped on its spine – declaring at first how new and relevant and then, almost immediately, how dated and quaint the information inside truly is.

Wikipedia allows the best knowledge of the time to be condensed and parsed, argued and sourced – in plain sight. As this knowledge changes, as the facts move and shift because of new discoveries and developments, the Wikipedia changes with it. If experts happen to arrive with new information, and source it well, the Wikipedia can be convinced to publish the new information. If the experts cannot source it, cannot convince the skeptics and the masses that the new facts are indeed facts, then they are sent packing – same as everyone else – to keep digging. This is not to say the masses should have all the power, it’s that if an individual truly feels they can move the discussion forward, they have to bring the evidence – whether they be expert or not.

This is the way it should be.

Because someone comes with credentials, they are not necessarily to be believed. Opinion is where we should defer and perhaps listen to experts. They have knowledge and expertise. They have experience and judgement tested through trial and error and the passage of time. Presumably they’ve even been challenged by other experts, both professionally and at lunch, and so they should be listened to and considered. But how much deference we pay to the experts should be a personal decision. The argument remains that there is no objective truth – and we are each making up our minds as to what we believe. We each use experts as proxy. We should not be told who the experts are – we should be allowed to choose ourselves – and that has to be done on a personal level.

Finally, experts are—albeit fallibly—the best-suited to articulate what expert opinion is. It is for the most part experts who create the resources that fact-checkers use to check facts. This makes their direct input in an encyclopedia invaluable.

Yes, exactly. And I think we’d be hard pressed to find anyone to argue with that. What is at issue is Sanger’s assessment of what follows:

To exclude the public is to put readers at the mercy of wrongheaded intellectual fads; and to exclude experts, or to fail to give them a special role in an encyclopedia project, is to risk getting expert opinion wrong.

It does not follow. Why does allowing experts a spot at the table specifically mean the head of the table? And nowhere still is the process for determining the expertise of the expert defined. What’s the term limit for head of the table? How often are the midterm elections held? Is there only one table?

Here’s a little dilemma. Wikipedia pooh-poohs the need for expert guidance; but how, then, does it propose to establish its own reliability? It can do so either by reference to something external to itself or else something internal, such as a poll of its own contributors. If it chooses something external to itself—such as the oft-cited Nature report—then it is conceding the authority of experts. In that case, who is it who says “we know”? Experts, at least partially: their view is still treated as the touchstone of Wikipedia’s reliability. And if it concedes the authority of experts that far, why not bring those experts on board in an official capacity, and do a better job?

This is not a strong argument. Wikipedia stands on citations from other sources, credentialed sources, sources written by experts. This is not under debate. Wikipedia takes great pride in pointing to others and showing broad consistencies where it finds them – and inconsistencies if and when it finds them. Experts are not needed for this job.

The reliability of Wikipedia is in its transparency. A full audit of edit history and personality and language is available at the click of a button. This is the main reason experts should not be given a big chair at the table of Wikipedia. They are not needed – because the knowledge compiled in Wikipedia is not original research. It is simply a compendium of the very world in which it exists. Its job is to document – and that does not require expert opinion.

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.