Citizens’ Encyclopædia

The Citizendium has not yet a license, but there are debates on which they should choose. The two main points are whether it would allow commercial redistribution and whether it would be compatible with Wikipedia’s GFDL.

The main argument for a non-commercial license is that more academics would allow their content to be redistributed just for non-commercial use. However, there is a contradiction, which perhaphs was not yet noticed by anyone: contributors to Citizendium don’t simply license their content, but actually give all the rights on redistribution to the Citizendium Foundation, thus giving them a blank cheque, allowing them to use the content in commercial ways as they see it fit.

As such, while anyone can legally use the Wikipedia content in a commercial way, the content from Citizendium can be commercially exploited just by the Citizendium Foundation, which can legally sell the content to commercial publishers. It’s not clear whether this loophole was thought by Sanger, but it’s clear that it makes Citizendium less attractive to potential contributors, not more as intended.

The CZ community appears to be against Wikipedia being able to take and modify articles from Citizendium and a license non-compatible with wikipedia (Creative Commons) is likely to be used.

The main problem is that Citizendium uses some articles from Wikipedia, which would requires them to use GFDL. Larry Sanger thought that it might be possible to use GFDL just for such articles, but this could lead to an unfair situation: Citizendium can use any original Wikipedia article, but Wikipedia can’t use original Citizendium articles.

However, the issue on whether forks from Wikipedia articles are to be allowed is not yet clear, as there are many unsettled issues on licensing and policy on Citizendium. It’s too early to tell and perhaphs all this discussion is nothing more than a simple speculation.

It seems that a major difference between Wikipedia and the new Citizendium is that Citizendium will perform censorship of certain materials deemed inappropriate (not “family friendly”). As such, they won’t cover some topics related to sexuality nor they’ll have “many” articles on porn stars and they certainly won’t include photos on the remaining sexuality topics.

The issue on whether the parents should allow their children to be exposed to sexuality from an early age is a hot issue, some parents, especially religious ones, fearing that their children won’t grow up to be prudes like themselves, while others realize that sexuality is a fact of life and hiding it from the children would not only be impossible (per the amount of porn on the web), but also not a good thing.

However, should an encyclopedia help the prudish parents? Isn’t an encyclopedia supposed to gather all the knowledge of the world? Sexuality has always an important thing for the humanity and we can’t just ignore it.

Many articles on sexuality on wikipedia are indeed badly sourced and they are not encyclopedic, but that’s also against the rules of wikipedia. A better policy enforcing on an encyclopedia using wikipedia’s rules would be just as good.

Then why the “Family friendliness”? Could it be just a cheap trick to gather some attention from the press and people who consider Wikipedia too liberal for their taste?

Someone, Think of the Children!

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.