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.

Yesterday I wondered what Larry Sanger - co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Citizendium - thought about Google's new "Knol" project. Well, he's done an interview about it. I've only skimmed it, but here are the main problems that Sanger sees with this project:

There are a few problems.

First, quality. It looks to me as if Knol is a high-level attempt to do what many others have done. Countless websites already exist that invite signed essays and information (remember h2g2.com?) and other content for public rating. Time will tell, but Knol will probably resemble other such websites, and have a huge amount of mediocre content, with a little excellent content mixed in. The concept does not sound like a model that would attract many genuine experts. I say that because the notion that anyone may write a “knol” and be compared and ranked by “the crowd” — not by expert peers — is apt to attract relatively little notice from experts who are very careful about where they publish. Still, other Web companies have had reasonably good success making money with such Web services, and Google might make a lot of money with theirs.

I've been kind of (not kind of...I've been struggling) with how to ground the dissertation chapter I'm currently working on. It's about how Wikipedia refigures intellectual property. This, in itself, is not a new insight. However, I'm hoping I can open up some new questions by bringing a Levinasian/Derridan ethics to conversations about intellectual property. The general thrust of the argument:

Wikipedia offers a kind of hospitality that a print encyclopedia does not; This hospitality means that it's difficult for anyone to claim ownership over the text (Wikipedia is a commons); A textual commons implicitly (or, possibly, explicitly) recognizes the primacy of the Other in any writing situation. That is, it recognizes that I am not the source of my text and that I cannot lay claim to it. It is a citation of previous texts, and it will be taken up by others and used in different ways. The origin of "my" text is in now way "me."

Now, I'm starting to think that a way to ground this theoretical discussion is in a comparison of Wikipedi and Larry Sanger's Citizendium project. Citizendium requires users to "fess up" and give their real names - no pseudonyms. One way that Citizendium sets itself apart from Wikipedia is by calling itself "Wikipedia for grown-ups":

Irony: when I google the word "Citizendium" - the new "more authoritative" Internet encyclopedia - the Wikipedia article for Citizendium is the first link on my list. The article is extensive: it has 37 footnotes.

Citizendium founder (and Wikipedia co-founder) Larry Sanger probably isn't surprised by this. In fact, he mentions in a recent interview that Citizendium is not meant to replace Wikipedia:

"The world needs something in addition to Wikipedia. The world needs a better, more reliable free encyclopedia. There is little chance that Wikipedia is going to change the policies that I think are responsible for its lack of authoritativeness."

It's going to be really interesting to watch how this plays out. I'm not sure if Citizendium will get off the ground or not. I'm assuming Sanger has learned some lessons from the failure of Nupedia (the project that preceded Wikipedia), but it's going to take a massive effort to put something out there that draws a great deal of traffic. The press attention can't hurt - Sanger has done a great job of getting the word out.

Meanwhile, Conservapedia is up to 6300 articles. I clicked on the Samuel Morse article to see what kind of stuff they've got over there. Here's the article:

(1791-1872) revolutionized communications by inventing the telegraph and Morse Code. He was also an outstanding portrait artist who founded the National Academy of Design. He was a graduate from Yale College in 1810.

The son of a pastor, Morse built the first first telegraph lines between Baltimore and the U.S. Supreme Court chamber in Washington, D.C. His first message over these lines in 1844 was from the Bible, Numbers 23:23: "What hath God Wrought!"

Samuel F.B. Morse wrote a few years before his death:[1]

"The nearer I approach to the end of my pilgrimage, the clearer is the evidence of the divine origin of the Bible, the grandeur and sublimity of God's remedy for fallen man are more appreciated, and the future is illumined with hope and joy."

[edit] References

1. ↑ http://www.amerisearch.net/index.php?date=2004-04-02&view=View

All but this last quotation are included in the Wikipedia entry for Morse, albeit in a different form. For instance, Wikipedia does not mention that Morse's famous first transmission was from Numbers 23:23. The frustrating thing about Conservapedia is that it seems to be less about a "conservative" source of information and much more about reading religion back into history.

CmdrTaco at Slashdot writes of Citizendium. S/he says that Citizendium could become what "Wikipedia almost was":

The main difference is that Citizendium articles, after initially being built up through the same collaborative process that Wikipedia uses, will go into an editor-approved stage, at which point an editor (publicly identifiable on the article's history page) signs off on the accuracy of the article, and further edits also have to be approved by an editor.