Dear Citizens, I want to admit and apologize that, like many of you, I have taken an unannounced break for much of July. To be sure, I've been doing some work, but the accumulated weight of my responsibilities (Citizendium, WatchKnow, a personal project, and a very active and delightful two-year-old), after an especially manic June, have really done me in. So I've done some reading and writing and the family has taken a few little trips--things like that. I hope you understand. I also hope you understand that the break is over and I'm back at it!
We are closing in on 7,600 articles, and that is nothing to sneeze at. Citizendium is almost getting to the point where it is actually useful qua general encyclopedia. That's something all contributors can feel proud about. But admittedly the wiki has been rather slow this summer--perhaps because I haven't been cheerleading enough, but summers in volunteer encyclopedia projects are always relatively slow, in my experience. (CZ's summer 2007 was slow.) But this could soon change, as I'll explain below. ======================== I. Some new competitors. I would like to remind you of a remarkable fact: we are the first Web community to demonstrate that a meaningful and robust public-expert wiki partnership is *possible*. Our activity and success so far shows just how crucial collaboration is to the long-term growth of projects like this; you might compare our progress with the relatively slow growth of Scholarpedia and Encyclopedia of Earth, in which there are decided pressures against collaboration. The recently-announced Medpedia is likely to have similar difficulties despite their obvious advantages. I don't say that such projects are a waste of time; they produce high-quality free content, and that is a great thing. But they are unlikely to be orders of magnitude more productive than similarly top-down enterprises such as the (wonderful) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The advantages we have over such projects are our activity and robustness, as well as our unlimited growth potential. Our collaborative nature is also why, though we will not be complacent, I am not terribly worried about Britannica Online's announced project, or Google's Knol, which launched yesterday. (See the blog, http://blog.citizendium.org/, on these.) Radical collaboration, especially among named people, builds real and shared goals. That in turn creates a real community, which is why this is called the Citizens' Compendium and not Expertpedia. The community takes on a life of its own, and can feed on itself. Ultimately, my hypothesis is that creating free articles together, as part of a non-profit, contains motives and satisfies interests that are more powerful than the dubious honor of creating a single-authored article that benefit Knol or Britannica. If I were wrong, probably H2G2 (which has a similar model to Knol's and Britannica's) would have beat Wikipedia. Mind you, in saying this, I am not meaning to sound like a communitarian. I think that if anything, the open, libre, bottom-up, and self-governing nature of the Citizens' Compendium more deeply appeals to a liberal, individualist, self-motivating frame of mind than all those other projects. Even more than Wikipedia--but for different reasons. In short, if you want to be part of a project that places you in a meaningful ownership position over the whole project, creating something for the whole world to use and from which no specific entity will profit exclusively, you're in the right place. These and other reasons explain why there are many dozens of deeply committed Citizens involved in this project, and hundreds who work on it from time to time. It would be amazing to me if many of these people were to jump ship for Google's Knol, for example. It would mean giving up something truly valuable and growing that you know you own. It would also mean giving up on your fellow Citizens, with whom you've developed relationships through collaboration and a sense of shared responsibility and ownership. I know that a few will choose to interpret the above discussion as whistling past the graveyard, or wishful thinking. I'm honest enough to admit that there might be *a little* of that. But you should notice that this discussion reflects relevant experience as well as basic, deeply-explored principles. In any event, I thought it would be appropriate that you know, in a project as open as this aspires to be, how the Editor-in-Chief is thinking about the recent launches. ================================== II. Plans for the summer and fall. After my break, I am now feeling refreshed and reinvigorated and you should see me back to my old cheerleading and scheming self in the coming months. I am keenly aware of the importance of the next two or three months in particular. In September we have our first Workgroup Week (called Biology Week), which is a great opportunity to show a large group of people just how powerful our production model and community really are. Around the same time, I hope to launch WatchKnow. Moreover, I want by this fall to pump up activity on the wiki to levels beyond what we saw last winter and spring. How are we going to do all this? First, in the next few weeks, I am going to be helping to get the word out about Biology Week to a lot of mailing lists. We are about to hire a certain devoted Citizen who will help with this and other Workgroup Weeks as well. That person and I (and, we hope, many volunteers) will be making many such invitations to join Workgroup Weeks on many listservs (e-mail discussion lists) and Web forums. Then it is just a numbers game: the more people we invite, the more people will join us, and the more activity you will see on the wiki. We will probably see this increased activity from new people *soon*, not just during the various Workgroup Weeks this fall. I am confident that we can make our Workgroup Weeks successful, and the result will likely be a boom in project development beyond any we have seen yet. Another feature we'll be adding in a few weeks is an automatic newsletter. You might remember the big mailing I did last November, which got tremendous numbers of people to join (or rejoin) the project from within the set of people who have created CZ accounts. Well, we are going to do a similar mailing, inviting everyone to join a new mailing list that sends out an automatic, monthly report summarizing things like the most active contributors, the longest new articles, the most active articles, and so forth. These will be tasty statistics, designed to get people who are "on the fence" interested in the project and to reward active contributors with recognition. Yesterday we made an agreement to pay a programmer who will create a MediaWiki extension that will do all this. As a result, we should see a massive influx of old and never-got-involved Citizens in August. Finally, we can expect some ancillary attention to CZ as WatchKnow.org launches, because WatchKnow is a CZ Foundation project. For various reasons I cannot disclose at this time, there is good reason to think the launch is going to be a big one. Of course, this doesn't exhaust all of my plans... ================= III. Useful links (which you might need if you've been away for a while) Start an article? Here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Start_Article Check out recent changes and help out somebody else? Here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges Get general help? Here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Home :-) Hope to see you on the wiki in the next couple of days! --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
