Marshall has a post up about Citizendium. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is the founder and it will be a forked version of the popular site with experts who have the final say on whether or not changes will go through.
Marshall asks whether wikipedia really needs to be “fixed” and suggests it doesn’t.
I think it does. While wikipedia appears to be open to all, I’ve seen numerous examples of changes getting immediately deleted for what appears to be political reasons rather than the pursuit of pure knowledge. And I’ve also seen people be attacked for making changes that appear to be factual and correct.
The TechCrunch listing on wikipedia has a number of errors. But there is no way in hell I’d ever think about fixing those errors. The wikipedia community has completely intimidated me to the point where making a change to that site is unthinkable.
So I do think Wikipedia needs to be fixed.
Ah Nicky, you are such a little princess.
But no… fork YOU!
Neutering seems extreme.
The question is whether Citizendium’s political system will be more successful than Wikipedia’s. Of course, much of that will depend on what you define as success. If Citizendium has better quality and makes everyone involved feel warm and fuzzy, but almost no one participates due to the top-down power structure, is that a success?
Citizendium might not even need a big following. They can use Wikipedia’s articles and following. They can essentially just look at a wikipedia article, use it for their own site, and when ever the wikipedia article is changed decide if that change will go through in Citizendium.
This could do with a little explanation: “wikipedia community has completely intimidated me” – I’ve made a handful of changes to Wikipedia, which I guess makes me a member of the community, yet I haven’t been asked to wield a baseball bat for unsporting purposes.
Is there anything to suggest that a more closed system would be any less subject to bias? Seems to me that locking people out reduces the opportunity for inaccuracies to be corrected. I would have thought a more distributed dispute arbitration system could work a lot better than the ordination of experts.
btw, I’d recommend Aaron Swartz’s recent series on the state of Wikipedia.
If there are factual errors on the TechCrunch page, document them on the entry’s talk page. Editors check those pages often on entries they care about.
People often don’t realise that on Wikipedia what you write has to be “verifiable”, i.e. something that can be proved, and also back it up with a published source if challenged.
It’s like the one about scientists saying “they shouldn’t change what I write, I’m the expert”. Well, on the net, anyone can pretend to be anyone, so how do we really know you’re the expert? Instead, provide evidence for your edits (which anyone can do, it’s a great leveller).
As Rogers said, please, either post the errors to the talk page, or even to here. While tempers often flair with various controversial topics, I simply can’t imagine any changes to TechCrunch’s article. The talk page is barely got anything on it, there’s been so little debate. So please, consider hoping over and giving us a line or two on what to fix.
Mike, this is what the discussion pages are for. Leave a note about the incorrect info in the article’s discussion page and other users will make the corrections.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”
Eric Blair (George Orwell) – Animal Farm
Hey,
Please email me a list of errors in your article so I can investigate them.
Thanks