Citizendium

The Citizendium logo as of March 2020, even worse than their beta logo.

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Citizendium ("CZ") is (was?) a free Internet-based encyclopedia project that began as a pretender to the throne of Wikipedia. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger started the project in 2006 to remedy what he viewed as problems with Wikipedia. It was essentially a reincarnation of the Wikipedia predecessor Nupedia, and just like its previous incarnation, it was a massive failure.

Citizendium aimed to boost its reliability by having articles vetted by experts and requiring contributors to use their real names. Articles were managed by workgroups, which for several years included "healing arts," Citizendium's term for alternative medicine — distinct from the workgroup on "health sciences", medical treatment that actually works. This led to the first public sign that something had gone seriously wrong, when a ludicrous puff piece on homeopathy was featured on the main page in January 2009. While pseudoscience advocates were protected by site policies, many of the recruited academic experts quickly left, driven away by Sanger and the site administrators.

The project began with lofty ambitions and heavy media coverage. Participation grew through early 2008 before entering a steady decline. By June 2011 Citizendium was moribund, with fewer participants and fewer edits than any full month in its history, and with well over half the month's edits made by just three users. It only got worse from then on. By early 2014, only about 10 people made even 10 edits per month. An election held in June 2015 to fill a council seat attracted 13 voters. 2020 began with a discussion among a handful of people about shutting down the project. Only three people contributed to articles in the first 80 days of 2020.

The project continued essentially as a hobby site for a few individuals who enjoy bureaucracy, Wikipedia-bashing, or believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Citizendium is significant (although even these activities underwent a decline) – harmless enough in itself, though unfortunate in its wasted potential. The rise and fall of Citizendium, with issues such as micromanagement, top-heavy organization, and credentialism used to give cranks undue influence, serves as a useful warning to other projects. As of February 2020, the site is currently hovering around the 595,000 mark on Alexa ratings.

In 2020, after years of moribund activity, it was decided that Citizendium in its editable wiki form will close on September 30, 2020, with the possibility of the project living on in another form.

History

Founding and public launch

The project was founded in 2006 to create a "new compendium of knowledge" based on the contributions of "intellectuals," defined as "educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly." The ambition was to "unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online." It was launched with great fanfare and wide coverage in both the blogosphere and the international prestige press.

Citizendium began its pilot phase in October 2006 and went public on March 27, 2007. It began as a fork of the English Wikipedia under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, but by the time of the public launch Sanger had decided that starting from a clean slate was the best way to motivate writers. He therefore deleted all Wikipedia-sourced articles that had not been worked on locally. This was a huge gamble, betting that Citizendium's writers would fill gaping holes in content.

Growth and decline

Number of participants per month, Oct 2006-Aug 2012. Find the "explosion of growth." Edits per month, Oct 2006-Aug 2012. In August 2012 almost half of all edits were made by just two users and about 85% were made by the top 10 users. Sanger's prognosis compared to reality

Sanger stated in October 2007 that he foresaw "an explosion of growth...in the not-too-distant future," and that he expected the project to triple, or at least double, in size annually.

Participation grew during Citizendium's first year, peaking in early 2008 before settling in to a long-term decline. The number of words added per day has plummeted from 17,100 in the second quarter of 2008 to just 600 in January 2014. Article creation rate increased from around 14 per day in late 2007 to 18-20 per day in 2010, falling to less than one per day by 2013. At the start of 2014 there were about 15.1 million words in 24,891 mainspace articles (a mean of 605 words/article).

In early 2014 about 21 individuals made at least one edit per month at Citizendium, down from around 200 at the time of Sanger's "explosion of growth" prediction. It is of course dwarfed by Wikipedia, which had 117,763 active editors at the start of 2014. But it's also far behind even narrow, hobbyist wikis such as Muppet Wiki and Wookieepedia (the Star Wars wiki), which had 178 and 545 contributors respectively in January 2014. Or even RationalWiki, where about 300 people make at least one edit per month. The project is now dominated by a small core of regulars with almost no new blood, as in fact, joining at all is still impossible (see below).

Community management

Authors and editors

Citizendium called its contributors "Citizens." They were divided into authors (hoi polloi) and editors (the experts) — analogous to print publications. The class distinction was clear and came from the top: if you were a mere author, your opinions were worthless. As may be expected, this left Citizendium a wiki of editors with few authors to supervise. This contrasted with Wikipedia, where everyone is an "editor." The difference in terminology sometimes led to confusion when discussing Citizendium.

Editors were supposed to provide "gentle expert guidance" to authors. They could referee disputes over article content and could also enforce style guidelines. But their real power lay in their ability to "approve" articles. After an article was approved it became the version displayed to the public (prior to August 2013) and was locked from further editing. Any changes had to be made to a separate draft version which could eventually be approved to replace the current public-facing version. The process was cumbersome enough that reapprovals were rare, so even obvious and uncontroversial errors could remain in articles for years. As we shall see later, this also had some interesting implications for the project's coverage of fringe and pseudoscience. This process was changed in August 2013 so that the main version displayed to the public was the editable version, bringing Citizendium closer in style to Wikipedia, as with many changes Citizendium made out of practicality due to declining editorship.

