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.

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.

2006/10/24 00:50:39 EDTAs a little side project I got interested in adding a MicroID extension for MediaWiki. MicroID is a teensy little format for asserting that the owner of a particular Web user account is also the owner of another account (like an email account or an OpenID). Adding support to MediaWiki means that Wikitravel users can verify their accounts with claimID or other similar services. Fun stuff, relatively easy, and useful for everyone — the best kind of hacks.

Behold: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MicroID_extension

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.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told CNET in an interview that the Germans are coming—and they have a plan to save Wikipedia. The German-language version of Wikipedia will get an experimental overhaul in the next few weeks designed to cut down on vandalism, edit wars, and misinformation. How will it work? Through the magical power of trust.

In the German system, any user will still be allowed to make edits to any article. Those edits won’t show up in the live version of the site, though, until a registered user with a certain level of time and experience approves the changes. It’s a simple change, but one that could prevent the most juvenile forms of vandalism from ever appearing on the main site, which should do much to remove the appeal of vandalizing articles.

This is interesting on a few levels.

The wiki phenomenon we’ve all experienced in the last few years has definitely reached a tipping point – a point where an educated populace has probably heard of, and might even be able to explain, what a wiki is. We’ve seen NYTimes articles, CNN reports, and BBC broadcasts. We’ve considered what it means to be a ‘real’ resource for our children’s homework assignments – what it means to have a NPOV (neutral point of view).

But we’ve also learned that communities of trusted peers do a very good job of policing themselves (it takes a global village?). While inalienable rights are great, I think this movement away from ‘all users are created equal’ is a good thing. We need to better mirror our real world and give credit and affordances to those who are experienced. We should allow those who are the experts, those who have done this a few times before us, to have more say in how things run. They’ve probably learned something.

This decision by Wikipedia, while in part a reaction to a lengthy court case, is a welcome one. The pantheon should be allowed to speak a little more loudly than the peons. It’s only fair. We’re not all equal when it comes to knowledge. Trust, reputation and expertise are what allow us to divide and conquer. Adam Smith’s Division of Labor is most efficient when we let the experts do what they do.

I welcome this change and can’t wait for it to trickle across the rest of the Wikipedia and the rest of the sites that let allow/encourage user-generated content. The sooner we have more than the lowest common denominator, the sooner we can tap the real power of everyone.

Third, you have to participate in the online conversation. If you don’t, the party will start without you and how many of the millions of people online do you think care about your reputation? That’s what I thought.

Nathan Schock at Fresh Glue:

It all started when someone decided to have fun with a Wikipedia entry. Nothing new, right? It happens all the time. But this entry happened to be about Stephanie Herseth, the lone member of the US House of Representatives from South Dakota.

The wiki-hacker claimed Herseth was pro-life (she’s not), pregnant (she’s not) and engaged to her campaign manager (she’s not). The false information was taken down quickly, but not before it got a little more interesting.

Herseth is in a (very non-competitive) race for re-election this fall and her opponent’s campaign manager couldn’t leave the Wikipedia reference alone. He emailed it to several political bloggers…one of which happened to be the blog of the Rapid City Journal…who posted the full text of the email on the blog…and then defended their decision to do so.

As local political blogger Pat Powers noted, whoever put the false information on Wikipedia didn’t do Republicans any favors. Neither did her opponent’s campaign manager because now the discussion is about his email, rather than what they want to discuss. Not surprisingly the Herseth campaign has sensed the momentum in their favor on this issue and is calling for the campaign manager to be fired.

There are three important new media lessons here for anyone who cares to learn them. First, the Wisdom of Crowds is real and represents a new kind of information and fact exploration process. In the old days (only a few years ago) someone would research a story for days, weeks, months, even years before publishing the definitive account in a newspaper, magazine or book. If you wanted to respond to that account, you had to do the same thing yourself and it was very difficult to correct a story once it was published.

Today, the quest for the facts starts out in the open with a blog post or a Wikipedia entry. Everyone can read that information and respond to it. Eventually, the truth is discovered, as it was in this case, through the participation of a large group of people, like a virtual party. That’s why Wikipedia is always among the most-searched topics on the net. That’s also what makes blogging so difficult for most people to understand. Any one post may not be completely accurate, but is rather part of the process of getting at the accurate account. Sure, there will always be those who abuse the system, as there were in this case, but those people are typically found out and appropriately flogged.

Second, the Internet is not nearly as anonymous as you think. If I were you, I would avoid emailing anything you don’t want the entire world to see. Bad email pitches can find themselves on the Bad Pitch Blog or posted on another blog that (at last count) had 80 comments. And by the way, your computer has a little thing called an “IP address” that leaves a convenient trail for people to follow. As we learned from the Cluetrain Manifesto and Adam Curry, there are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have.

Third, you have to participate in the online conversation. If you don’t, the party will start without you and how many of the millions of people online do you think care about your reputation? That’s what I thought.

Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about people, brands or corporations. Simply click on the history link at the top of any entry page and you will see the RSS link on the left hand side. Here’s the feed for the ever-popular podcasting page.

This is a very interesting and very powerful. Wikipedia is arguably the single point of aggregated knowledge with the most active participants anywhere on the planet. The fact that those participants can now, a little more passively, keep up with the topics that most interest them is truly ripe with potential.

One of the OneTrueWiki’s greatest strengths and points of the most contention is that anyone can edit the content at any time. The resource that so many people are linking to and citing now as vetted fact can be changed by anyone – horror of horrors!

What is left from these discussions oftentimes is that there are a great number of watchers who see every change made to an article and swoop in with great fervor to defend the honor and NPOV of their joint creation.

To help complete the feedback loop of content creation and policing via RSS, I propose Wikipedia publish, Feedburner style, the number of subscribers to each Wikipedia article (bandwidth and CPU cycles notwithstanding). This will perhaps give more pause to those edits of inconsequence, the toes in the water of community edited content.

There is a potential downside to publishing these numbers though. Knowing how many people are watching your actions is a great catalyst – either for subtlely and rational good behavior, or for rash inflated headline-grabbing stupidity. I think the full information loop of disclosed RSS readership outweighs the potential for rashness though – let the masses use their power for good.

And they even render well in my newsreader – bonus!