User:Daniel Mietchen/Sandbox/Open Knowledge Conference 2010

Background

This document shall help the drafting of a "full paper" (meaning 15 min of talk on the basis of "5-10 pages describing novel strategies, tools, services or best-practices related to open knowledge") for the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010. Submission deadline for the abstract: Jan 31, 2010. Our abstract has been accepted. Feel free to edit as you see fit. For discussion, please use this forum thread.

Deadline for submission of full paper: March 31, 2010.

The presentation will be given by Tom Morris, but everyone is invited to chime in on the drafting. It is intended to reuse much of this material for improving our Citizendium entry.

Technical details

All authors of OKCon papers:

• Can submit a camera ready version of the paper in LNCS style [1] for publication in the online proceedings e.g. till March 31st, to the proceedings editor: Claudia Muller-Birn <clmb@cs.cmu.edu>

[1] http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0%20LNCS%20Style

Please also note there is no page restriction in place on your papers for this process.

The final typesetting in LaTeX will be done by Daniel Mietchen.

Title

Public and experts working together: an experiment in structuring (disseminating?) knowledge

Alternative: Structuring knowledge for and with both the public and experts

Abstract

The abstract should consist of no more than 200 words.

There is much debate on how public participation and expertise can be brought together in collaborative knowledge environments. One of the experiments addressing the issue directly is the Citizendium. In seeking to harvest the strengths (and avoiding the major pitfalls) of both user-generated wiki projects and traditional expert-approved reference works, it is an organically-growing wiki to which anybody can contribute using their real names, while those with specific expertise are given a special role in assessing the quality of content. Upon fulfillment of a set of criteria like factual and linguistic accuracy, lack of bias, and readability by non-specialists, these entries are forked into two versions: a stable (and thus citable) approved "cluster" (an article with subpages providing supplementary information) and a draft version, the latter to allow for further development and updates. We provide an overview of how the Citizendium is structured and what it offers to the open knowledge communities, particularly to those engaged in education and research. Special attention will be paid to the structures and processes put in place to provide for transparent governance, to encourage collaboration, to resolve disputes in a civil manner and by taking into account expert opinions, and to facilitate navigation of the site and contextualization of its contents.

Key issues

This section is auxiliary to the drafting process and will be deleted when the draft is nearing completion. Let's concentrate on the following areas from the call for proposals:

  •   Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating open knowledge
  •   Open educational tools and resources
  •   Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models

hence:

• Citizendium as

  • a platform for creating, sharing, curating and navigating open knowledge
  • an Open educational tool and resource
  • an open knowledge model supporting professional workflows
  • a democratic and meritocratic community

Introduction

Just imagine you had a time slider and could watch the history of knowledge on tool making, cooking, clothing, learning, general relativity, plate tectonics, self-replication, or cell division unfold from the earliest ideas of their earliest proponents (and opponents) onwards up to now.

"The Citizendium is a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and update knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free. It is created by volunteers — henceforth Citizens — who contribute under their real names and agree to a social covenant centered around trust." - such starts the charter that the project participants are currently drafting. In this contribution, we intend to provide an overview on how the project is structured and what it offers to the open knowledge communities, particularly to those engaged in education and research.

The Citizendium model: Real names, stable versions and contextualization

Basic overview about the main differentiators to other Open Knowledge projects, and why they were introduced.

Many of those involved with the Citizendium believe that it is possible to go much further than existing open knowledge projects have gone - to be a bridge between existing scientific and academic communities and the new online communities. The founder of the Citizendium, Larry Sanger, was the co-founder of Wikipedia. The Citizendium differs in a number of important ways from Wikipedia and other similar projects.

The first of these is an insistence on real names. Every participant in the Citizendium project must be signed up using their real name - that is, the name they have on their passport or driving licence or their gas bill. This will exclude a number of legitimate contributors who prefer to remain anonymous. The real name policy gives participants accountability.

The second is the involvement of experts. Some critics of the project have come up with names for this like "credentialism", but it rests on a common sense belief that some people do know more than others: it is sometimes the case that the thirteen-year-old kid in Nebraska does know more than the physics professor. But most of the time it is not the case. The role the experts have is not that of a supreme leader, allowed to exercise his will on the populace - it is much more of a guiding role. We use the analogy of a village elder wandering around the busy marketplace who can resolve disputes and to whom people pay some deference due to his maturity, wisdom and expertise. Wikipedia rejects "credentialism" in much the same way that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) does. David Clark summarised the IETF process thusly: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Wikipedia obviously doesn't have running code to worry about: in an open source project, or an IETF standardisation project, one can decide a great many of the disputes with reference to the compiler. If the code doesn't compile, think again. For rough consensus to happen, one needs to get the people together who have some clear aim in mind: getting two different servers to talk to one another. The rough consensus required for producing an encyclopedia article is different - it should attempt to put forward the truth, and people disagree on that. It is difficult to get "rough consensus, running code" when two parties are working on completely different epistemological standards. At this point, one needs the wisdom of Solomon, a grown-up who will come and clear up the mess and sort it all out. In other words, you need a government of sorts created by something like a Hobbesian social contract.