Signing up to contribute

Citizendium has often been criticized for its cumbersome and intrusive signup process. Each member is required to use their real name, and for the project's first seven years they could not even use common nicknames (such as "Dicky Smith" for "Richard Smith"). In addition to their real names all contributors have to provide a statement of personal interests and education. Not just a sentence or two, but a minimum of 50 words and "preferably a few hundred words." If the statement through the account request form was less than fifty words, the request was automatically blocked from being reviewed by Constables. And if the real name policy and requirement for a biography aren't intrusive enough, the project also suggests you provide "rough clues as to age and location" — a cyberstalker's dream. If you want to be an "editor" you also have to submit a curriculum vitae along with links to web materials supporting what you claim in your CV.

They actually think that it isn't a complicated process to join, even with the information provided and the number of options and applications that must be selected. Reviewing the account request page looks like a legal document for adding a constitutional amendment.

The Citizens often expressed puzzlement as to why they had so much trouble getting people to join.

After the server change in late 2014, the request account form stopped working altogether. You could still fill the form in, it just wouldn't be sent anywhere and no one would see it. A note was placed at the top of the form asking people to put all the required information into an email and send it to "citizendium-l-owner 'at' lists.purdue.edu". Yep, they even make you fill out the email address manually. To this day (March 2020) the request account form still doesn't work. Evidently allowing people to join at all has always remained a low priority.

Sanger's role

Larry Sanger

Sanger was Editor-In-Chief of Nupedia and Wikipedia until resigning in March 2002, the money having run out a month earlier. He resigned from the volunteer position because he did not have the authority from the community to deal with users he felt were being simply disruptive.

Despite his early claims that Citizendium would operate on an open "bazaar" model rather than a closed "cathedral" one, Sanger had worked out in detail how he wanted to run Citizendium early on and kept it under firm control from the start. He surprised prospective contributors who were used to having room for differing opinions and for serendipity with such actions as shutting down the project mailing list, thus killing the main venue for community enthusiasm at the time, because he felt it had too much traffic. He was not interested in the ideas of others and tended to react to them as if they were attacks on his detailed plan.

When establishing Citizendium, Sanger announced that he would be resigning as Editor-in-Chief after two or three years. In July 2009 he stepped down from active involvement, to pursue paid work on the WatchKnow educational video initiative. When he tried to report Wikipedia to the FBI over "child pornography" (line art drawings of lolicon) in April 2010, he used the official Citizendium blog to link to his reply to Slashdot commenters, suggesting that he still considered Citizendium his personal site, and bashing Wikipedia as part of the mission. He stepped down as Editor-in-Chief after the Charter was ratified in September 2010, but after a brief absence was elected to the site's Management Council in 2011.

Sanger believed that any lack of participation in or readership for Citizendium was not due to his policies or the behaviour of himself or his "constables" (the wiki administrators), but due to "thuggish--cretinish" Wikipedians who were "trying to beat down the underdog with lies and intimidation."

Sanger offers consulting services as an expert in policy formation for online communities. Everipedia is a Wikipedia competitor Sanger became involved with well after he left Citizendium, another one of a series of failed projects. His other interests include promoting hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment and the work of Computing Forever.

Operational management

Financial misadventures

In November 2010 an accidentally-revealed forum thread detailed the dire financial straits in which Sanger had left Citizendium. Sanger had told the Citizens in vague terms that more funding was needed but they were blindsided by the immediacy of the financial crisis. Available funds were down to $1800, they were shelling out $700 a month in hosting charges to Steadfast, and within a few weeks they had a payment of $1500 owed to the Tides Center, their parent organization. According to their new Managing Editor they faced the prospect of insolvency by the end of the year.

This revelation brought up significant questions about the project's financial management. Piecing together Citizendium's fragmentary records the project had received around $60,000-$65,000 in contributions; Sanger has put the amount at "$60,000 and change." In March 2007, Citizendium expanded to multiple servers (five!) with Steadfast; two of these were donated and the other three presumably were paid for out of pocket. This put the accumulated infrastructure and hosting costs at an estimated $32,200 by the time of the forum post, leaving about $30,000 to account for. It eventually came to light that Citizendium had been paying the Tides Foundation at least $2000 per year for handling the project's finances plus $1000 per year for liability insurance. Assuming these expenses were paid for calendar years 2007, 2008, 2009 and the first half of 2010 the total paid to the Tides Center would be at least $10,500, leaving around $20,000. By Citizendium's own records, only Larry Sanger, initial technical director Jason Potkanski, and an unnamed programmer have received any compensation for their work on the project. The total paid to these individuals has not been revealed. We can make conjectures about other expenses — for example if Sanger had to travel extensively for fundraising or promotion this could have eaten up $10,000 fairly quickly. But we just don't know.

