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 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 a wiki to which anybody can contribute using their real names, while those with speci c expertise are given a special role in assessing the quality of content. Upon ful llment of a set of criteria like factual and linguistic accuracy, lack of bias, and readability by nonspecialists, 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 Citizendium is structured and what it o ers 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.
Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It's just a highly ine cient one { the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and signi cant e ort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper.
John Wilbanks [
There are many ways to structure knowledge, including collaborative arrangements of digital documents. Only a limited number of the latter ones have so far been employed on a larger scale. Amongst them are wikis { online platforms which allow the aggregation, interlinking and updation of diverse sets of knowledge in an Open Access manner, i.e. with no costs to the reader.
As implied by the introductory quote, it is probably fair to say that turning science (or any system of knowledge production, for that matter) into a wiki (or a set of interlinked collaborative platforms) would make research, teaching and outreach much more transparent, less prone to hype, and more e cient. Just imagine you had a time slider and could watch the history of research on general relativity, plate tectonics, self-replication, or cell division unfold from the earliest ideas of their earliest proponents (and opponents) onwards up to you, your colleagues, and those with whom you compete for grants. So why don't we do it?
Traditionally, given the scope of a particular journal, knowledge about specialist terms (which may describe completely non-congruent concepts in di erent elds), methodologies, notations, mainstream opinions, trends, or major controversies could reasonably be expected to be widespread amongst the audience, which reduced the need to redundantly say and then repeat the same things all over again and again (in cross-disciplinary environments, there is a higher demand for proper disambiguation of the various meanings of a term). Nonetheless, redundancy is still quite visible in journal articles, especially in the introduction, methods, and discussion sections and the abstracts, often in a way characteristic of the authors (such that services like eTBLAST and JANE can make quali ed guesses on authors of a particular piece of text, with good results if some of the authors have a lot of papers in the respective database, mainly PubMed, and if they have not changed their individual research scope too often in between).
A manuscript well-adapted to the scope of one particular journal is often not very intelligible to someone outside its intended audience, which hampers cross-fertilization with other research elds (we will get back to this below). When using paper as the sole medium of communication there is not much to be done about this limitation. Indeed, we have become so used to it that some do not perceive it as a limitation at all. Similar thoughts apply to manuscript formatting. However, the times when paper alone reigned over scholarly communication have certainly passed, and wiki-like platforms provide for simple and e cient means of storing information, updating it and embedding it into a wider context.
Cross- eld fertilization, for example, is crucial with respect to interdisciplinary research projects, digital libraries and multi-journal (or indeed crossdisciplinary) bibliographic search engines (e.g. Google Scholar), since these dramatically increase the likelihood of, say, a biologist stumbling upon a not primarily biological source relevant to her research (think shape quanti cation or growth curves, for instance). What options do we have to systematically integrate such cross-disciplinary hidden treasures with the traditional intra-disciplinary background knowledge and with new insights resulting from research?
The by now classical example of a wiki environment are the Wikipedias, a
set of interlinked wikis in multiple languages where basically anyone can edit
any page, regardless of subject matter expertise or command of the respective
language. As a consequence of this openness, the larger Wikipedias have a serious
problem with vandalism: take an article of your choice and look at its history
page for reverts - most of them will be about neutralizing subtle or blunt forms
of destructive edits that do nothing to improve the quality of the articles, but
may reduce it considerably. Few of these malicious edits persist for long [
Peer review is indeed a central aspect of scholarly communication, as it paves the way towards the reproducibility that forms one of the foundations of modern science. Yet we know of no compelling reason to believe that it works better before than after the content concerned has been made public (doing it beforehand was just a practical decision in times when journal space was measured in paper pages), while emerging movements like Open Notebook Science { where claims are linked directly to the underlying data that are being made public as they arise { represent an experiment in this direction whose initial results look promising and call into question Wikipedia's "no original research" as a valid principle for generating encyclopaedic content.
Although quite prominent at the moment, the Wikipedias are not the only
wikis around, and amongst the more scholarly inclined alternatives, there are
even a number of wiki-based journals, though usually with a very narrow scope
and/or a low number of articles. On the other hand, Scholarpedia (which has
classical peer review and an ISSN and may thus be counted as a wiki journal, too
[
Despite the above-mentioned tensions between public participation and expertise
in the collaborative structuring of knowledge, it is not unreasonable to expect
that these can be overcome by suitably designed public knowledge environments,
much like Citizen Science projects involve the public in the generation of
scienti c data. One approach at such a design is represented by Citizendium. The
founder of Citizendium { Larry Sanger { is the co-founder of Wikipedia. The
two projects share the common goal of providing free knowledge to the
public, they are based on variants of the same software platform, and they use the
same Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike license [
The rst of these is simply an insistence on real names. While unusual from a Wikipedia perspective, this is custom in professional environments, including traditional academic publishing and some of the above-mentioned wikis, e.g. Scholarpedia and Encyclopedia of Earth. It certainly excludes a number of legitimate contributors who prefer to remain anonymous but otherwise gives participants accountability and allows to bring in external reputation to the project. 2.2
To compose and develop articles and to embed them in the multimedial context
of a digital knowledge environment, expert guidance is important. Of course,
many experts contribute to Wikipedia, and the Wikipedias in turn have long
started to actively seek out expert involvement, yet the possibility to see their
edits overturned by anonymous users that may lack even the most basic
education in that eld keeps professionals away from spending their precious time on
such a project. The Citizendium approach of verifying expertise takes a di erent
approach { sometimes termed "credentialism" { that 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, at least when matters of physics are concerned, this
is not the case. The role the experts have at Citizendium is not, as frequently
stated in external comments, that of a supreme leader who is allowed to exercise
his will on the populace. On the contrary, it is much more about guiding. We
use the analogy of a village elder wandering around the busy marketplace [
The respect for experts because of their knowledge of facts is only part of the reasoning: the experts point out and correct factual mistakes, but they also help to guide the structuring of content within an article and by means of the subpages. The experts bring with them the experience and knowledge of years of in-depth involvement with their subject matter, and the project is designed to make best use of this precious resource, while still allowing everyone to participate in the process. Of course, experts are likewise free to bring in content, be it within their specialty or in other areas, where others take over the guiding role. 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 eld, but can express opinions and biases in a way that the main article ought not to. 2.3
Citizendium attempts to structure knowledge in a di erent way. Each article
on Citizendium can make comprehensive use of Subpages, i.e. pages providing
additional information that are subordinate to an article's page. Some of these {
e.g. the Sculptures subpage in Fig. 1 { are similar to but more exible than the
supplementary online materials now being published routinely along scholarly
articles. Two subpages types are di erent, with keywords and running title being
Fig. 2. Top: Screenshot of the Related Articles subpage from the [[Biology]] cluster
(which is approved) while logged in. It shows the Parent topics and the rst section
of the Subtopics { subdisciplines. For each related article, there is a short de nition
or description of the topic, and a link to its Related Articles subpage (hidden behind
the [r] ), as well as instructions on mouseover and a Table of Content. Bottom:
Related Articles subpage from the [[Open Knowledge Conference]] cluster (while logged
out) which has not yet been converted to subpage style but can already be used for
structuring information related to the topic. In principle, on could also think of adding
[[Open Knowledge Conference 2010]] as a subtopic and using this article for conference
blogging. However, the current MediaWiki software cannot handle parallel editing by
multiple users, though tools like Etherpad [
Subpages (a further usage example is in (cf. Fig. 3) are one way in which
Citizendium is attempting to go beyond what is provided in either traditional
paper-based encyclopaedias or by Wikipedia: to engage with context, with
related forms of knowledge, and to emancipate knowledge from the page format
to which it was con ned in the print era. Marx wrote that "Philosophers have
hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it"
[
Citizendium has an evolving, but hopefully soon-to-be clearly de ned governance process - a Charter is in the process of 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, responsible for anything not related to content. The Management Committee appoint Constables who uphold community policy regarding behaviour. Disputes with the Constables can be brought to an Ombudsman selected by the Editorial Council and Management Committee. At the time of writing, the charter is still to be rati ed by the community. One of the reasons we have this is that although there is a cost to having bureaucracy and democracy, the bene ts 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 shift very quickly from the truth value or relevance of the content itself into often ritualized arguments about 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 a ord 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 - to participate on an equal footing. 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 Citizendium. 2.5
An important part of the governance process is collaboration with partners external to the Citizendium. One of our initiatives { called Eduzendium { provides for educators in higher education to assign work on wiki 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, nance students from Temple University and others. These courses reserve a batch of articles for the duration of the course, and assign each article to one or more students. The course instructor can reserve the articles for just the group of students enrolled in the course, or invite the wider Citizendium community to participate. Much of the formatting is achieved via course-speci c templates that can be generated semi-automatically by the instructor and applied throughout the course pages, so that course participants can concentrate on content. 3
The project is still young, resulting in a number of challenges and opportunities. In many elds, Citizendium does not meet our own standards { we do not have a full range of expert editors. Larry Sanger once envisioned that Citizendium could reach 100,000 articles by 2012. This would, on average, require about 150 new articles a day to reach; the current level is around 15. It is not obvious how the necessary shift from linear to exponential growth can be achieved.
Motivating both editors and authors to take part in both writing and approving of content remains a di cult challenge { most experts have very little time to o er for projects that do not contribute to the metrics according to which their performance is evaluated, and others shy away from contributing under their real name and in the presence of experts. Another problem is that the initial structure of the community, and the nature of its interaction with Wikipedia, has led to a few articles on popular pseudoscienti c topics which are hard to handle from an editorial perspective because those willing to invest their time on the topics are usually heavily biased in their approach, and most of those capable of evidence-based comment prefer not to contribute to these topics.
The project also needs to allow for more feedback by non-registered readers,
without harming the currently very collegial atmosphere that is to a large extent
due to the real-name policy and the respect for expertise. We may need to
explore how to codify our core policies and collaboration model as a possible
MediaWiki extension, from which other wikis could possibly bene t { online,
"code is law" [
Citizendium is open for partnerships with other open science and online
knowledge communities and projects. Possible candidate projects would include, for
instance, AcaWiki [