Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness

Martin Luther challenged Catholicism's perceived corruption by nailing his Ninety-five Theses to a church door. Bostonians challenged England's "taxation without representation" by casting crates of tea from a ship. Larry Sanger is challenging Wikipedia's perceived lawlessness by building what he hopes to be an expert-guided online encyclopedia. Sound overblown? Not to Sanger, who recently founded the Citizendium after parting ways with his former colleague, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. (See Assignment Zero's related article, "Lessons From the Old School.")

The Citizendium, the free encyclopedia that Sanger launched on March 25, may resemble Wikipedia, the Web 2.0 juggernaut containing 1.7 million entries in English alone. Anyone can contribute to either of the competing sites, and they look nearly identical. But pull back the skin of the Citizendium -- whose name is a shortening of "The Citizens' Compendium" -- and you’ll find an operating model that challenges the horizontally-driven free-for-all of Wikipedia (and, indeed, online culture at large). Sanger’s site enforces a ban on anonymous contributions and imposes "gentle expert guidance" to maintain order, intended to counter what he sees as Wikipedia's devotion to amateurism, anonymity and anarchy: a "wild-and-woolly atmosphere." In contrast, Wikipedia head Jimmy Wales believes in a "very open social model," and his Wikipedia lets almost anyone contribute, notwithstanding some basic rules of etiquette and neutrality.

Recently Sanger told the Times of London that Wikipedia "is still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon... [but] also broken beyond repair," despite the fact that Wikipedia is one of the top-ten destinations on the Web. The Pew Internet and American Life project recently released a study citing two Internet research firms that both rank Wikipedia among the top ten Internet sites. Using Wikipedia, the study noted, is more popular than online shopping.

Meanwhile, the Citizendium went beta with 1,200 articles in progress, only nine of which were "approved." A random sampling of the unapproved articles revealed content that was generally inferior to what's available at Wikipedia, although head-to-head article comparisons are unfair to the nascent Citizendium -- for now.

Sanger is convinced he can attract the critical mass of contributors that his project needs. "We're already well on our way," Sanger said via e-mail. "I've got more active people now, I suspect, than Wikipedia had after five months. They're just working on fewer articles -- which isn't a bad thing."

The drama raging between the two information pioneers goes well beyond the scope of mere competing websites; it’s fueled by a well-documented professional-gone-personal conflict between Sanger and Wales about the paternity of Wikipedia. Sanger wrote the essay for kuro5hin that introduced Wikipedia. In the essay he credited himself as the “chief instigator of Wikipedia." Wales wrote extensive comments to the essay, but not once did he object to Sanger's crediting. Now Wales insists that Wikipedia was his own sole creation. He chafes at Sanger's usual co-founder credit as "absurd," going so far as to tell the Sydney Morning Herald that Sanger was just one of twenty people working on the project.

Wales refused interview requests for this article.

From his earliest days working on Wikipedia, Sanger wanted a vetting and protection process for articles "that are up to a certain standard." Wikipedia never provided the approval mechanism that he wanted. In Sanger's mind, Wikipedia -- despite its success -- remained just "one-half of the original design" that included an expert-led compendium called Nupedia, which was launched alongside with Wikipedia but was quickly eclipsed by its "amateur" sibling. The Citizendium is Sanger's effort to realize his whole vision in a single wiki.

If you’re no denizen of social networking culture, Sanger’s hybrid of a traditional professionalized model and the relatively recent phenomenon of crowdsourcing may seem insignificant. But to many people who live online as much as offline, Sanger’s hybrid is tantamount to apostasy. Offline, lack of oversight and an anything-goes culture sounds truly rebellious, but online, just the opposite is true. Sanger has become an enfant terrible to some simply by putting experts above the crowd.

But this model is not anathema to everyone. Netscape has hired expert social bookmarkers as "navigators," sparking predictable controversy within its community. And it should be mentioned that the project that developed this article, Assignment Zero, functions in what founder and NYU professor Jay Rosen calls a "pro-am" model. (Rosen also serves on the Wikimedia advisory board; while he offered feedback on this article, he did not edit it.)

James Surowiecki, author of the book The Wisdom of Crowds, notes that collective wisdom has limits. Crowds that are ill-informed, homogeneous or over-centralized are potential targets for becoming the evil twin of a crowd: a mob. But given the right conditions, Surowiecki told Forbes, a crowd can be smarter than even its smartest member. He questions whether "only people we recognize as experts should have a say in tough decisions."

Others, though, say a hybrid model has the potential to organize the mob into a more effectively wise crowd. In fact, Mark Glaser, author of the MediaShift blog sponsored by PBS, says that expert guidance is inevitable: "The hybrid of amateurs and pros is the future,” he said.

Wikipedia has paid a price for working outside that hybrid with its policy of purely open access. "Don't be afraid to edit," Wikipedia proclaims; "anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold!" And indeed, changes to Wikipedia are continuous. Many of these are vandalism.