$700 a month for hosting was absurdly high. A site of Citizendium's size and traffic (comparable to RationalWiki as of 2010) could easily be supported by commercial hosting for around $50-$150 a month. That’s around $28,000 wasted on over-the-top network and server infrastructure. Put another way, enough money was blown to support Citizendium for an estimated 23 years. At the end of 2010 the project took steps that reduced their hosting costs to $320 per month, trimming their costs from "insane" to merely "excessive." It was also revealed then that major donors to Citizendium had become disinterested in supporting the project. Later on, over the course of an entire year in 2013 and 2014, their hosting costs were brought down to around $100 (with one person paying over $3800 out of pocket to support the change.) Citizendium now relies entirely on individual donors; for most months in 2019, it received a single $5 monthly donation against $100 hosting costs.

Relationship with the Tides Center

The Tides Center is a major non-profit described as an "incubator" for other non-profits. Apparently, Larry Sanger entered into an agreement with them right before he started accepting large donations, with the Tides Center managing donations and providing status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization under U.S. law. This status is required in order for contributions to be tax deductible; Sanger had said that lack of such status was a "sticking point" for many prospective donors. As noted previously, this arrangement cost Citizendium at least $3000 per year. Citizendium was promised operational independence, and Sanger promised in 2007 that Citizendium would be "independent" within six months. Three years later and $60,000 poorer Citizendium was still a Tides Center project.

Although no official announcement was made, Citizendium is no longer affiliated with the Tides Center. By May 2011 there was no longer an entry for Citizendium under the Tides Center project directory, and Citizendium staff had quietly deleted most references to Tides from their internal pages.

Technical implementation

Citizendium defined itself so completely as the anti-Wikipedia that even technical decisions were made largely on the basis of being different from Wikimedia (such as using PostgreSQL rather than MySQL for the database and incompatible changes to their MediaWiki installation). It was later realised that forking when one doesn't have the technical resources is not such a good idea; sysadmin Dan Nessett did try to bring the software more back towards mainline, and actively contributed to MediaWiki until he left Citizendium.

Copyright violations

“”Note: as it stands, this image is a copyvio because the owners of the separate images need to be credited here. Also, the montage ought to be deleted and re-uploaded to purge the system of an image which is a copyvio. Finally, the images of the tiger and the butterfly violate CZ's 'real name' policy.

—Comment on the description page of the lead image of one of their approved articlesimg, as of 5 February 2011. Fixing it would evidently be too much work. Incredibly, it was still there as late as January 2013; as of August 2013, it appears to have finally been taken down.

In mid-January 2011 RationalWiki contributors noted extensive and long-standing copyright violations on Citizendium related to their use of images. Citizendium, however, was too busy with infighting and working out complicated numbering systems for their bureaucratic discussions to bother with minor matters like breaking the law, and so the report was met with a collective shrug. Eventually most (though by no means all) of the reported images were dealt with to some extent, but no effort has been made to deal with others, of which massive numbers remain.

In November 2013, an article plagiarised from Wikipedia, Subjective-objective dichotomy,^img was featured on Citizendium's main page.

The concept of expertise on Citizendium

There's much to like in the idea of creating an environment that is welcoming to people who know what they're talking about. But it didn't work out too well at Citizendium.

There's expertise and then there's certification as an expert, which is a social construct made of pieces of paper and (hopefully) accredited standards. Sometimes the two don't quite overlap. In the quest for expertise — "This article is good and I can explain why" — Citizendium went for credentialism — "This article is good because I have the authority to say so." But the most damaging part of the Citizendium approach was that the required credentials were inconsistent. Someone wishing to be a general editor in an academic field had to show they had a PhD, or were a tenure-track professor; if they couldn't show that, they might have been able to get editorship in a small subfield — if they had an M.A. or M.Sc, and at least three published, peer-reviewed articles. But if they wanted the authority to take over articles in alternative medicine, they only had to prove that they were licensed to practice their branch of alternative medicine.

Like many things on Citizendium, the concept of editors was largely abandoned in practice due to the catastrophic fall in the number of contributors.

Attracting and repelling academia

“”My experience of CZ has not impressed me in terms of its chances of its reaching its laudable goals. People discuss and debate, but no matter what we say, Larry comes in and makes some executive decision without really consulting anyone outside of his inner circle.

—An early (18 January 2007) expression of frustration by a Citizendium academic.

Wikipedia has plenty of academics and actual experts editing — you can hardly edit without bumping into someone who knows a hell of a lot more than you about a topic. It fails utterly, however, in keeping idiots out of the experts' faces.

