[X] My Assistant

[Jonny Cache]

Nota Bene. Perhaps he can be prevailed upon to listen to Reason, the Critique of which I thought he'd appreciate, but as of this writing Larry Sanger seems to be saying that there's no room for Critically Reflective Independent Thinkers (CRITs) among his Sangermonious In-Crowd (SIC), so permit me to import for the sake of future development this report that I began at the Citizendium Textop Wiki. I will probably be developing this outline in a dynamic fashion over the next week or so.

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.

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.

1. Manifest disconnection : Failure to implement the manifesto

• Larry Sanger (Apr 2006), "Text and Collaboration"

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

1. Failure to understand the cultures of resource communities
2. Failure to understand roles and rewards of professionals
3. Trying to sell people something that they do not need
4. Trying to get something for nothing

It is the nature of the human to exist in community, and most human beings exist in multiple communities at once, some by birth, some by choice, some they are constantly aware of being in, and some they are barely conscious of sharing with others, if at all.

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.

3.1. Problems with early adopters

1. Failure to differentiate Citizendium from other wikis
   1. Failure to define objectives
   2. Failure to define procedures
2. Principled cynicism due to failure of other projects
3. Failure to differentiate Citizendium from Wikipedia

One of the implicit assumptions of the Citizendium recruitment efforts that we have been engaged in so far is that most of the candidate resource groups are wholly unfamiliar with wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular. This has not been my experience in the discussion groups that I am familiar with.

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

It seems that the endorsement effectively precludes any discussion or negotiation of these policies, as doing so would then be grounds for dismissal from the project.

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

5.2. Wikipedia No Original Research (WP:NOR)

• New-Fangled NOR : Getting Less Non-Original Every Day
• Old-Fangled NOR : The Rise and Fall of Non-Originality

5.3. Wikipedia : Verifiability And Company (WP:VAC)

• 5.3.1. Wikipedia : Verifiability (WP:VER)
• 5.3.2. Wikipedia : Reliable Sources (WP:RS)
• 5.3.3. Wikipedia : Vanity (WP:VAIN)

See also

• Editorial Policy : Data And Discussions
• Accessibility, Audience Levels, Reader Models
• Grounded Research And Verifiable Information

External links

• 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

Appendix. Digest of posts to Citizendium forums and lists

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 15th November 2006, 8:29pm

[Jonny Cache]

Discussion : Critizendium

Jon, I am going to ask you to pursue this project somewhere other than the Textop wiki and CZ planning pages.

Provide the Citizendium community a pointer to your work when you are done -- place it in your own webspace, perhaps -- and we will look at it with interest. But I am not interested in using Citizendium or Textop resources to host your "Critizendium".

You may correctly interpret this as a general policy: the Citizendium will not play host to collections of critical remarks about the basic mission of the Citizendium. We will ''always'' be highly interested in extended discussions of the best interpretation of our policies. But there is no reason for us to use our resources to support our detractors, of which you evidently count yourself one. There is plenty of free space available online. Use that, and we'll be happy I'm sure to look at it when you're finished.

I'd also like to remind you, since you have resigned from the project, to move your encyclopedia article work from the Textop wiki. We will be deleting all encyclopedia articles from this wiki at some indefinite time in the future -- possibly very soon.

Larry Sanger

Larry, I am trying to do what I've done from the beginning, namely, to help the Citizendium project succeed. I am trying to respond to your request in a thoughtful and organized manner, but it will take some time to abstract and to clarify the comments that I have already made in the Citizendium Forum and Lists.

I can only continue to recommend that you allow space for Citizendium participants to reflect in a genuinely critical manner on the workings and the non-workings of the project as it proceeds, and that all Citizendium participants take a less defensive attitude toward the feedback of less involved observers.

Failing to take good faith criticism seriously is one of the main reasons that Wikipedia is rapidly becoming the laughing stock of all who care about factual information and sound scholarship.

I can do no more than hope you will not make that same mistake.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 7th November 2006, 7:36pm

[Jonny Cache]

On The Road Again ...

Well, I wasn't the first to get banned from Citizendium, as there was a Casino Game Spammer who beat me to the Finished Line, but I do think that my record of nearly 1400 edits over 3 months time working on Larry Sanger's Textop and Citizendium projects is likely to go unbeaten for quite a long time among those poor huddled masses whom Larry Sanger will come in good time to boot out the Golden Door of his Gated Community.

Data Links

• Citizendium Textop Block Log
• Contributions : Jon Awbrey (09 Aug 2006 – 07 Nov 2006)

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 7th November 2006, 9:58pm

[Jonny Cache]

Just bringing this topic to the top of the crop — for the more world-historical-consciousness-challenged among us.

Jonny

[michael]

Uh, Jonny - SlimVirgin moved your WP:NOR/Historical viewpoints page to your userspace, might want to fix that link.

[Jonny Cache]

Uh, Jonny — SlimVirgin moved your WP:NOR/Historical [data]points page to your userspace, might want to fix that link.

Yes, I saw that, but there's nothing that I can do about it at the present time.

