It’s not a wikicracy, it’s a trollocracy.

When an admin tries to edit the article on Sarah Palin, one gets this warning:

Administrators Attention!

Do not edit this page without consensus on the talk page or be prepared to be blocked.

It says that you should get a consensus on the talk page first, an impossible task, because of all the lobbyists (paid or not, who knows), who bring you in the wonderful realm of circular logic and of non-sensical arguments. They throw random policies without explaining how and why and begin arguing about the meaning of each word. The talkpage is a madhouse frequented only by trolls.

A sane person, when surrounded by such individuals, would lose his/her interest and try to find people more rational, on other subjects.

Every big corporation wants captive customers, and Google is afraid that its customers would be able to escape. People would search less on google and instead head off to Wikipedia for information, to Web 2.0 sites when wanting to browse something interesting and to their favourite shopping portal when in need to buy something. Knol is the solution, as Google holds the content on its servers and it can monetize it with adsense.

Wikipedia, because of its wealth of information, was indeed seen as a threat for Google, but they can’t do anything to their Search engine results to penalize Wikipedia somehow, because that would result in lower quality results overall and that could affect its market place. On many topics, the only reasonable article on this is the Wikipedia’s and Google is surely wishing it would be able to monetize it.

Knol allows, due to the way the Google algorithms work, that everyone can place in front in the google results with an article, so that they’ll be able to “steal” a part of Wikipedia’s traffic and control and monetize it.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

The major quality problems of Wikipedia stem from other issues:

First of all, the need of professional copy-editing. Wikipedia is full of clumsy editing and a mishmash of trivia and valid information, all scotch taped together in a Frankenstein-like monster article. The number of well-written articles has increased a lot in the last year, but in the same time, the number of articles has exploded and most of the new ones are written by ‘new’ editors who don’t know the style or the standards of Wikipedia.

Then, for some articles, the nationalists (both trolls or non-trolls) are a real nuisance. This is especially true for the articles concerning Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Basically, for hundreds of years, the people of those countries had their own version of the “truth” and now those truths are confronted. Perhaphs having one set of NPOV articles would help the nations understand each other, but this would take time.

The factual accuracy is also a problem, which was widely reported in the press, especially after the Siegenthaler scandal, but the press exaggerated its importance. Any non-trivial work of any nature is inherently inaccurate. The problem of Wikipedia is not citing sources: Wikipedia should emphasise the citing sources part more than it does now.

On the basis of interviews given by the founders, the Digital Universe concept appears to be undergoing rapid evolution, so it may be difficult to give a fully self-consistent explanation of the goals of the founders.

So, basically, they haven’t decided yet how it should be, despite starting the project more than a year ago. On the other hand, they worked on their interface, which is complicated enough, so, it confuses the visitors and it won’t work in some browsers, such as Opera:

There has been an error.

You will be redirected to the page where you can contact our support and give us your feedback.

The interface software is a good example of what happens when programmers try to impress the PHBs instead of the users. The Digital Universe bureaucratic way of doing business, which includes meetings, secretaries, workflows, etc., is very different from the informal way of Wikipedia’s IRC leadership.

In fact, this appears to have pissed off Larry Sanger and hence his idea of starting his own expert-based fork right away. Sanger wanted that his project would be included in the Digital Universe Foundation, but it seems that no decision was taken yet.