So Citizendium promised they'd remedy this, and attracted a good number of established experts, such as university professors, in the site's early days. But almost all left within months — and it turned out that the people getting in the academics' faces were Sanger and his constables. Heavy-handedness, meddling in article content, censoring user comments, bullying and harassment of academic users were commonplace and extensively documented in the wider world. Others grew exasperated over Sanger's penchant for micromanagement and inability to acknowledge areas of academia he was not competent in, often overruling or pushing out the very specialists he had recruited.

Sanger's guidance was also responsible for driving out established fields of study while encouraging a proliferation of pseudoscience. For instance, in 2006 Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies professors began joining Citizendium. Sanger refused to recognise these as genuine fields of endeavour, saying "I do not want to make CZ 'politically correct,' i.e., appealing especially to one (largely American/Western/Left) ideology," and refused to give them any place in Citizendium's structure. In contrast, he personally recruited "celebrity" homeopath Dana Ullman and gave alternative medicine practitioners their own workgroup with full control over all articles on alternative medicine. He told members who preferred scientific evidence over other parts of the "whole dialectical landscape" that they were "not welcome" at Citizendium, and decreed that Citizendium would treat both scientific and anti-scientific views on an equal footing in manufactroversies such as intelligent design and global warming. When others dared question this approach, he responded:

“”I am sick and tired of reference works, journalists, and professionals generally, simply instructing me what to think, when I know that there are other professionals who disagree with them and who are not given a fair hearing. There is a sort of paternalism about the acceptance of bias in expository writing that I find disturbing. It's not unlike propaganda, ultimately.

Citizendium practice reflected Sanger's philosophy. The article on Intelligent design promoted it in a manner reminiscent of aSK, changing only after Sanger left. Similarly the global warming article included an extended apologia for denialism that was not pared back until after Sanger's departure.

Sanger claims academic credentials, academic expertise, academic credibility and respect for and from academia, and loves the idea of academia. But he had never held a position as professor or the equivalent, and had no idea what actual working academics do for a living or how to work with them. His idealized vision of academic knowledge production, in which philosophically robust propositions are put forth and formally debated, bears no resemblance to reality, in which academic exchanges are more typified by snatches of hallway conversation or arguments over a beer at a conference — casual semi-social interaction the way humans have always done it. His inflexibility and the emulation of his worst behaviors by his acolytes did the rest. Having run off the recruited academics was not considered a problem by the remaining Citizens.

Crank magnetism

Citizendium's expert approval was just as much a double-edged sword as is Wikipedia's open editing policy. In some cases the Citizendium approach worked fine and avoided the problems with Wikipedia's almost unguided editing that causes articles to degrade (although Wikipedia's counterpart articles have often become far more comprehensive over time). But it also allowed people of dubious qualifications to obtain control over articles with relatively little opposition. In this way supposed "experts" could hijack articles on their pet topics and ensure that the articles were as uncritical as possible.

Citizendium's approval process meant that once an article was approved, it was locked from further editing and all changes had to be made to a draft version that was not presented to the public until it went through the approval process again. And who controlled the re-approval process? The same "experts" who approved the original article. This meant that once a fringe enthusiast had managed to get an article approved in their preferred version, it was very difficult for reality-based contributors to undo the damage. This locking down remained in place until late 2013, long after anyone cared about what Citizendium was doing.

It was certainly not the case that all, or even most, Citizendium contributors were cranks. Some lamented the project's reputation for fringe topics and pointed out that it had driven away potential contributors. But the site's policies, such as its emphasis on credentialism, made it especially appealing to cranks. Whereas actual, practicing experts tend simply to get on with their work instead of waving their credentials, cranks compensate for their lack of substance by faking expertise and working for status and perceived credibility. This means cranks will be attracted to and stay on a credentialist project, particularly if those of genuine expertise are driven out. Cranks on Citizendium were further protected by users in positions of authority who were, themselves, purveyors of "alternative medicine."

Citizendium also had a unique protective mechanism that made it particularly crank-friendly: the rule against attacking other contributors prohibits questioning their claimed expertise. For example, an editor was banned for pointing out that Dana Ullman — a well-known and tireless advocate for homeopathy who was banned from Wikipedia for disruptive advocacy but then became a Citizendium Healing Arts editor — has no medical or homeopathic qualifications and had been arrested for practising medicine without a license. Even an expression of general frustration about homeopathy and other fringe topics got the smackdown from a pro-altmed constable.

Does the "expert guidance" model work?

The Citizendium process has been critiqued in detail since before the launch. The Citizens quite reasonably replied that the proof would be in the resulting product. Unfortunately, the product did not turn out so well either. The project has been excessively tolerant, even deferential, toward cranks, while driving actual academics away; so it's unsurprising that far too much questionable material appears for a site that prides itself on being "authoritative, error-free, and well-written." Even where pseudoscience is not an issue the presentation is often disorganized and unfocused, or contains obvious errors that should never have made it past a true "expert."