It's just a small part of Sarah Mc's longrunning parade of lies on behalf of SlimVirgin-o-pedia's Personal Opinion On Research (SV:POOR).

In the end, the Wikipedia gang will get the quality of leading-around-by-the-nose that it deserves.

And the world community will get the quality of information that it deserves.

There's a kind of justice in that.

Mostly poetic ...

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Mon 2nd April 2007, 2:08am

[Jonny Cache]

Uh, Jonny — SlimVirgin moved your WP:NOR/Historical [data]points page to your userspace, might want to fix that link.

Yes, I saw that, but there's nothing that I can do about it at the present time.

It's just a small part of Sarah Mc's longrunning parade of lies on behalf of SlimVirgin-o-pedia's Personal Opinion On Research (SV:POOR).

In the end, the Wikipedia gang will get the quality of leading-around-by-the-nose that it deserves.

And the world community will get the quality of information that it deserves.

There's a kind of justice in that.

Mostly poetic ...

Jonny

Well, the Keepers Of The Akashic Records keep deleting that Policy Discussion Subpage, so here is my old user space copy of it, which I've been Wiki-Promised will be there forever:

Wikipedia : No Original Research — Historical Datapoints

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Mon 7th May 2007, 1:15am

[Kato]

I took a look at who was contributing to citizendium lately and spotted some of the same fools who had made wikipedia such a grim place to hangout. Including the meddling right wing Christian nut, Ed Poor; and Dr Adam Carr, arrogant, neo-conservative potty mouth and general miserymaker. Both are editing well outside their "field of expertise" - actually in Ed Poor's case there is no "field of expertise". He's imparting his wisdom on Global warming and Communism at the moment. What happens when a genuine expert comes along and finds themselves having to discuss matters with this befuddled savant? With this guy's record of edit warring on wikipedia, and his inability to comprehend the most basic intellectual concepts, I see fun ahead.

Ed Poor's actually an administrator on Conservapedia so he's really spreading himself thin. Good.

[Jonny Cache]

I took a look at who was contributing to citizendium lately and spotted some of the same fools who had made wikipedia such a grim place to hangout. Including the meddling right wing Christian nut, Ed Poor; and Dr Adam Carr, arrogant, neo-conservative potty mouth and general miserymaker. Both are editing well outside their "field of expertise" — actually in Ed Poor's case there is no "field of expertise". He's imparting his wisdom on Global warming and Communism at the moment. What happens when a genuine expert comes along and finds themselves having to discuss matters with this befuddled savant? With this guy's record of edit warring on wikipedia, and his inability to comprehend the most basic intellectual concepts, I see fun ahead.

Ed Poor's actually an administrator on Conservapedia so he's really spreading himself thin. Good.

In the early days of the Citizendium Project I did my level best to prevail on Larry Sanger that Citizendium would need to distinguish itself from Wikipedia in far more fundamental ways than he was contemplating.

The use of real names and real credentials would of course do a lot to reduce the sorts of infantile vandalism that we see in Wikipedia.

So far so good, but far from enough.

One of the biggest lessons to be learned from Wikipedia is that the Administration of such a project is almost bound to become a bigger threat to Accuracy, Balance, Civility, Diversity — almost any goal of the project — than any other factor.

But Larry Sanger appears to labor under the same sort of projective delusion that forms a fixed part of the Wikipedian Mythos, namely, that all threats to the project arise from "outside agitators" — from they who are about to become labelled as "not like us" — what Wikipediots like to demonize as "trolls" and "vandals". So the only thing that Larry Sanger could think of by way of dealing with the inevitable problems of working together was to give the Cops even more absolute power than they have in Wikipedia.

Yeah, that'll fix it ...

Jonny

[Kato]

I see Richard Jensen - another problem editor who has migrated from wikipedia - is editing a lot of the history material on Citizendium. This guy says he is a retired history professor. Maybe so. But he also has a staunch right wing agenda, a bad attitude, and will cause severe problems when more able historians attempt to grapple with his narrow view. And Anthony Argyriou is yet another bad tempered right winger from the 'pedia. With far fewer other users to rein in people like Jenson, Ed Poor and co, they are going to run amok in the place and create articles even more biased and misleading than wikipedia itself.

Citizendium aint gonna work is it.

[GlassBeadGame]

I see Richard Jensen - another problem editor who has migrated from wikipedia - is editing a lot of the history material on Citizendium. This guy says he is a retired history professor. Maybe so. But he also has a staunch right wing agenda, a bad attitude, and will cause severe problems when more able historians attempt to grapple with his narrow view. And Anthony Argyriou is yet another bad tempered right winger from the 'pedia. With far fewer other users to rein in people like Jenson, Ed Poor and co, they are going to run amok in the place and create articles even more biased and misleading than wikipedia itself.

Citizendium aint gonna work is it.

Maybe the problem is not just credentials but self nomination.

[Jonny Cache]

Maybe the problem is not just credentials but self nomination.

The problems go to the root of the Sanger-Wales worldview. There is a ½-concealed, ½-disclosed philosophy of everything there that is somewhere between 50 and 350 years behind the current crest of cultural critique.