Citizendium has an evolving, but hopefully soon-to-be clearly defined governance process - currently, a Charter is being drafted by an elected group of writers that will allow for democratic governance and oversight. The broad outline is this: we will have a democratically elected Editorial Council which will deal with content policy and resolving disputes regarding content, and we will also have a Management Committee who are responsible for anything not related to content. The Management Committee appoint Constables who uphold community policy. Disputes with the Constables can be brought to an Ombudsman selected by the Editorial Council and Management Committee. The charter is still to be ratified by editors. One of the reasons we have this is that although there is a cost to having bureaucracy and democracy, the benefits of having an open governance process outweigh the costs. We have a real problem when governments of real-life communities are controlled by shadowy cabals who invoke byzantine legal codes - all the same problems would seem to apply to online communities. With a Wikipedia article, the debate seems to never be the content itself, but a reified argument about three-letter acronyms (AfDs, NPOV, CSD, ArbCom, OR etc.). There is always a challenge in any knowledge-based community in attempting to reconcile a fair and democratic process with a meritocratic respect for expertise. There are no easy answers - if we go too far towards bureaucracy, we risk creating a system where management is separated from the actual day-to-day writing of the site, while if we attempt to let the site 'manage itself', we risk creating a rather conservative mob rule that doesn't afford due process to interested outsiders. A more traditional management structure, combined with real names and civility, should help those outside of the online community - the many experts in real life who work in universities, in business and in public life - be able to participate. Hopefully, if we get the governance decisions right, we can also not get in the way of the people who engage on hobbyist terms with the Citizendium.

An important part of the governance process is collaboration with those outside of the Citizendium. We have a long-standing project called Eduzendium, which allows for educators in higher education to work on articles as part of a course. We have most recently had politics students from the Illinois State University work on articles on pressure groups in American public life, as well as medical students from Edinburgh, biologists from City University of New York and the University of Colorado at Boulder, finance students from Temple University and others. These courses reserve a batch of articles usually for one semester, assign each article to one or more students. The course leader can either reserve the articles for just the group to work on, or they can work on them alongside editors on the site.

The differences described so far have been around governance, but the policy the Citizendium uses for governance is only part of what makes it different from other collaborative knowledge projects: the content policy differences are more significant. Citizendium attempts to structure knowledge in a different way. Each article on Citizendium can make comprehensive use of Subpages. All pages are encouraged to have a short definition (around 30 words or 150 characters) which define or describe the subject of the page. They are also encouraged to have a comprehensive Related Articles subpage, which pulls in the definitions from the pages that it links to. If one looks at the article on 'Biology', one can see the parent topics of biology (science), the subtopics - subdisciplines of biology like zoology, genetics and biochemistry, articles on the history of biology and techniques used by biologists - and finally other related topics, including material on the life cycle, the various biochemical substances like DNA and proteins, the components of the cell, and other specialised language. This Related Articles page gives a pretty comprehensive contextual introduction to what biology is all about, and is structured by the authors of the article in a way that the category system used on Wikipedia isn't. Wikipedia has something similar with some of the sub-boxes you find at the end of articles, but we feel that the Related Articles subpage system allows for more detail, and is comprehensive rather than ad-hoc.

Each article can also have a comprehensive, categorised bibliography with annotations, pointing to books and journal articles on the subject. For scientific and academic topics, we attempt to write the list in a way so as to be useful both to a novice to the subject and to students and experts: much like a good academic reading list (e.g. London Philosophy Study Guide). Here, the expert guidance is important. Critics of Citizendium seem to think that the respect for experts is solely because of their knowledge of facts - as if whether or not the articles are good is dependent on whether or not the facts are good. This is only part of the reasoning: the experts correct factual mistakes, but they also help to guide how the structure of the subpages goes. The experts bring facts, but we also hope they bring with them wisdom gathered from extended in-depth knowledge of their subject matter.

The External Links subpage provides something similar to the Bibliography page but for web resources - pointing to relevant organizations, educational resources and other resources. For articles about authors, we allow for a 'Works' subpage to list the person's written works. For musicians and musical groups, a discography subpage can be added; for actors, producers and directors of film and television, a filmography subpage can be added. For some topics, we allow for a Timelines subpage to be added where a comprehensive timeline or multiple timelines about the topic can be presented (we have one, for instance, on the article on Tony Blair). The Catalogs Subpages exist to contain lists or tables of information much like that found in almanacs. Articles on food and cuisine can have a Recipes subpage.

