Wikis and the U Student
Clancy and I are both quoted in a Minnesota Daily article on the launch of Citizendium and wiki use at UMN*.
My point was pretty simple: While Citizendium is indeed the long-predicted fork of Wikipedia, I don’t think it necessarily dilutes Wikipedia’s value or core following. The hardcore Wikipedians who handle the primary production and management of the project spend a fair amount of their personal time on this because they are dedicated to the project’s core values: open access, open source, rhizomatic growth, and egalitarianism. They self-select and often describe their increased participation as a transformative process (see Bryant, et al, “Becoming Wikipedian”). Citizendium’s ethics of expert direction will demand development of a different sort of community with a different ethos and value set. And I suspect that the built-in requirements of expert approval and direction will slow production considerably, much like the problems that plagued Nupedia. (One would think it will still run faster than that project did, though, since Citizendium doesn’t require a multi-tier review process.)
The best possible result would be that the two projects would complement each other, giving the Internets two rich, free, community-driven encyclopedic resources. Given the players involved, that’s probably rather optimistic — Sanger has not been shy in the past few years about voicing his unhappiness with the governance rules and general quality of Wikipedia.
So we’ll sit back and wait. No matter what happens, this will be something that digital text researchers will be talking about for awhile to come.
* I’m never sure quite how to think of the Daily. On the one hand, it’s the University newspaper. On the other, it’s one of the largest university papers in the country, and the fifth largest in Minnesota. And they quoted me more accurately that some larger venues.