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Citizendium Goes With Creative Commons

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Submitted by Jim Brown on December 22, 2007 - 3:28pm.

Citizendium has finally picked a license - they've gone with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is good news. Until now, Citizendium was in a big holding pattern trying to figure out how it was going to license it's work. Citizendium articles can now be circulated much like Wikipedia articles are.

So, is the Citizendium a "commons." This makes it more difficult to argue that it isn't a commons (I am making this argument in the chapter that I'm currently working on). However, Citizendium is still quite different from Wikipedia - I'm just going to have to articulate those differences very carefully.

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Obviously...
Submitted by Larry Sanger (not verified) on December 22, 2007 - 7:44pm.

...the Citizendium is a commons. Jim, don't embarrass yourself too badly in that chapter. I mean, if you made part of your argument that CZ is not a commons rest on the fact that we hadn't made up our mind about the license, your argument was very weak indeed. I would encourage you, if you're going to write about it, actually to study what happens on the website, instead of doing what so many academics do, namely reason a priori about what it must be like, based on your abstract preconceptions.

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Certainly. Citizendium is a commons.
Submitted by Jim Brown on December 22, 2007 - 11:16pm.

Certainly, yes. Citizendium is a commons, but it's a different kind of commons - one that bleeds into the realm of "property." That is, while Citizendium does not allow any one person to determine ownership, it does deal with property differently. The move to attach particular writings to particular people treats intellectual property differently. This isn't wrong, it's just different. I would say the same about Wikipedia. Their choice to allow anonymous edits isn't necessarily wrong (There are certainly problems with such a policy, but it has also allowed the the text to become what it is.)

The chapter is very much in the early stages, but if there's a continuum with "property" on one side and "commons" on the other - I would (and will) argue that Wikipedia and Citizendium are at different points on that continuum.

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"The atoms, as their own weight bears them down plumb through the void, at scarce determined times, in scarce determined places, from their course decline a little- call it, so to speak, mere changed trend. For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne'er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught."

-Lucretius, Of The Nature of Things

About Me

My name is Jim Brown and I'm a Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric at the University of Texas. I teach courses in Rhetoric, Literature, and New Media. This blog mostly focuses on my academic work, but you'll also find occasional posts about music or baseball. I also maintain two other blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings by viewing this RSS feed. I'm a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. This lets you know that I'm kind of a masochist and explains the name of my dog.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.