User:Daniel Mietchen/Sandbox/Open Knowledge Conference 2010

Background

This document shall help the drafting of a "full paper" (meaning 15 min of talk on the basis of "5-10 pages describing novel strategies, tools, services or best-practices related to open knowledge") for the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010. Submission deadline for the abstract: Jan 31, 2010. Our abstract has been accepted. Feel free to edit as you see fit. For discussion, please use this forum thread.

Deadline for submission of full paper: March 31, 2010.

The presentation will be given by Tom Morris, but everyone is invited to chime in on the drafting. It is intended to reuse much of this material for improving our Citizendium entry.

Technical details

All authors of OKCon papers:

• Can submit a camera ready version of the paper in LNCS style [1] for publication in the online proceedings e.g. till March 31st, to the proceedings editor: Claudia Muller-Birn <clmb@cs.cmu.edu>

[1] http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0%20LNCS%20Style

Please also note there is no page restriction in place on your papers for this process.

The final typesetting in LaTeX will be done by Daniel Mietchen.

Title

Public and experts working together: an experiment in structuring (disseminating?) knowledge

Alternative: Structuring knowledge for and with both the public and experts

Abstract

The abstract should consist of no more than 200 words.

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 the 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 an organically-growing wiki to which anybody can contribute using their real names, while those with specific expertise are given a special role in assessing the quality of content. Upon fulfillment of a set of criteria like factual and linguistic accuracy, lack of bias, and readability by non-specialists, 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 the Citizendium is structured and what it offers 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.

Key issues

This section is auxiliary to the drafting process and will be deleted when the draft is nearing completion. Let's concentrate on the following areas from the call for proposals:

  •   Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating open knowledge
  •   Open educational tools and resources
  •   Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models

hence:

• Citizendium as

  • a platform for creating, sharing, curating and navigating open knowledge
  • an Open educational tool and resource
  • an open knowledge model supporting professional workflows
  • a democratic and meritocratic community

Introduction

Just imagine you had a time slider and could watch the history of knowledge on tool making, cooking, clothing, learning, general relativity, plate tectonics, self-replication, or cell division unfold from the earliest ideas of their earliest proponents (and opponents) onwards up to now.

"The Citizendium is a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and update knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free. It is created by volunteers — henceforth Citizens — who contribute under their real names and agree to a social covenant centered around trust." - such starts the charter that the project participants are currently drafting. In this contribution, we intend to provide an overview on how the project is structured and what it offers to the open knowledge communities, particularly to those engaged in education and research.

The Citizendium model: Real names, stable versions and contextualization

Basic overview about the main differentiators to other Open Knowledge projects, and why they were introduced.

Many of those involved with the Citizendium believe that it is possible to go much further than existing open knowledge projects have gone - to be a bridge between existing scientific and academic communities and the new online communities. The founder of the Citizendium, Larry Sanger, was the co-founder of Wikipedia. The Citizendium differs in a number of important ways from Wikipedia and other similar projects.

The first of these is an insistence on real names. Every participant in the Citizendium project must be signed up using their real name - that is, the name they have on their passport or driving licence or their gas bill. This will exclude a number of legitimate contributors who prefer to remain anonymous. The real name policy gives participants accountability.

The second is the involvement of experts. Some critics of the project have come up with names for this like "credentialism", but it 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 it is not the case. The role the experts have is not that of a supreme leader, allowed to exercise his will on the populace - it is much more of a guiding role. We use the analogy of a village elder wandering around the busy marketplace who can resolve disputes and to whom people pay some deference due to his maturity, wisdom and expertise.

(tbc)

Open knowledge

• a collaborative platform for creating, sharing, curating and navigating open knowledge

Open education

• an Open educational tool and resource

Open science

1. an open knowledge model supporting professional workflows
2. For scholarly uses, a detailed outline can be found in this blog post.

Open governance

• a democratic and meritocratic community

Open questions

• how to motivate registered users to contribute
• how to motivate more users to register
• how to allow feedback by non-registered users
• how to codify the policies (and especially the subpages system) into a MediaWiki extension
• financial perspectives

References

Just links will do fine for the time being - Wiki and LaTeX are not compatible in this regard.

• Shirky and Sanger, or the costs of crowdsourcing

Contains a number of critical remarks on CZ that may be worth addressing.

Summary in the Wikipedia signpost

• RationalWiki article on Citizendium

Further notes

• Speaker bio:

Tom Morris is a postgraduate philosophy student and programmer and has been actively involved as an author in the Citizendium project since October 2007.

• Just some suggestions for consideration from Aleta, not intended to be cast in stone. Question: what do you mean by an 'organically-growing wiki' (fifth line in abstract)? Doesn't resonate with me, can you say it in a different way?

• There is a talk given by Chris Day on Citizendium in mid-2008 at this workshop: video. His slides may serve as the basis for Tom's on this occasion (anyone can edit them)

• Initial reactions:
• I suppose an inorganically growing wiki would use silicon...and it does. Some things cast in stone, indeed, would have high silicon content. It is, perhaps, a metaphor to avoid.
• Not knowing much about Rationalwiki, yes, the article raises legitimate questions about some areas, such as healing arts. I would hope, however, that the observations on herding cats display some inability or unwillingness to recognize humor, and, indeed, informal analysis of idioms. It does seem needlessly antagonistic.
• Real name policy needs, I think, to be in a broader perspective than comparison to Wikipedia. Netnews/USENET, for example, started declining in utility once AOL made public, anonymous access possible (1988 or thereabouts). Previously, while there was no real name policy, to get access, one had to be affiliated with a research or academic group, or have someone there willing to give you an account: a reputation factor.
• Reputation factors, also called karma systems, have been used in blogs, and, I believe, are quite appropriate for Wikis. I believe the first widespread use was at the Well. There is a tension between name verification and reputation.
• Contextualization is, I believe, one of the great opportunities, but it's fair to say that it's experimental. Nevertheless, it would be worth showing a decent Related Articles page, and perhaps compare-and-contrast it with Semantic Web techniques. Our subpages have a steep learning curve, but I wonder if any structured knowledge does not.

Howard C. Berkowitz 22:25, 24 March 2010 (UTC)