We have Subpages to contain extra images, as well as audio and video resources, and for programming-related articles, to contain code samples and tutorials (for example, the article on Perl - also, some mathematical articles will contain a machine-readable implementation on the Code Subpage). The Subpages system can also contain alternative presentations of the topic at a variety of different levels - 'Advanced' Subpages can contain a version more suited to experts in the field, while 'Student Level' provides one more suited to children. A 'Debate Guide' Subpage can be created to provide an outline of all the arguments on a disputed topic. The Citizendium can also host 'Signed Articles', which are placed in a subpage alongside the main article. A Signed Article is an article on the topic described by a recognised expert in the field, but can express opinions and biases in a way that the main article ought not to.

Subpages are one way that the Citizendium is attempting to go beyond simply what is provided in an encyclopaedia and to engage with related forms of knowledge. Marx wrote that "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it". Traditional encyclopaedias attempt to reflect the world, but we are attempting to go further. The open science movement - which has formed around the combination of providing open access to journal articles, making scientific data more openly available in raw forms, using and sharing open source software and experimenting with some of the new techniques appearing from the community that is formed under the 'Web 2.0' banner - is exploring the edge of what is now possible for scientists to do to create new knowledge. Some of the electronic engagements by academics has been for actual research benefit, some has just been PR for universities - doing podcasts to sound 'relevant'. The Citizendium model, while a little bit more traditional than some of the open science community, is willing to try a variety of new things. Wikipedia has produced a pretty good encyclopedia - the challenge is to see if we can go further and produce a citizens' compendium of structured and comprehensive knowledge

There are still a number of challenges:

Open knowledge

• a collaborative platform for creating, sharing, curating and navigating open knowledge

Open education

• an Open educational tool and resource

Open science

1. an open knowledge model supporting professional workflows
2. For scholarly uses, a detailed outline can be found in this blog post.

Open governance

• a democratic and meritocratic community

Open questions

• how to motivate registered users to contribute
• how to motivate more users to register
• how to allow feedback by non-registered users
• how to codify the policies (and especially the subpages system) into a MediaWiki extension
• financial perspectives

Open perspectives

• contextualization
• potential for mutually beneficial partnerships with projects at similar wavelengths, e.g. AcaWiki for references, OpenWetWare for primary research, Open Access publishers as possible content providers

References

Just links will do fine for the time being - Wiki and LaTeX are not compatible in this regard.

• Shirky and Sanger, or the costs of crowdsourcing

Contains a number of critical remarks on CZ that may be worth addressing.

Summary in the Wikipedia signpost

• RationalWiki article on Citizendium

Further notes

• Speaker bio:

Tom Morris is a postgraduate philosophy student and programmer and has been actively involved as an author in the Citizendium project since October 2007.

• Just some suggestions for consideration from Aleta, not intended to be cast in stone. Question: what do you mean by an 'organically-growing wiki' (fifth line in abstract)? Doesn't resonate with me, can you say it in a different way?

• There is a talk given by Chris Day on Citizendium in mid-2008 at this workshop: video. His slides may serve as the basis for Tom's on this occasion (anyone can edit them)

• Initial reactions:
• I suppose an inorganically growing wiki would use silicon...and it does. Some things cast in stone, indeed, would have high silicon content. It is, perhaps, a metaphor to avoid.
• Not knowing much about Rationalwiki, yes, the article raises legitimate questions about some areas, such as healing arts. I would hope, however, that the observations on herding cats display some inability or unwillingness to recognize humor, and, indeed, informal analysis of idioms. It does seem needlessly antagonistic.
• Real name policy needs, I think, to be in a broader perspective than comparison to Wikipedia. Netnews/USENET, for example, started declining in utility once AOL made public, anonymous access possible (1988 or thereabouts). Previously, while there was no real name policy, to get access, one had to be affiliated with a research or academic group, or have someone there willing to give you an account: a reputation factor.
• Reputation factors, also called karma systems, have been used in blogs, and, I believe, are quite appropriate for Wikis. I believe the first widespread use was at the Well. There is a tension between name verification and reputation.
• Contextualization is, I believe, one of the great opportunities, but it's fair to say that it's experimental. Nevertheless, it would be worth showing a decent Related Articles page, and perhaps compare-and-contrast it with Semantic Web techniques. Our subpages have a steep learning curve, but I wonder if any structured knowledge does not.

Howard C. Berkowitz 22:25, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

For Linked Data, see this discussion, for example. --Daniel Mietchen 23:17, 24 March 2010 (UTC)