Interview notes with David Pennock, PhD, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research

Background info: http://research.yahoo.com/~pennockd

The beginning of the interview centered on his background and current work in prediction markets. He noted that prediction markets have been built using both real money and fake money and that "surprisingly, the play-money are just as accurate." This was primarily in the sports domain.

He offered a link on current work: http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/ - this is a fantasy (fake-money) prediction market for techie stuff.

He characterized himself as "definitely a big fan and big consumer" of Wikipedia content, and had made one or two edits himself using his own name. Wikipedia's open-editing policy "is a good idea," he said. "The one thing is that ideally, contributors should not be anonymous."

In work is a project called Yootopia!, also related to prediction markets.

As far as Citizendium, Pennock thought it was at risk for the "chicken-and-egg" problem -- people want to contribute to something that's successful, but that something can't be considered successful until it has enough contributed content.