Citizendium's greatest pseudoscientific hits

As an example of the deference to cranks, Citizendium's horrific piece on homeopathy was taken over by Dana Ullman (whom Time magazine has called a "leading proselytizer of homeopathy") at Sanger's personal invitation. The resulting article was so badly skewed that the alt-med promoters at Wiki4CAM copied it almost wholesale to use as their own entry on the topic. Likewise the article on chiropraxy was "owned" by D. Matt Innis, a practicing chiropractor and acupuncturist, who as a Constable removes criticism of homeopathy. Both of these pseudoscience advocacy articles were fully embraced by the Citizendium community. They are both marked as approved articles, and the homeopathy advertisement — which Sanger called "an excellent article, remarkably balanced and neutral" — was even featured in January 2009 on the site's main page. (This version was live when it was featured.) It wasn't until Sanger's departure in late 2010 that the homeopathy article was finally reduced to something better by motion of the project's Editorial Council. In an extraordinary overruling of the project's "expert approval" process the EC not only legislated the new version of the article but ruled that the article was such a blight on Citizendium that they forbade all editing on it for a year, after which they might allow editing again. Their article on chiropractic, however, remains pure advocacy.

Some more examples of pro-pseudoscience articles:

• Alice Bailey — Puff piece on the New Age author; relies heavily on her autobiography for sources on such matters as telepathic transmission of books and the hidden "Masters of Wisdom".
• Cold fusion — Largely written by proponent and advocate Jed Rothwell. Rothwell was banned indefinitely from Wikipedia for disruption and advocacy using an army of sockpuppet accounts. Remained profoundly at odds with the scientific community for over three years, with some of the most blatantly promotional wording finally being redacted in October 2011.
• Critical views of Chiropractic^img — Not what you'd think. It's actually an attack on criticism of chiropractic by the "medical establishment."
• Global warming — An early harbinger of future colonization of Citizendium by pseudoscience advocates who had tried and failed on Wikipedia. The 2007 version was a feast of climate change denial bad enough to attract the attention of experts in the field. It was improved somewhat — by copying from Wikipedia. It was biased enough that the global warming denialists at the Heartland Institute listed it as part of their recommended "Primer on Global Warming." The article was finally brought into reasonable agreement with the scientific consensus in early 2011, after Sanger's departure.
• Pseudoscience — The 2009 version was terrible. The current version is much improved, though written in the rambling and chatty style typical of many Citizendium articles. The article still contains a paragraph defending astrology.
• Qigong — A barely readable promotion which mentions skepticism only in order to dismiss it, and concludes: In spite of the above, there are many accepted, and in the author's opinion, legitimate "Masters" of "Qigong". The promotional version had remained for almost four years; although some Citizens had edited it in the meantime, they did not alter the promotional tone.
• Reiki — A promotional article on one of the stupidest and least supportable alternative medicine quackeries. Page after page after page of promotion, then, right near the end, two sentences basically amounting to "Some skeptics don't like it" as the only balance, then the rest of the controversies are controversies within reiki. The article was in this state from late 2007 through January 2011.
• Samuel Hahnemann — Short article heaping praise on the creator of homeopathy.
• Shang reviews of homeopathy — Uses bizarre arguments (e.g., Shang used a different pre-determined definition of "high-quality" than a study homeopaths liked), a discredited data-mining attempt by a pro-homeopathy team led by Ludtke, a letter from a homeopathic organization, and outright lies about the study's methods and findings to attack an innovative, well-respected study. A hit piece, nothing more, and a very strange topic for an encyclopedia.
• Tests of the efficacy of homeopathy — Pooh-poohs large, respected negative studies, lists every single tiny study it can find that ever had a positive result.
• Unidentified flying object — A highly unskeptical article based mainly on the claims of UFO proponents.
• Vertebral subluxation — A pseudoscientific article on chiropractic, written mostly by an unpublished author without any verifiable medical background. That this is one of the site's "approved" articles is especially damning.

Wikipedia, of course, also has lots of pseudoscience. But apart from having many more contributors to help better approximate reality, Wikipedia does not have mechanisms in place that actively promote pseudoscience; to the contrary, its policies forbid its advocacy and mechanisms are in place to allow it to be identified and fixed (at least in principle). Meanwhile, Citizendium considers alternative medicine qualifications as signs of expertise, which allows a user to take over an article, and has neither policy nor sufficient numbers of motivated people to keep these supposed experts in check.

