CZ:Myths and Facts

We enjoy considerable goodwill from many people. But the Citizendium is also misunderstood. This page is devoted to correcting many errors about us.

Let's debunk some myths

Myth: we're experts-only.

Fact: we love experts—we admit it. And we want more of them. And we want your expertise as well. Everyone has something to contribute; everyone has some area of expertise. You do not need to be a credentialed professor in order to contribute what you know.

See Editor's Role, Author's Role, Request Account

Myth: we're a top-down project, with expert editors giving orders to underlings.

No, we're very much bottom-up. If you join, nobody is going to tell you what to do here. You work on the articles you want to work on, when you want to work on them. We are a "radically," collaborative project. This means we share ownership and work together; nobody "owns" articles or "gives orders" to do this or that. Of course, we aren't the first to use this method; it gained currency online with the open source software movement. One of the theorists of that movement was Eric S. Raymond, who compared communities that create free software collaboratively to "bazaars," as opposed to the old-fashioned "cathedral" model where everyone has a specific role and function, and orders are given from the top down. (See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," free to read online.) We, too, are a bazaar. We have merely added "village elders" wandering the bazaar. Their presence does not convert the project into a cathedral; it only helps make the bazaar a little less anarchical and unreliable.

For further reading, see Group Editing and How to collaborate.

Myth: edits appear on the Citizendium only if they have been specifically approved by editors.

No, editors do not approve edits before they appear on the website. Once you're signed up, you can immediately change any article (or, for approved articles, any article draft—example). Editors are not standing over your shoulder. Another author is as likely to critique and edit your work as an editor. It's like we said. This is a wiki—a real, robust, bottom-up wiki.

see The Editor Role.

Myth: we're Serious. Writing here is like writing a term paper—no fun

You're welcome here. This is a work in progress, and we have fun! Yes, we have some highly educated people here, who are writing wonderful prose as if it costs them no effort. But we also have no problem whatsoever with you making a rough start on any topic, as long as somebody else will be able to pick up where you left off. We are permanently under construction. You do not have to be painfully careful, as if you might break something and people will start screaming at you, or will freeze you out socially, if you do. We're much more relaxed than that. We want everybody to be bold, not so careful that you never make any mistakes. And you don't have to write a whole term paper to start an article. It's OK if you start a relatively short article, just a paragraph or two (we call these "stubs").

see Be Bold, Under Construction, and Stubs.

Myth: privacy will be violated, as our bios will be accessible from Google!

Fact: biographies are not indexed by Google (or any other search engine that respects the "noindex" tag).

We feel that the advantages of real names outweigh the small sacrifice of allowing our work-in-progress to be viewed publicly. On the one hand, using real names makes people behave themselves more civilly; on the other hand, it makes our articles more credible, since readers know that there are people willing to put their names behind them.

see CZ:Statistics and Sanger's "Defense of Modest Real Name Requirements."

Myth: since this is an academic project, we are not open to articles about pop culture.

Fact: we are open to pop culture. Don't believe us? See Led Zeppelin and Metal Gear Solid. We are better described as a hybrid academic/public project. Think of it like this: we reject both the idea that knowledge belongs exclusively in the academy, and the idea that, after Wikipedia, the academy has no special role to play in explaining what we know. We think the most productive and reliable system involves the marriage of expertise with wide-ranging public interests and knowledge. So, as long as we can expect to maintain a full set of articles of a certain category, then go to town!

For further reading, see Article Inclusion Policy or look at Category:Games Workgroup, Category:Hobbies Workgroup, and Category:Media Workgroup.

Myth: since this is an academic project, our articles will have an academic bias.

Fact: our neutrality policy specifically requires that our articles feature the full range of opinion on a subject, including opinion that is outside the mainstream of expert opinion. The important thing is that all opinion be properly labelled and attributed. Besides, as we said, this is a hybrid expert-public project, not just an academic project; the input of the general public is a necessary check on the particular biases that sometimes plague particular disciplines. So far, this problem has not been much in evidence here.

For further reading, see Neutrality Policy.

Myth: there is no point to the Citizendium, because Wikipedia exists.

Fact: Wikipedia has uneven quality, and is extremely off-putting to most experts—indeed, to most people, period—who might otherwise contribute to it. We believe that, in the end, a lot more people will be comfortable with and attracted to the open, yet sensible CZ model. Some of us expect a tipping point to come in the next year or two, in which CZ will be flooded with more and more people who are now firmly persuaded that we are a force to contend with. There is no danger whatsoever of our giving up. Your work here will be well used as part of a resource with tens of thousands, and then probably hundreds of thousands, of articles.

Besides, we're sure you'll agree that the world can use more than one "go to" source for free reference information. We are the best hope for a real alternative!

For further reading, see Why Citizendium? and Workgroup Weeks.

Myth: most Citizendium articles are just copied from Wikipedia.

Fact: wrong. While we do allow people to copy Wikipedia articles here, we keep careful track of them, and by far most of our articles are completely original. Most of the articles that are sourced from Wikipedia are not counted in our CZ Live article count (currently 16,469). We generally prefer that people start over, in order to give the public "added value." If someone copies a Wikipedia article here without changing it, we won't take credit for it, and we are more than willing to let others start over from scratch on the topic.

For further reading, see How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles and Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians.

Some other facts about us

• Though we are an active and open wiki, we have no vandalism and little if any "trolling."
• Our well-developed articles feature subpages (here's a list), which cover many other kinds of reference information. An encyclopedia article, plus supporting reference material, is called a "cluster."
• CZ articles are intended to be coherent narratives, not random grab-bags of facts.
• The person [http://www.larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html who led Wikipedia in its first year, and designed many of its fundamental policies, is also the founder of Citizendium.
• It is easy to get a quick start. In our sign-up procedure, we don't ask that much information about you. A human being will review your account request, and let you into the system typically within 24 hours. Once you've signed up, it is easy to start a new article.
• We have a neutrality policy.
• Editorial policy decisions are settled by our Editorial Council
• We are not a Silicon Valley for-profit business. We are a non-profit, civic project that uses Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the license for our content, and our Citizens are essentially co-owners of the project.

Why all the errors about CZ?

So, why have there been so many errors passed around about CZ? And why are so many of our interesting innovations largely unknown? There are probably two reasons.

First, this is a genuinely innovative project. Nothing quite like it has ever existed before. The expert-public hybrid model and several other innovations are quite simply new. But most people are not able to take such novel things on board easily, because they think in terms of prototypes or examples. Therefore, to them, we are like a traditional academic project, like Nupedia, or like Wikipedia. In short, most people naturally think in terms of stereotypes, and so we have been stereotyped. No doubt that's been the fate of most real innovators. This means only that we need to educate people--which this page attempts to do.

Second, a lot of Web 2.0 advocates, whose favorite online platforms are websites like Wikipedia and YouTube, are philosophically opposed to our basic policies. So they dislike the idea that we ask people to take real-world responsibility for their contributions and that we make even a low-key "gentle guidance" role for experts. We hope that a more nuanced understanding of what we are up to will eventually emerge anyway.

See also: Why Citizendium?