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One of the cofounders of Wikipedia says there are "serious and endemic problems" in the Wikipedia model, and that's why he founded Citizendium.
Sanger was laid off from Wikipedia back in 2002, and soon stopped all active involvement with the project. He returned to teaching philosophy and playing the fiddle, and he dabbled with ideas for future open content projects, including one that approximated the Citizendium. And then John Seigenthaler called him, looking for answers.
"When Seigenthaler called, I was already resigned to the necessity of making a competitor to Wikipedia," Sanger says. "The effect of Seigenthaler's call was to make me feel to some extent personally responsible for the injustice that Wikipedia was causing, which made my motivation only stronger. When after six to nine months I saw that Wikipedia wasn't going to make any significant changes, it became clear that it was on me to organize a better alternative, if I could."
In September 2006, Sanger issued his manifesto, a document called "Toward a Compendium of Knowledge." In it, he laid out the "serious and endemic problems" that he saw in the Wikipedia model:
- The community does not enforce its own rules effectively or consistently
- Widespread anonymity has a problem—it's attractive to people who want to cause trouble, undermine the project, or simply troll
- The community has developed an insularity that makes it difficult for people who are not already part of the community to get on board
- The "arguably dysfunctional community" is not attractive to traditional experts such as academics
Sanger had hoped that Wikipedia would clean up its act, and he was all but certain that the encyclopedia would eventually put an expert review system in place. After Seigenthaler's call, Sanger found the Wikipedia community's response "completely unacceptable" and concluded that they were no longer able to change in important ways.
It's interesting to see many of my own doubts about Wikipedia echoed by one of its founders. Expert oversight and lack of anonymity ... wow, what a concept, huh? One of the worst problems I see in Wikipedia right now is that an "editor" who is miffed about an article for some reason will just delete it. It's not an encyclopedia; it's a giant communal sandbox, and if you dig around in it too much, you run the risk of finding buried poo.
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a) Saying that academic minded people are at all at odds with "dysfunctional communities" is kinda funny. Academics wouldn't recognize a functional community even if their petty politically infested ivory towers fell over on one. The only complaint academics can make, on this particular note, about wikipedia is "this particular dysfunctional community isn't swayed by their self-important pretentious posturing". The alternative would not be a "functional community that satisfies academic minds". It would be a "community of a different, academically minded, dysfunction." (that isn't to say that every, or even most, individuals within an academic community are self-important, pretentious, etc., but that I have yet to observe an academic community that, as a whole, doesn't display those qualities to such an extent that they are dominated by them)
b) it's kind of my observation that any significantly "open" community is going to have to deal with some degree of dysfunctionality. My primary anecdote about Cygnus, for example, is that while I like heterogeneous computing models, there comes a point where you're talking about a dysfunctionally heterogeneous environment. Cygnus was (by necessity) one of those. Having to satisfy every platform, including half-baked ones that aren't yet finished by the vendor, leads down that path.
c) any open community has to struggle with the balances between polar opposites of rigid structure vs dysfunctional flexibility. If you're going to allow anything/anyone in, without restriction, then you're going to have a dysfunctional environment. If you're not going to allow anything/anyone in, then you're not going to have an open community, you're going to omit certain content (and some of it will be valuable content that just doesn't fit your chosen level of structure), and you're going to be picking shades of "grey" between "dysfunctional community" and "closed community". The question is: where do you draw the line and what level of dysfunctional vs closed do you want?
The fact that wikipedia is having problems doesn't mean that they're a dead end, or that they picked the wrong place to draw their line in the sand. They picked a spot in the spectrum, and that spot has problems. So will _any_ other spot in that spectrum. Trust me when I say: this new compendium is going to have problems based on trying to strike a balance. That also doesn't mean it's bad, or will be useless, it just is what it is.
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This is NOT EVER going to be solvable. Except in the "old scientists die, so new ideas can be heard" sense.
Anonymity..... there's disadvantages to it, but until we as a social groupings set can accept complete fishboowl existances, it's going to be a major plank in libertarian thought. Too many police states oppose anynymous anything.....
Expert oversight has advantages- but it also leads to the old guard scientist problem....
Fortunately, the intarwub is big enough for both methods!
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"I vouch that this information is accurate and correct, and can be trusted."
"So who are you?"
"Oh... nobody."
When it comes to authorship and editorship, anonymity tends to defeat verifiability and accountability.