Scientology

The Scientology article has been heavily edited by at least two well known members of that organization. On 1 May 2007, the article "Scientology" was moved first to "Scientology (the philosophy)" then finally to Church of Scientology. The word "cult" was deleted, as well as any mention of Scientology being banned in a number of countries, and the term "adherent" replaced with "parishioners" by Terry E. Olsen, a public member of Scientology well-known for his Internet advocacy on its behalf as "Terryeo" on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Shortly afterwards Steven Ferry joined Citizendium. Ferry did not declare his membership of the Church, nor his previous position working in public relations for the Church, prior to editing and purging the article of criticisms. Ferry was subsequently elected to the Citizendium Editorial Council unopposed in 2008, leading to claims the project had been successfully infiltrated by the Church of Scientology. Ferry ceased contributing in mid-2008 and the article was gradually cleaned up over the next two years.

Thank goodness for gentle expert guidance!

“”Welcome to Citizendium, an endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness.

—Citizendium's Main Page as of January 2012.

Even on less contentious topics the supposed expert guidance appears worryingly absent at times, with poorly written articles and basic errors that many a non-expert would spot.

• Atomic hypothesis — Appears unable to tell the difference between a hypothesis and a theory in scientific terminology. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation that can be tested. A theory, on the other hand, is a body of knowledge and principles that have been found to (approximately) explain observed phenomena, such as "gravitational theory." Nowhere is it mentioned that in the time since Dalton's proposals the atomic hypothesis evolved into a theory supported by experimental testing. It stops with Dalton and goes no further - it's stuck in the 18th century. IUPAC, Encyclopædia Britannica, World Book and Wikipedia all use "Atomic theory".
• Biology — One of their approved articles, it consists mainly of a rambling, disorganised history of biology. Contains a single paragraph on evolution, while giving disproportionate space to outdated curiosities such as the homunculus. Essential concepts like dominant and recessive genes, chromosomes, mitosis and meiosis are never even defined, just mentioned offhand. There is an enormous amount of irrelevant verbiage, random philosophical musings, and, just for good measure, a see-also link at the top of the article to the one on "healing arts" - Citizendium's term for alternative medicine. Anyone with the slightest understanding of biology could crank out a better article in half an hour.
• Cat — For four years used the redundant scientific nomenclature for the domesticated cat, Felis silvestris catus. The accepted nomenclature is Felis catus, see for example ITIS taxonomy. Note that silvestris is a wildcat ancestor, not domesticated cat. Encyclopædia Britannica, Tree of Life (TOL), Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), and Wikipedia all use Felis catus for domesticated cat. Has since been corrected.
• Compton effect — The article defines: "The Compton effect is the name for the primary manner in which energy is absorbed by matter." Thus, the Sun heating the oceans and their beaches is the Compton effect? Arthur Compton, and all textbooks after him, define the effect as the elastic collision of a photon with a nearly free electron. No free electrons on the beaches or in the oceans: absorption of energy by sand and rocks is by exciting lattice vibrations; the oceans absorb energy primarily by water molecules gaining kinetic energy. No Compton effect in sight.
• HTML5 — For quite a while, the second half of the article was not shown because of an ordinary bug (the MediaWiki parser crashed on the tag <source>). Either the Citizens that worked on it were too sloppy to preview to the end, where they would have noticed the bug, or they did not know how to fix it. Shortly after someone did manage to fix it, two new errors were introduced. The syntactically correct <audio> <source /> <source /> </audio> was "corrected" to the syntactically wrong: <audio> source / source / </audio>. Why would an expert make such a WP-type correction? Isn't an expert somebody who knows when they don't know?
• Jupiter — Claimed for two and a half years that Jupiter has a surface. Gas giants don't have surfaces. Remained uncorrected despite complaints mailed to the project.
• William Bonham, William Bonham (outlaw) — Claim Billy the Kid's name was William Bonham, a name mentioned in no existing source. The alias most famously used by Billy the Kid was William Bonney. Uncorrected from July 2009 until, apparently, August 2013.

When errors are detected, more often than not they are detected by people outside of the project (such as RationalWiki) — bringing into question how qualified these CZ experts are and whether CZ's expert oversight procedure can be claimed to work in practice at all.

The great Wikipedia killer shows its strength

To be even minimally useful, an encyclopedia needs to have information on subjects people would want to know about. Here is a list of articles which do not exist on Citizendium as of March 2020, and, unless they are created in the waning days of the project, never will.

