Draft 2.1 (spiked)

This draft was submitted to the editors and subsequently rewritten extensively for the final piece, which is unlikely to follow this form. As such, it contains placeholders for subheds and some remaining running commentary that will have been struck prior to publication. It also never was sent through the fact-checking process; the final piece will have gone through that process.

SECTION I: INTRODUCTION

Martin Luther challenged Catholicism's perceived corruption by nailing his Ninety-five Theses to a church door. Bostonians challenged England's "taxation without representation" by casting crates of tea from a ship. Larry Sanger is challenging Wikipedia's perceived lawlessness by building what he hopes to be an expert-guided online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia needs no introduction for most Wired readers -- but for those who may not be familiar with it, it's an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. Sanger's goal? An online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. The kicker is that the competing sites even look nearly identical.

So where's the beef? It lies somewhere between "two quibbling personalities" -- Sanger's description of himself and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and current leader -- and a core difference in how the two think a wiki-based encyclopedia should be run.

Wales believes in a "very open social model," and his Wikipedia lets almost anyone contribute, given some basic rules of etiquette and neutrality.

Sanger's new encyclopedia is strikingly similar to Wikipedia with two new additions: a ban on anonymous contributions and "gentle expert guidance" to maintain order, intended to counter what he sees as Wikipedia's devotion to amateurism, anonymity and anarchy: a "wild-and-woolly atmosphere." Recently he told the Times of London that Wikipedia "is still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon... [but] also broken beyond repair."

Broken beyond repair -- but don't tell that to web-surfers, who've made Wikipedia one of their top-ten destinations overall and have embraced it as their general-information source of choice. [WRITER NOTE: FORWARD REFERENCE: ASSERTION JUSTIFIED BY PEW STUDY CITED IN SECTION IV; THAT GRAF CANNOT BE MOVED HERE WITHOUT BREAKING THE FLOW OF S4.]

Enter Sanger's Citizendium, stage right. Pronounced with the accent on "zen." Guided by experts. Gently.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's "amateurs" continue to work on their immense product, containing 1.7 million entries in English alone.

Sanger's project has touched off a firestorm among old colleagues and new-media evangelists for whom "oversight" and "experts" amount to fighting words -- a direct assault on the "wisdom of the crowd," a last grasp by "gatekeepers" to keep control of content.

One of the more often cited critiques is by NYU professor and writer Clay Shirky on his Many2Many blog. Experts, he wrote, aren't special, and adding them to the mix won't result in a better wiki. Furthermore, he said, motivating these experts will be a Sisyphean task that "will probably prove quickly fatal."

Sanger says his critics are misinformed. "We are Web 2.0," Sanger wrote on the Citizendium blog, "with real names, fairly enforced rules, and a role for experts." Here he is distancing himself from the top-down structure that sank Nupedia, an expert-led project that was launched side-by-side with Wikipedia but that was quickly eclipsed by its "amateur" sibling.

So we've come full circle to the source of the "quibbling." Who really did create Wikipedia?

It was Sanger who wrote the essay for kuro5hin that introduced Wikipedia. Some of the most vocal commenters were not impressed.

"Wikipedia is doomed," wrote one commenter. "Sorry but the idea of a free encyclopaedia sounds ridiculous," wrote another. Yet another pooh-poohed the whole idea as "re-inventing the wheel."

Harsh predictions -- and wrong ones, as it turns out.

The essay credited Sanger as "the editor-in-chief of Nupedia and chief instigator of Wikipedia." In the comments to the essay, Wales staunchly fended off all attacks on Nupedia and Wikipedia, calling the projects a joint venture and signing one comment as "Jimbo (founder of Nupedia)." Not once in those comments did he object to Sanger's crediting.

Now Wales insists that Wikipedia was his own sole creation. He chafes at Sanger's usual co-founder credit as "absurd," going so far as to tell the Sydney Morning Herald that Sanger was just one of twenty people working on the project.

Based largely on the kuro5hin essay, the media generally credit both Sanger and Wales as co-founders.

>From the beginning, Sanger has wanted a vetting and protection process for articles "that are up to a certain standard."

Wikipedia never provided the approval mechanism that he wanted. In Sanger's mind, Wikipedia -- despite its success -- remained just "one-half of the original design" that had expert-led Nupedia existing side-by-side with amateur-led Wikipedia.

The Citizendium is Sanger's effort to realize his whole vision in a single wiki.