Last month, viewers of The Office swarmed Wikipedia's "Negotiation" entry when it was mentioned on the show's April 5 episode. Various fans, most of them anonymous, advised "withholding sex" and "throwing sharp objects" as negotiation tactics. At one point, the entire page contained only one sentence: "HOLY FARK, THE OFFICE RULES!" Just the night before The Office fans’ vandalism, NBC's Brian Williams had lamented to a group of journalism students at New York University that his own Wikipedia entry had multiple errors and that much of today's explosion of Internet content is trivial, biased, or just plain wrong. (Underscoring Wikipedia’s dominance in spite of these concerns, New York Times columnist John Tierney cited Wikipedia as a primary source on his Times blog just hours before the Office viewers trampled the "Negotiation" entry. And so the world is turned upside down: the gatekeepers now look to the masses, as personified by Wikipedia, for information. )

These could not have been welcome developments for Wikipedia, where a couple of years ago, a Wikipedia contributor edited the John F. Kennedy entry to assert that John Siegenthaler had been involved in the president's assassination. More recently, the comedian Sinbad was declared dead on Wikipedia and then quickly resurrected. Such events have made the site the target of much bad press and at least one satirical look-alike.

Of course, Wikipedia's challenges do not ensure the Citizendium’s success. And Sanger’s site does not want for detractors. One of the more often cited critiques is by NYU professor and writer – and Wikimedia advisory board member -- Clay Shirky on his Many2Many blog. Experts, he wrote, aren't special, and adding them to the mix won't result in a better wiki. Furthermore, motivating these experts will be a Sisyphean task that "will probably prove quickly fatal."

Nicholas Carr, author of the RoughType blog, says he has " some sympathy for Sanger" in wanting a high-quality product but that "he's just adding rules that will turn potential contributors off.” He adds, "Maybe it has a chance, but the odds are against it."

One of those rules is the Citizendium’s real-name policy: You have to identify yourself with your real name to write any content. Jérôme Delacroix, a member of the Citizendium's executive committee, says that this requirement makes it "likely that people will take more responsibility" for their content. Enforcement and verification of the real-name policy falls to the "constables."

To survive, the Citizendium will need enough of both contributors and contributions. Helping out on both fronts is Eduzendium. Sorin Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue, proposed Eduzendium, a new program to partner with doctoral programs and graduate seminars to let students get academic credit for Citizendium articles. Eduzendium "offers [students] the opportunity to take their work to another, more socially consequential level," he says. If Eduzendium works well at Purdue, Matei hopes to extend the program to other universities. But its success is just as questionable as Citizendium’s. University of British Columbia zoology professor Rosemary Redfield says,"I like the idea a lot.... But most faculty teaching [graduate] seminars will be reluctant to take a chance on such a new venture."

The Citizendium may thrive or wither depending on whether institutions and individuals are willing to take that chance. David Pennock, a principal research scientist at Yahoo!, called himself "a big fan and big consumer" of Wikipedia and worried that the Citizendium could fall victim to the "chicken-and-egg" conundrum: people want to contribute to something that's successful, but the Citizendium can succeed only after attracting enough people and contributions.

But numbers don’t determine everything. Despite Wikipedia’s wealth of contributors, Wales seems to be gradually introducing his nemesis’s thinking into his own site. "There's a kind of irony to what Sanger is doing," Carr says, noting Wikipedia itself is starting to look more like Sanger's vision for the Citizendium. "Wikipedia still lives in the Web 2.0 rhetorical glow, but I don't believe that that's any longer an accurate description." The most-viewed articles are often locked down, he says, but less popular entries get less scrutiny and are still free to edit, leaving them open to vandalism. Mark Glaser says Wales is introducing greater oversight into Wikipedia, which he says he can’t imagine as a minor or temporary move. “They will probably move toward a hybrid model where people move up the ladder and become overseers, or have paid editors help verify things," he says.

It's hard to say -- since Wikipedia doesn't cite authors -- who vetted Sanger's quote in his Wikipedia entry, that the site has issues "from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals."

How Wales will fare in his Citizendium entry is still open to question. Looking at the site, it appears that no one has signed on yet to write -- or edit -- the entry.

Credits:

Principal reporter and writer, Michael Ho

Sidebar reporter and writer, Randy Burge

With reporting from Anna Haynes, Robert William King, Steve Petersen, Muhammed Saleem, J. Jack Unrau, Paul S. Wilson

Additional research by John Eisched, Carl Collins, Matthew Kress-Weitenhagen

Discussion and editorial guidance from Francine Hardaway, Ken MacNamara, Derek Poore

Art by Mark Selander

Fact-checking by Craig Silverman, Ian Elwood, Christopher Nystrom

Edited by John C. Abell, Jeff Howe, Lauren Sandler