• Most of Shakespeare's plays, including King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Anthony and Cleopatra, Much Ado about Nothing, and Twelfth Night. Luckily, no one ever studies Shakespeare.
• Basic parts of the body, like organ, bladder, diaphragm, uterus, or testicles. In addition, skeleton and bone are less than 10 words each.
• Historical figures such as Marco Polo, Hannibal, and Cleopatra.
• The Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Bosnian War, and much of the rest of military history.
• Many famous scientists, including Linus Pauling, Rachel Carson, Jacques Cousteau, Heinrich Hertz, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, J.J. Thomson, and Robert Oppenheimer. Max Planck at least gets a one-sentence stub.
• Many spaceflight pioneers, such as Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn, and Alan Shepard.
• Critically acclaimed film directors including Michelangelo Antonioni, Billy Wilder, Quentin Tarantino, and Andrzej Wajda, and classic films such as Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Solaris, Ran, L'Avventura, If..., Jaws, and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. Also classic or critically acclaimed TV shows such as Game of Thrones, NYPD Blue, Roseanne, Bewitched, Murphy Brown, Barney Miller, and True Detective.
• Visual artists including Donatello, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Edouard Manet, Jasper Johns, and Mary Cassatt.
• Composers Giacomo Puccini, Claudio Monteverdi, Joseph Haydn, and George Frideric Handel. Benjamin Britten and Giuseppe Verdi each have less than 50 words of text. In popular music there is no article on Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Herbie Hancock, Diana Ross and/or The Supremes, Velvet Underground, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo, Deep Purple, Morrissey, or Duran Duran, but at least there's no article on Ted Nugent.
• Capital cities including Warsaw, Bucharest, Santiago de Chile, Port-au-Prince, and Reykjavik. And other important geographical features Lake Titicaca, Lake Baikal, River Thames, and Kalahari Desert.
• Geological terms including mantle, subduction, granite, gneiss, lithosphere, and quartz. Geographical terms including watershed, plateau, village, cartography, climatology, and continental shelf. Ocean, volcano and geological fault have articles of less than 25 words.

Why Wikipedia wins

Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it is one of the most successful volunteer-driven projects on the World Wide Web, and that makes it hard to compete with. Any other wiki needs something that differentiates them from Wikipedia in order to lure people to them rather than Wikipedia. The successful ones, such as Conservapedia, RationalWiki, and all the various wikis devoted to analyzing video games, television shows, and so on, have a particular focus that does not overlap with Wikipedia's, allowing them to carve out a unique niche. Conservapedia, for instance, caters to right-wing nutjobs. RationalWiki snarks about pseudoscientific topics from a skeptical and scientific perspective. Muppet Wiki has over 33,000 pages (more than all of Citizendium) covering everything anyone might want to know about the various Jim Henson shows, movies, and characters. Whether due to special focus, intentional bias, tone, or obsessive detail, these wikis provide something that Wikipedia cannot.

Citizendium, however, exactly duplicated Wikipedia's focus of being a general encyclopedia. Its major difference was an organizational one (during the time in which it had enough editors for there to be a de facto organization), which only affected editors, not readers.

The one area Citizendium can make a somewhat fair claim to beat Wikipedia is in its "approved articles", which have (allegedly, at least) met certain standards and undergone some form of peer review. According to Citizendium itself, such articles are "tentatively declared to be of reasonably high-quality and so are locked to prevent further editing." As such, they can be seen to be "complete" and "accurate" in a way it is hard to ensure any Wikipedia article is at any given time. At this stage, these articles can theoretically be said to be more in the vein of traditional encyclopedias. This might indeed be a strong point in Citizendium's favor over its rival, were it not for the fact that as of March 2020, there are only 166 such articles in the entire project (out of 16,861 total). Disregarding the fact that even these articles have not always been of the highest quality, it is only in these very specific handful of subjects that Citizendium can make any claim to be superior to Wikipedia. If one is looking for information on air pollution or fossil fuels (on which there are a disproportionate number of approved articles), Citizendium might be a good place to visit. On almost any other subject on earth, they can't even pretend to offer anything Wikipedia doesn't (except a smaller amount of random vandalism). Thus Citizendium bears more resemblance to Wikipedia's failed predecessor Nupedia than it does to Wikipedia itself.

Even worse from a competitive standpoint, Citizendium's content is available under a Creative Commons license - meaning that Wikipedia can import any content it deems good enough. And Wikipedia did so, setting up WikiProject Citizendium Porting, a group dedicated to reviewing Citizendium's approved articles and adapting them for use on Wikipedia.

Some statistics:

• At least 23 of Citizendium's 156 approved articles (circa 2010) either were taken from Wikipedia, or both Wikipedia and Citizendium's versions were written by the same person. Of the ones taken from Wikipedia, this was often done without attribution.
• Approximately 150 articles on Wikipedia incorporate some text from Citizendium, though in some cases this was as little as two words.
• Many of Citizendium's approved articles were considered too low quality to use on Wikipedia, either in whole or in part. For instance, the Citizendium article on DNA was considered "a degraded version of the Wikipedia article that tries to deal with too many subjects at once"; and Tux, as in the Linux mascot, has the note "Strongly against porting any more. A little information added from a low quality article." The Citizendium-approved articles on homeopathy, literature, chiropractic, and World of Warcraft, among others, were all considered completely unsuitable for Wikipedia.
• The Citizendium articles on Scarborough Castle, wheat and cypherpunks were singled out for praise. And were copied wholesale to Wikipedia under the terms of the mutually compatible Creative Commons licenses of the projects.

