Why Citizendium editors are involved: some testimonialsIn February 2007, after several months on a successful pilot project, the Citizendium project began a recruitment campaign. As part of this campaign, we asked our editors to offer testimonials aimed at recruiting their colleagues and explaining the project to the public. Here are some of the quotes submitted. Some people believe that all that glitters is gold. That's why the Citizendium is necessary: to make the difference between gold and bronze.
Year by year the dissemination of information in the United States is ever more under the control of corporations and media conglomerates with their own agendas for determining what is made available and how it is presented. The impact of this is global. The most important criterion is the effect on profit, not the intrinsic merit of the information. Citizendium is a bold populist attempt to stake out a public service alternative.
Public understanding of science needs scientists to help to explain, clearly and objectively, what science can do and what it can't, its weaknesses as well as its strengths, its failures as well as its promise. At the Citizendium, our role will not be to tell readers what opinions they should hold, but to give them the means to decide, rationally, for themselves. The role of experts is critical--not to impose opinions, but to support accuracy in reporting and citing information.
I was involved in Nupedia years ago and I am excited now to take part in the Citizendium.
The Citizendium is the natural evolution of Wikipedia, at least from the point of view of a natural (empirical) scientist. Wikipedia demonstrably works (and people are still trying to find out why), but in Wikipedia a mechanism that allows the evaluation of quality is missing. Since the reader must evaluate the quality of an article by itself, he must know the subject already to evaluate the quality, making Wikipedia sometimes useless. The Citizendium is designed in a way it can be cited in any context. This makes it worthwhile. My opinion is that, if the Citizendium reaches its full potential, many publishers of encyclopedias-you-pay-for will change their jobs. You should get involved because this is public outreach the wide way. People out there know about Earth Sciences from biased pieces of journalists who are not scientists. Here you can reach everyone worldwide and do good popular science.
A refereed online encyclopedia of scholarly, authoritative information strikes me as a worthwhile project. It offers an alternative model to traditional encyclopedia publishing. For these reasons, I am involved and I hope my colleagues will want to be as well.
An expert-led investigation was carried out by Nature--the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica's coverage of science. The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. Our aim at Citizendium is to ensure that from any number of (authorized) articles chosen randomly, there should be no more than "zero" inaccuracy. Of course, there is no "final" version of knowledge. What we will do is to certify that a particular page does not contain any error, as of date. Further addition to the knowledge base will require newer versions which too will be verified likewise. Unsubstatnitated claims will not be encouraged and "the wisdom of the crowd" will be reinforced in this wiki-based authoritative encyclopedia. If you feel that you can help us in achieving the goal with your expertise and time, the Citizendium is the right place to be right now.
The potential of the Citizendium is to combine the best of the encompassing aspects of Web 2.0 and an assurance of the depth, quality and credibility that all of us in higher education value so highly!
|