Folks who have been paying attention for the last 50 years, and reading up on the last 350, have been there, done that, and could pretty much tell you exactly how things will go from here — but Sanger, Wales, et al. have proven themselves rather bull-headedly insensible to all that.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 13th May 2007, 11:20pm

[GlassBeadGame]

Maybe the problem is not just credentials but self nomination.

The problems go to the root of the Sanger-Wales worldview. There is ½-concealed, ½-disclosed philosophy of everything there that is somewhere between 50 and 350 years behind the current crest of cultural critique.

Folks who have been paying attention for the last 50 years, and reading up on the last 350, have been there, done that, and could pretty much tell you exactly how things will go from here — but Sanger, Wales, et al. have proven themselves rather bull-headedly insensible to all that.

Jonny

I suppose it is also possible that scholar/editors who might have otherwise have been perfectly good editors of CZ might have picked up some very nasty habits on WP that Sanger will now have to deal with.

[Jonny Cache]

Maybe the problem is not just credentials but self nomination.

The problems go to the root of the Sanger-Wales worldview. There is a ½-concealed, ½-disclosed philosophy of everything there that is somewhere between 50 and 350 years behind the current crest of cultural critique.

Folks who have been paying attention for the last 50 years, and reading up on the last 350, have been there, done that, and could pretty much tell you exactly how things will go from here — but Sanger, Wales, et al. have proven themselves rather bull-headedly insensible to all that.

Jonny

I suppose it is also possible that scholar/editors who might have otherwise have been perfectly good editors of CZ might have picked up some very nasty habits on WP that Sanger will now have to deal with.

I'm afraid — very afraid — that Larry Sanger has done more than his share of spreading nasty habits from the Usenet, or wherever it was he picked them up, to the wider Web. All that baby boogey bizness about trolls to name just one of the nastiest.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 13th May 2007, 11:22pm

[Skyrocket]

Richard Jensen -- what is/was his user name on Wikipedia?

[Cedric]

Richard Jensen -- what is/was his user name on Wikipedia?

Rjensen

[Kato]

This is an interesting article in the London Times.

It attacks wikipedia, describing it as "a dictatorship of idiots" then goes on to say,

We must choose between sites such as Wikipedia, where the cult of the anonymous amateur prevails, and the newer alternative Citizendium, which aims to improve on Wikipedia’s model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

The article bemoans the tribulations of expert William Connolley on wikipedia, battling with unqualified idiots on the subject of climate change.

Ironically, Connolley's biggest bête noire on the subject was Ed Poor - who really was an idiot - and, as mentioned above, has exported his unique brand of nonsense to Citizendium itself . Something that hasn't escaped people's attention.

So Citizendium fails to provide an escape from what the Times article calls the "endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary"! The lunatics just take over the new asylum as well.

This post has been edited by Kato: Sun 3rd June 2007, 10:16pm

[JohnA]

This is an interesting article in the London Times.

It attacks wikipedia, describing it as "a dictatorship of idiots" then goes on to say,

We must choose between sites such as Wikipedia, where the cult of the anonymous amateur prevails, and the newer alternative Citizendium, which aims to improve on Wikipedia’s model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

The article bemoans the tribulations of expert William Connolley on wikipedia, battling with unqualified idiots on the subject of climate change.

Ironically, Connolley's biggest bête noire on the subject was Ed Poor - who really was an idiot - and, as mentioned above, has exported his unique brand of nonsense to Citizendium itself . Something that hasn't escaped people's attention.

So Citizendium fails to provide an escape from what the Times article calls the "endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary"! The lunatics just take over the new asylum as well.

Yes I read that as well. The actual quote about Connelley was a legitimate complaint about Connelley deleting facts he did not like, which is a constant complaint about him.

The article made him look like a paragon of academic virtue rather than the dedicated propagandist and historical revisionist that he really is.

[Jonny Cache]

Bumping ↑ another thread whose capital issues have recently raised their infernally recurrent heads again.

Jonny

[Firsfron of Ronchester]

The article bemoans the tribulations of expert William Connolley on wikipedia, battling with unqualified idiots on the subject of climate change.

Ironically, Connolley's biggest bête noire on the subject was Ed Poor - who really was an idiot - and, as mentioned above, has exported his unique brand of nonsense to Citizendium itself . Something that hasn't escaped people's attention.

So Citizendium fails to provide an escape from what the Times article calls the "endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary"! The lunatics just take over the new asylum as well.

That diff is blatantly bad. This one is worse, in my opinion. Removal of eleven paragraphs of cited text with the edit summary "Cutting science part".

Because an article on global warming doesn't need a "science part".

Also on the topic of Citizendium, their article on the history of television technology may include a copyright violation; I noticed the text added here is a word-for-word transcription of something I wrote on a Wikipedia article in 2006, without attribution to anyone (not in an edit summary, not in a tag, etc). It's fine if they want to use the GDFL, but it's not clear they're using it, and it looks like they may decide not to use it at all. If so, what happens to the GDFL licenced scrapes that were added without clear attribution? Is it really a copyvio?