This importing did have some benefit to Citizendium, since each imported article will link to the Citizendium one, at least for as long as Citizendium continues to exist. But in a bizarre twist, while Citizendium's license allows its material to be freely used elsewhere, the project's Editorial Council expressly forbid the importation of articles from any other source, including Wikipedia. Thus when a Citizendium article is better than its Wikipedia counterpart, Wikipedia can use the better one, but when the Wikipedia article is better, Citizendium must make do with whatever it has.

With its best content also available at its much larger competitor, which also has much more user-friendly registration procedures, and with Sanger's behaviour costing Citizendium the initial good will of the academic community, Citizendium never became a viable competitor to Wikipedia.

Rearranging the deckchairs

Citizendium utterly failed to make the bold moves necessary to regain the ground it lost. Instead, much of its effort was wasted in petty bickering (some of which took place on this very wiki) and in byzantine governance procedures that were inappropriate for such a small project.

A Citizendium Charter was mentioned in the project's inaugural press release of October 2006 and intended to be implemented within the first twelve months. The charter was at last voted in on 23 September 2010. The approved version contains 55 Articles that set up a seven-member Editorial Council, a five-member Management Council, and the three "ancillary positions" of Managing Editor, Constabulary, and Ombudsman — all for a project with less than 10 contributors on an average day. (Note Article 24 promises "a minimum of bureaucracy.") It has obvious typographical and grammatical errors and some of these, when taken literally, reverse the intended meaning of the text. But the committee assigned to create the charter was disbanded, the former members seemed pretty burnt out on the process, and personal sniping between them remained a regular feature of the site forum.

A month after the elections for the Management and Editorial councils one of the members of the Editorial Council resigned, citing his frustration with fighting "absolutely pointless bureaucracy":

“”It has been like the scene from Douglas Adams' Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy where they task the hair-dressers with discovering fire, so they form the Fire Discovery Subcommittee who then decide they need to do consumer focus groups to decide how best to market fire… Look at any successful open source project and you’ll find few if any committees or Councils or quorums or any of that faff. That is a feature, not a bug. I’m not saying we don’t need those things. But we don't need them now. What we need are sensible, mature people who can make a decision without drama and bickering.

—Tom Morris, "Citizendium Editorial Council: resignation statement"

While some progress was made after the charter passed, the fundamental problems remained. The homeopathy article was finally replaced with something reasonably sane by Editorial Council fiat, overriding the vaunted "expert approval" process and implicitly admitting its failure. The Healing Arts workgroup — consisting of alternative medicine practitioners — was disbanded; but according to that decision, no healing arts editor licensed to practice their craft lost their editorship, instead automatically gaining the right to register as Health Sciences editors, where they could do even more damage. (Dana Ullman was still listed as an editor, though apparently not attached to Health Sciences or any other workgroup.) Such spot fixes did nothing to solve the wider problem. Many promotional articles on the same level as the old homeopathy article still exist, including "approved" articles such as the one on Chiropractic^img.

Even if these issues could have been overcome, the charter itself was deeply flawed, to the point that it likely hindered Citizendium's progress. The document violated every possible principle of parsimony and practicality, comprising 55 Articles, some of which contradict other articles (with Article 24 promising "a minimum of bureaucracy", and then detailing an overly detailed bureaucratic structure ). It made constitutional the real names policy. It failed to mention Citizendium's objective as an encyclopedia. It showed absolutely no awareness of the problems that killed participation in the first place, and several users took objection to the bureaucratic structure.

Even worse, Citizendium's most crucial problem — its failure to attract and retain members — was actively exacerbated by the Editorial Council. For example, when a member of the Editorial Council pointed out one of his friends chose not to join Citizendium because he felt the questions being asked were too intrusive, another Editorial Council member responded:^img

“”Your friend may be the world's leading expert on whatever subject you say he is, but he's also the world's leading imbecile. And you may tell him that I said so, and use my name as well. What a cretin! And if all the other myriad people you tell us about share his feelings (which I seriously doubt, by the way), then they are cretins too. And we are better off without them.

And then, the Editorial Council itself fell apart in late 2012 due to not having enough members to participate. Not only did approvals of new users start to take months - if the e-mails sent to the constables aren't accidentally deleted^img - but when bureaucracy limped back together enough to hold an election in late 2013, all attempts to fix this with a saner registration process were not only rejected by the one remaining bureaucrat before voting was allowed to happen (1^img 2^img), but the attempts resulted in a backlash insisting that real names must be verified by methods "as foolproof as practically possible".^img

Welcome to Citizendium.

See also

For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Citizendium FAQ.

• Active users at Citizendium
• What is going on at Citizendium?

• Conservapedia
• Crank magnetism
• New World Encyclopedia
• WOMBAT

External links

• Citizendium's front page
• Their page on us

References

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