SECTION III: PROBLEMS WITH WIKIPEDIA:

As the Citizendium tries to grow, Wikipedia continues to suffer vandalism. Last month, viewers of The Office swarmed Wikipedia's "Negotiation" entry when it was mentioned on the show's April 5 episode. Various fans, most of them anonymous, advised "withholding sex" and "throwing sharp objects" as negotiation tactics. At one point, the entire page contained only one sentence: "HOLY FARK, THE OFFICE RULES!"

The night before The Office, NBC's Brian Williams had lamented to a group of journalism students at New York University that his own Wikipedia entry had multiple errors and that much of today's explosion of Internet content is trivial, biased, or just plain wrong. After a lifetime of climbing journalism's career ladder, Williams said, he now has to compete with bloggers with little more than "an opinion, a modem and a bathrobe," comparing them to a prototypical Internet "Vinny" who "hasn't left [his] efficiency apartment in two years."

Even as notes from Williams's lecture were posted on the Web, Vinny-vandals remained hard at work on Wikipedia's "Negotiation" entry, inserting nuggets of black humor from The Office while others clamored to remove them. More than a hundred edits were made in the week after the telecast, and the entry was in partial lockdown for most of April.

These could not have been welcome developments for Wikipedia, where the Seigenthaler-JFK assassination hoax and comedian Sinbad's wiki-death and resurrection had made the site the target of much bad press and at least one satirical look-alike.

Such is the price Wikipedia pays for its policy of open access. "Don't be afraid to edit," Wikipedia proclaims; "anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold!" And indeed, changes to Wikipedia are continuous. Many of these are vandalism.

THEN THIS GOES INTO SECTION IV: PROBLEMS WITH WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia has suffered several very public missteps in the past year, including the Seigenthaler, Sinbad and Office affairs. Nicholas Carr, author of the RoughType blog, said he had "some sympathy for Sanger" in wanting a high-quality product but that "he's just adding rules that will turn potential contributors off."

One of those rules is the real-name policy: You have to identify yourself with your real name to write any content. Jérôme Delacroix, a member of the Citizendium's executive committee, said that this requirement makes it "likely that people will take more responsibility" for their content. Enforcement and verification of the real-name policy falls to the "constables."

Sarah Tuttle, a graduate student at Columbia University, is one of the fifteen current constables and has been with the Citizendium since the beginning of the project.

"I'm our head teaching assistant in astronomy here at Columbia," she said, "and we constantly struggle with the bad info of Wikipedia -- or even perfectly good info that students just accept because they Googled it."

Mark Glaser, author of the MediaShift blog sponsored by PBS, said that expert guidance is inevitable: "The hybrid of amateurs and pros is the future," he said.

The Citizendium, of course, is such a hybrid. Netscape has hired expert social bookmarkers as "navigators," sparking predictable controversy within its online community. And it should be mentioned that the project that developed this very article, Assignment Zero, functions in what founder and NYU professor Jay Rosen calls a "pro-am" model.

(Rosen also serves on the Wikimedia advisory board; while he offered feedback on this article, he did not edit it.)

SECTION IV: BUT CAN SANGER DELIVER/CAN CITIZENDIUM WORK?

Can Sanger deliver on his promise of a "reliable" online encyclopedia?

"I doubt it," Carr said. "Maybe it has a chance, but the odds are against it." Strictly as a practical matter, he said, Wikipedia is king of the hill at this moment. "That has a self-reinforcing effect that is hard for the Citizendium, or anything, to break."

Recent studies underscore Wikipedia's immense popularity. The Pew Internet and American Life project recently released a study citing two Internet research firms that both rank Wikipedia among the top ten Internet sites. Using Wikipedia, the study noted, is more popular than online shopping.

David Pennock, a principal research scientist at Yahoo!, called himself "a big fan and big consumer" of Wikipedia and worried that the Citizendium could fall victim to the "chicken-and-egg" conundrum: people want to contribute to something that's successful, but the Citizendium can succeed only after attracting enough people and contributions.

Sanger, however, is convinced he can attract the critical mass of contributors that his project needs. "We're already well on our way," Sanger said via e-mail. "I've got more active people now, I suspect, than Wikipedia had after five months. They're just working on fewer articles -- which isn't a bad thing."

Contributors and contributions: the Citizendium needs enough of both to survive. One college professor's Eduzendium, a new program to partner with doctoral programs and graduate seminars to let students get academic credit for Citizendium articles, may help Citizendium on both fronts.

Sorin Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue, proposed Eduzendium and is coordinating the project. Eduzendium "offers [students] the opportunity to take their work to another, more socially consequential level," he said. If Eduzendium works well at Purdue, Matei hopes to extend the program to other universities.

