Citizens’ Encyclopædia

Is sourcing an important thing for an encyclopedia? In the beginning, in order to get a head start, Wikipedia ignored sources, allowing articles to be unsourced and as such, few had any real references.

Nowadays, there is a large number of people on Wikipedia who think that sourcing is not important, that if Wikipedia asks for references and sources, it means that it does not trust its users; that asking for sources would turn Wikipedia into the Nupedia, and that’s a Bad Thing™. They also believe that Wikipedia should not do a strong fact-checking like the elitist Academia, but should keep very lax standards on verifiability.

The main problem with unsourced affirmations is that when a later editor can’t know whether it’s true or false. It happens that the unsourced articles are unreliable: the editors write from their unreliable memories wrong or misinterpreted information, heard from the neighbours of their Aunt Edna or read on forums and blogs. Malice, albeit not very common, is also a cause of the wrong facts in Wikipedia. Misinterpretations occur on sourced information, too, but at least then, one can verify the facts more easily.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia has been moving toward more stringent standards. It is clear that the English Wikipedia has a fair coverage of the main topics in the world today and it has to think about the next step. Jimmy Wales says that now Wikipedia must now focus on reliability. A few policy changes have been made — for example, administrators can now delete any article which fails to describe why it is notable. And also, when creating a new article, one gets a big message written in friendly letters:

Articles that do not cite reliable published sources will be deleted.

Unless they’re written about non-notable things, the articles are not currently deleted, but at least it makes people aware that adding sources is important for Wikipedia.

Apart from the three “official policies” (Neutral Point of View, Verifiability and No Original Research), which are valid throughout Wikipedia, each language Wikipedia is free to choose their own policies and administration. Whereas most Wikipedias simply translate the policies from the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia had some original policies, which were different from the equivalents in English Wikipedia:

Userboxes

The userboxes are simply standardized boxes which are placed on the personal pages of the users. Some userboxes simply state facts about the person, like “This user speaks Japaneses” or “This user lives in New York”. However, things get more controversial in the realm of opinions, especially since the existence of a userbox template might make people think that Wikipedia might support that POV.

The German solution was to move them all, except the language templates, to the “userspace”, so that it would be clear that the opinion is linked to a user and not to Wikipedia itself.

On English Wikipedia, they were all allowed in the “mainspace”, except for the userboxes created for trolling purposes, like “This user is a Nazi” and “This user is a pedophile”, which were deleted swiftly. Then, the hell broke and some wikipedians started to delete userboxes: the Great Userbox Purge or the Great Userbox Wars of 2006 began. This made a lot of people forget that Wikipedia’s purpose is to write an encyclopedia and started wasting time quarreling over the userbox disputes. It ended in a compromise, and adaptation of the German solution to English Wikipedia.

Fair use

Fair use is a concept in American copyright law, which allows some limited freedom in the usage of copyrighted works. German law lacks it and and as such, the German Wikipedia banned it outright and only free-licensed images are allowed in the German Wikipedia’s pages.

An unintented consequence is that the forbidding of fair use keeps the Pokemoners away: they like articles with lots of pictures and in this case it not possible to add pictures without using copyrighted images.

English Wikipedia, on the other hand, included many fair use images and until recently, even images on topics for which a free replacement could be created very easily, for example, photos of public buildings. Recently, the fair use images deemed “replaceable” have been deleted, which fired a dispute between the Wikipedians who think that the usage of free images is very important for Wikipedia and those who think that fair use does not contradict its mission statement.

While banning of fair use images is unlikely, a compromise solution would be the requirement that every fair-use image to be approved individually after a discussion, with votes pro and against. That might increase a bit the internal bureaucracy, but the usage of non-essential fair-use images would be greatly reduced.

Stubs and stub categorization

Many short articles on English and other Wikipedias include a notice similar to this one:

This article related to German royalty is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

German Wikipedia held a vote and removed them outright, but on English Wikipedia, they are in full vigour.

The usefulness of such stub notices and their categorization is disputed: most readers of Wikipedia are by now aware that articles can be edited and the original purpose is therefore obsolete. The secondary purpose, to sort bad articles by topic is also not very useful: Few Wikipedians think that “today is a good day to update an article on German royalty”; usually, they browse and note the inferior quality in an article on a subject they are familiar.

Also, the stubs created more bureaucracy, the infamous stub-sorters and they clutter the edit history.

Larry Sanger initated recently a debate on whether it would be better to start Citizendium from scratch instead of forking Wikipedia.

Arguments have been brought forward, for both variants: Wikipedia has many good articles, but also a lot of mediocre or poor quality and his idea is that the poor quality articles would prevent experts from taking Citizendium seriously. Also, a lot of Wikipedia articles are the infamous “Pokemons”, articles about obscure topics, mostly on fiction, which the CZ people don’t like and they want them deleted from their fork. This brings the problem of size: Wikipedia, with its 1.6 million articles is huge and this is a work for many people, not for a couple dozen volunteers which are currently active on Citizendium.

However, there is another point, which I don’t think was ever raised: Google usually likes original content over mirrors and forks: it would appreciate more the pages which are not found elsewhere versus wikipedia articles with minor changes. That is a particular important point, as probably most of Wikipedia’s editors and readers learnt about it from a Google result page.

A difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium is the real-name policy: Wikipedia allows people to use pseudonyms, while Citizendium requires people to use their real names and even write a short bio of themselves.

One of the reasons for the usage of real names is less vandalism. Under ideal circumstances, it would work, but in our world, it won’t, because it’s not enforceable: it’s hard to check whether a name is real. One could ask for a scanned ID, but it’s not hard to photoshop a Botswanian driving license, which would look real for a person who is not aware of how that looks like. Of course, Citizendia could also ask for a picture of you holding that ID, but this sounds too much like what the Nigerian scam-baiters would ask from the poor Nigerian scammers. The only variant which is 100% sure is having to collaborate with all the governments, which is impossible.

People say that^{[citation needed]} for each expert, there’s another equal, but opposite, expert. So, Citizendia won’t be short of disputes, but will they be more academic and diplomatic in trying to solve their disputes? Time will tell, but in the meantime, on WikiEN-l, Stan Shebs argues that:

great knowledge tends to breed arrogance, making conflict more likely, not less so. CZ adds real names and attributions to the mix, raising the stakes even further by introducing the possibility of effect on one’s careers. The organizer would need the superior political skills of an Ivy League dean to make it all work, but Larry’s forum postings don’t evidence much improvement at diplomacy since the times he was angering editors on WP.