Citizendium

From RationalWiki

Citizendium ("CZ") is a by-product and pretender to the throne of Wikipedia. The project was founded by Larry Sanger to counter criticism that Wikipedia ("the encyclopedia any teenager can vandalize") is written by too many non-experts.

Articles at CZ are vetted by alleged experts, and editors are required use their real names and to post their credentials. The definition of "expert" is, however, extremely broad and often doesn't reflect any accredited academic expertise in a subject area. Articles are divided into "workgroups" such as history, engineering, and biology. Thus someone who is an "expert" in electrical engineering would also have authority over an article on chemical process engineering. There is also a workgroup on "healing arts," which is Citizendium's term for alternative medicine.^[1] This means that alternative medicine practitioners get to manage articles in those fields largely on their own terms - i.e., with authority to remove unwanted criticism and to cherry pick their own references.

While anyone can sign up and edit (contributors are called "Citizens"), the fact that real names are required means that participants lose the kind of privacy, anonymity and identity afforded by other internet sites and projects that allow personalised and unique handles and screen names.

[edit] Growth

Sanger's prognosis compared to reality

The rate of the creation of articles at Citizendium

The number of articles (approved, drafts and otherwise) at Citizendium 2007-2009

CZ has grown very rapidly slowly: In June 2009, there were less than 13,000 articles in the main space, less than 0.5% of the 2,900,000 articles at the English version of Wikipedia. The very small article creation rate of about 13-14 per day has been steadily over the last three years. Sanger himself expected an exponential growth^[2], as he stated on Oct 30, 2007:

In the years following Sanger's statement there have been no signs of accelerated growth. The average article creation rate has remained steady at 13-14 per month. During the same period the average length of Citizendium articles declined by well over half, from 468 words at the time of Sanger's statement in October 2007 to 213 words in October 2009.^[3] Only the future will tell whether the project will, from here until eternity, muddle on creating 14 articles per day^[2] as it has done for the last two years. New figures published for the first three months of 2010, continue to show dwindling article creations and declining author participation rates.

[edit] Dr. Larry Sanger

Dr. Sanger, when establishing Citizendium, made the announcement he would be resigning from the project as Editor-in-Chief after two or three years,^[4][5] to demonstrate he would not be a "dictator for life", an allegation commonly made against rival Jimbo Wales.^[6] Five years later, Sanger is still in charge of the project. A Citizendium charter which was also meant to have been implemented within twelve months of the project being initiated has never been written.

[edit] Crank magnet

Citizendium's "expert" approval is just as much a double-edged sword as is Wikipedia's open editing policy. The major downside to Citizendium's approach is that they allow designated "experts" to take ownership of articles within their field. In some cases this is fine and combats the effect of Wikipedia's almost unguided editing that causes articles to degrade. But it also allows people of very dubious qualifications to obtain such ownership with relatively little opposition. Thus, the method can effectively let supposed "experts" hijack pet articles and push their own POV, making the articles as uncritical as possible to the topic at hand. Citizendium's approval process locks an article from further editing so that all changes must be made to a "draft" version not presented to the public. This means that once a fringe enthusiast has managed to get an article approved in their preferred version, it is very difficult for reality-based individuals to undo the damage.

For example, Citizendium's horrific piece on homeopathy^[7] was taken over by Dana Ullman, a long-known internet shill for pseudoscience who was banned from Wikipedia for disruptive advocacy.^[8] Also, the article on chiropractic^[9] is owned by D. Matt Innis, a practicing chiropractor and acupuncturist. Both of these pseudoscience advocacy articles appear to be fully embraced by the Citizendium community. They are both marked as "approved" articles and the homeopathy article was even used in January 2009 as a "featured article" of the site.^[10]

Some more examples of awful pro-pseudoscience articles:

• Citizendium:Memory of Water - as per Homeopathy claims above. This article eventually was revised to acknowledge physical reality after library scientist Walt Crawford criticized it as "deeply disturbing."^[11]
• Citizendium:Pseudoscience, particularly the section under "Astrology"
• Citizendium:Intelligent Design - a scary article, reminiscent of aSK.
• This article about Young Earth Creationism, which is also heavily (and "expertly") edited by Conservapedia sysop RJJensen
• Citizendium:Cold fusion - heavily biased, and edited by proponent and advocate Jed Rothwell.^[12] Rothwell had been previously banned indefinitely from wikipedia for constantly removing criticisms of Cold fusion as a pseudoscience, using an army of sockpuppet accounts.^[13]
• Citizendium:Infant colic - relies on alternative and experimental medicine. Tone of article is dismissive of "scientific medicine".
• Citizendium:Vertebral subluxation - scientifically unsound article, written mostly by an unpublished author without any verifiable medical background.
• Citizendium:Apollo Moon landing hoax theory - Written by Luchezar Iliev Georgiev (former Wikipedia User:Лъчезар), who not only believes the moon landings were a hoax, but the entire Apollo program itself was a lie. The article was later reduced to a stub by other editors.
• Citizendium:Herding cats - an article worthy of uncyclopedia.

[edit] Scientology

The Scientology article is edited by at least two well known members of that organisation. On 1 May 2007, the article 'Scientology' was moved first to 'Scientology (the philosophy)' then finally to Church of Scientology. The word 'cult' was deleted as well as any mention of scientology being banned in a number of countries, and the term 'adherent' replaced with 'parishioners' by User:Terry E. Olsen. Olsen is the infamous usenet and wikipedia editor known as 'Terryeo'.^[14][15] Shortly afterwards User:Steven Ferry joined Citizendium. Ferry has never declared his previous and active membership^[16][17] of scientology to the project, prior to editing the article, and the targeted removal of criticisms.^[18][19] Ferry was subsequently elected to the Citizendium Editorial Council unopposed in 2008,^[20] leading to claims the project had been successfully infiltrated by the Church of Scientology.^[21]

[edit] Constabulary

There has been repeated criticism of Citizendium over the use of appointed constables to 'police' the project. In many countries of the Commonwealth of Nations, a constable is a police officer. Heavy-handed tactics, meddling in article content, and bullying and harrassing users have been commonplace (see Times Higher Education link below, for example). A number of prominent academics who started out with the project have since resigned, mainly after falling into disputes with constables. While Wikipedia has a system of dealing with complaints of problematic administrators, there is no such system within Citizendium.

[edit] Server outages

Citizendium has suffered repeated server outages since it was founded, often keeping the project off-line for hours at a time.

[edit] External Links

• Wikipedia founder's scholarly web venture plays host to a war of words
• What will kill Citizendium?
• Citizendium "Expertise"

[edit] Footnotes

1. ↑ Citizendium:Healing Arts
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} Larry Sanger: The Citizendium one year on: a strong start and an amazing future
3. ↑ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics#Word_count
4. ↑ http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/02/citizendium.ars/3 'No dictator for life'
5. ↑ http://news.softpedia.com/news/Wikipedia-Co-Founder-Ready-to-Launch-New-Project-120175.shtml
6. ↑ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator
7. ↑ Citizendium:Homeopathy
8. ↑ Dana Ullman ban annoucement
9. ↑ Citizendium:Chiropractic
10. ↑ Citizendium main page, January 28th 2009
11. ↑ http://citesandinsights.info/civ9i5.pdf
12. ↑ The Wiki-woes of Rothwell and Inept Cold-Fusioneers
13. ↑ User:JedRothwell block log
14. ↑ Encyclopedia Dramatica entry
15. ↑ User:Terryeo block log
16. ↑ Truth About Scientology: Steven Ferry
17. ↑ Scientology discussion
18. ↑ [1]
19. ↑ [2]
20. ↑ 2008 Council Members
21. ↑ Scientologist infiltrates Citizendium