University of British Columbia zoology professor Rosemary Redfield is reserving judgment. She sees potential in Eduzendium, but only as an adjunct to an already successful Citizendium: "I like the idea a lot.... But most faculty teaching [graduate] seminars will be reluctant to take a chance on such a new venture."

Sanger has spent the last five months building his competing Citizendium, whose name is a shortening of "The Citizens' Compendium." The Citizendium was opened to the public on March 25 with 1,200 articles in progress, only nine of which were "approved." A random sampling of the unapproved articles revealed content that was generally inferior to what's available at Wikipedia, although head-to-head article comparisons are unfair to the nascent Citizendium -- for now.

A month after its public launch, the Citizendium contained less than 1,600 articles. The online Encyclopedia Britannica boasts 120,000 articles, while Wikipedia claims 1.7 million in English alone. Starting the Citizendium with fewer articles "isn't a bad thing," Sanger said, because the Citizendium values quality over quantity, but he bristles at suggestions that he can never catch up to Wikipedia.

"I don't know where this idea has come from that we don't plan to get to the raw volume of articles that Wikipedia claims," Sanger said. "We want to have millions more than that. Why not?"

Sanger is counting on a superior free product to eventually win the Internet surfer's loyalty. With subject-matter experts editing contributions and constables policing anti-social behavior, he said, the Citizendium will prove its worth to Internet users and search engines through its higher-quality articles.

"Wikipedia will still be served up before us for a long time, of course, but that doesn't mean we won't steadily rise in the rankings," Sanger said. "There were other websites that were ahead of Wikipedia, too, and it rose in the rankings for the same reason Citizendium will: we'll have the sort of information people want."

But Wikipedia's not standing still, Glaser said.

"My take on Wikipedia," he said, "is that they have tried to have more oversight on controversial subjects, which is a good thing. They will probably move toward a hybrid model where people move up the ladder and become overseers, or have paid editors help verify things."

Carr, too, noted that Wikipedia itself is starting to look more like Sanger's vision for the Citizendium.

"There's a kind of irony to what Sanger is doing," Carr said. "Wikipedia still lives in the Web 2.0 rhetorical glow, but I don't believe that that's any longer an accurate description." The most-viewed articles are often locked down, he said, but less popular entries get less scrutiny and are still free to edit, leaving them open to vandalism.

On March 12, as the Sinbad debacle hit the press, Alex Beam of the Boston Globe weighed in with a column decrying vandalism to his own entry. An anonymous Canadian user had inserted charges that he was biased against Canada. These charges lasted for just under three weeks on Wikipedia itself, but they live on at other sites such as Answers.com's Alex Beam entry, which is a copy of his older Wikipedia entry.

"There is no wisdom in crowds," Beam wrote in his column. "The crowd drinks Coke.... The crowd accepts authority unquestioningly, especially when it's dressed up as a 'cool' new information source."

In a subsequent interview, Beam disclaimed specific expertise on the subject, but underscored his continued skepticism. In this he is not alone. Even James Surowiecki, who coined the buzzword-du-jour with his book The Wisdom of Crowds, notes that such collective wisdom has limits. Crowds that are ill-informed, homogeneous or overcentralized are potential targets for becoming the evil twin of a crowd: a mob.

Surowiecki did not respond to requests for an interview for this article, but in a Q&A with Forbes, he said: "Well, some crowds deserve a bad rap. Think of a mob, or investors during a stock market bubble. But I think we confuse these extremes... with how groups normally work. Under the right circumstances groups are remarkably smart, smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them. I also think that there is a bias against the masses, so to speak, and an assumption that only people we recognize as experts should have a say in tough decisions."

There's no way to know how well Wikipedia's user base matches Surowiecki's ideal crowd. Wikipedia itself warns that one should "be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible".

Seth Finkelstein, a Guardian columnist and winner of the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that Wikipedia "tends to select for simple, popular, and controversial aspects."

For a reporter on a short deadline or a student beginning a research project, Wikipedia can provide a tempting starting point for most any imaginable subject, but Finkelstein notes with concern that mainstream news organizations are ignoring Wikipedia's own warnings and citing it as a primary source.

Even New York Times columnist John Tierney cited Wikipedia on his Times blog just hours before the Office viewers trampled the "Negotiation" entry.

And so the world is turned upside down: the gatekeepers now look to the masses, as personified by Wikipedia, for information. Whether the Citizendium can supplant Wikipedia in this role is anyone's guess.