not the way to start a party

Posted in General, New Media, Wikis - 20 October 2006 - No comment

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog is reporting a response to Wikipedia by co-founder Larry Sanger:

This week Mr. Sanger announced the creation of the Citizendium, an online, interactive encyclopedia that will be open to public contributors but guided by academic editors. The site aims to give academics more authorial control—and a less combative environment—than they find on Wikipedia, which affords all users the same editing privileges, whether they have any proven expertise or not.

Good on Mr. Sanger. The more the merrier. And we academics exert our authorial control best in a less combative environment. Any large lecture class that prohibits discussion – or academic department meeting – will tell you that.

But there are going to be a lot of notes and blog posts commenting on the name of this project (and add it to your spell-checking dictionary now): Citizendium. It would be hard to get more academically pretentious in a single word. Sanger even thinks the title needs an explanation, complete with pronunciation guide:

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an “encyclopedia,” because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

I wonder if that passage is a good indication of what “gentle expert guidance” means: the (clichéd) academic tone, and the innuendo that Wikipedia isn’t responsibly managed and wrongly claims a position as an “encyclopedia.” Sounds a lot like my 3rd grade teacher – or me when I let my academic persona get the best of my good sense.

But wait: There’s more!

First, there’s an essay by Sanger, “Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge,” setting out the background and rationale for the Citizendium. Not an essay to be sniffed at, either. Worth the academic nod (give it a quick read and post it to del.icio.us for later). But the kicker – the thing that nails the pretentious academic ethos into Citzendium’s heart – is this link at the top of the essay page: