First, as far as I know, GFDL comes from a different world and appears not so well adapted for such a wiki-based project; to make it work we have to interprete it quite loosely (however I admit that _so far_ WP goes well with GFDL and at this stage hardly anyone is interested in - or would dare to - criticizing WP for problems at this level).
On this point objections have to be much more substantial. What are the
details of objections to the GNU FDL in and of itself? The only one I can think of that has any merit is that the FDL permits commercial exploitation of the material, but personally I think it would be crazy to curtail this as doing so would restrict what Citizendium itself could do to make funds. Any third-party commercial exploitation would result in further material being made available to us (positive) and they would have to cite us for the matierial (more positive).
Second, perhaps more important, compatibility is always mutual. I'm afraid that it eventually results in CZ being (or at best being perceived as) a WP-shadow: just another site making reference to WP; maybe expert-lead but, after all, not that different for many practical purposes. I mean that in long term I see two sets of interlinked articles. And WP probably would not be much more accurate than CZ but would "oscilate" not so far away from it.
In other words, with the passive "aid" from CZ, WP would reach a better quality. Very nice, but what are possible consequences for our project? For example, if we are too WP-similar (or perceived as such), then questions "what for?" might arise. I mean, this would not be a question for me - but for the outside world. This could have consequences even for fundrising. But generally, I'm afraid that we could be "consumed" by WP due to its strong popularity (it would be difficult to argue that we outdo WP).
I think that at least part of the doubt here stems from the fact that people are thinking of their writing (and their encyclopaedia or compendium of choice) in a rather proprietary way. If we are thinking in a possessive, "my project!!" manner, then obviously that we want Citizendium to be king and Wikipedia to be wiped off the face of the earth. On the other hand, if we start thinking in terms of the
user of our content---e.g. "how do we provide the best possible content for as many people to benefit from as possible?"---then alternatives become apparent.
Let's think in terms of the assets both projects bring to the table. Wikipedia has one absolutely key strength---it has a huge number of existing users both in terms of the people who write for it and even more so in terms of the people who read it. If material of yours, or mine, is posted on WP, huge numbers of people will read it and (if it's good) benefit from it.
On the other hand, if you do post material on WP, you can guarantee that it will be fiddled with in a detrimental manner. Minor changes, often by people wanting their "pet concern" registered on the page, can destroy the sense of an article: the introduction to a work of mine, which was meant to contain a few brief and illustrative examples of the topic, became a huge and nonsensical list. A controversial topic may include continuous combat between supporters of one side or another (see e.g. the WP article on the current Iraq war, which has been locked against comments from non-registered and new users), and partisans for a particular cause, whether in WP itself or in terms of outside influences, can seriously distort an article (I recall a point when the majority of the WP article on Human Rights Watch documented accusations of anti-Israel bias, and this is still the case in the article on "Criticism of Human Rights Watch"). Combating these problems requires constant care and attention and may be impossible for a topic which is too regularly edited. Citizendium can avoid this to a great extent because the immediately editable article is not the same as the active article displayed to the public.
It follows that WP and CZ have some interlinked interests. Citizendium needs exposure for its material, and WP can spread that material to a wide audience. By contrast WP needs quality, which CZ can more easily guarantee. There is, then, at least the
potential for a cooperative relationship
if the users and leaders of both projects can convince each other that this is what they want. For example, I don't see an inherent problem with Citizendium being an "upstream" to Wikipedia, or with WP functioning as a "Citizendium-unstable", as long as CZ remains sustainable in terms of contributors and funding.
I think that there will always be an inherent attraction to a new user that Wikipedia allows one to make a change to an article and
immediately see the results. It was terribly satisfying for me, as a new contributor, to be able to take a subject on which I had some expertise and transform it from a poorly-written work with many mistakes to a satisfactory, well-informed piece, without having to jump through hoops to gain approval. On the other hand it was disheartening to see small-scale edits gradually result in a weakening of the article. I think it's obvious why that would lead me to Citizendium, but I didn't come here to be divisive---my goal in contributing to both these projects was to help in creating something I felt was very necessary, a freely-available, high-quality reference work. Wikipedia already has a wide range of high-quality contributors and we have a great interest at Citizendium in having them also contribute to our project. We already have one attraction---the possibility to do good work without worrying that it will automatically be distorted by idiots or vandals. But another would be having Wikipedia actively support our efforts by encouraging members to consider contributing and pointing experts to our doors. A cooperative relationship, where Citizendium returns this favour by supporting WP import of high quality CZ material, could greatly facilitate this.
We may think that the interlinks pointing from WP to CZ would be our "ads" and/or testify our "superiority". Not that much, I'm afraid. If WP puts a general link, this would be as vague as possible. The reader would never know that the quality comes from CZ and where "our interventions" were essential. See below what happens if we are not compatible.
Thinking of a cooperative WP/CZ relationship, imagine instead a Wikipedia credit which reads not simply, "this article uses material by Citizendium," but either, "this article is a copy of the expert-approved article from Citizendium" or, "this article uses material from Citizendium but has diverged from the expert-approved text". And I don't think we should rule out the possibility that, in the event of Citizendium becoming a regular supplier of high-quality content to Wikipedia, and a sustained positive relationship between the leaderships and contributors, the two projects might re-merge into a "Wikizendium" or "Citipedia" with the user base of both projects but the now-proven rules of Citizendium.
Actually, what about encouraging writing from scratch in the "How to convert"article? Being WP-inspired, WP-suggested, but not WP-tied-to?
Writing our own texts, while more exciting (wasn't that one of unforking goals?), gives us more liberty in creating our own culture (again, a goal of unforking). Being incompatible (at the license level, say) will eventually result in being really distinct from WP and, hopefully, better than WP), while compatibility may result in diminishing differences at many levels which in turn could be dangereous for the project.
Further, in this case our content on WP would need proper references/credits (strict citations instead of vague links) just like for any other on-line encyclopedia or copyrighted source. This make a difference.
Well, one can write from scratch on WP as well. If removing the existing material might be controversial, one can create a subpage of Talk:Subject and write freely, and then present it as a replacement for the active article. The problem of course is that people may say, "Piss off, we don't want your rewrite, you suck," whereas on Citizendium the novelty of the project allows for a more forgiving environment regarding original work, at least for the time being.
Personally, while working here I've found that there is something of a "Wikipedia style" of writing that is a bit difficult to shake at first, a sort of "fake encyclopaedia" feel that surely stems from working in an environment where a paragraph may consist of sentences from myriad different authors and it is difficult to maintain a consistent style or thread between them. Personally I hope that one of the benefits of CZ will be that, since the public article is only altered in response to expert opinion, it will be
easier to propose sweeping changes behind the scenes since one can make one's case on merit.
However, I don't see that as an argument for non-compatibility with Wikipedia. Consider again that many of our potential contributors are people who have made quality contributions to Wikipedia and seen them diminish. An attraction for these will be the prospect to make use of the quality material they have already created and see it
sustained rather than allowed to decay. You may say, "Anyone can contribute material they have written themselves without worrying about GFDL," but it's never so easy: almost certainly they will have made some use of other contributors' material that they will view as worth keeping.
I believe that CC-by-NC-SA is quite well suited for us; e.g. it makes us WP-uncompatible.
Well, I'm a "separatist", I think that our ''niche'' is the quality and not the quantity. The latter will come too, but on the wiki the quantity is relatively cheap. And I believe that our quality and the knowledge that we share for free, while precious, is not for sale (and if for sale then I want my "share" ;-) .
Paradoxically, I believe that CZ can be a wiki based encyclopedia, i.e. "wikipedia",
while the Wikipedia is an actual "compendium of everything", the staff about anythig, but generally of no encyclopedic reliability flavour.
I think if there's one key lesson we can learn from the free software community, is that the most important thing to do is to sustain multilateral cooperation with the widest range of people, so long as it does not compromise the core aim (in their case, free software, in our case, free, quality reference material). We have an existing community of people committed to the existence of a free knowledge repository. We should not divide that community.
As for commercial exploitation, I agree it is not quite as nice for Citizendium or Wikipedia as for free software. Enterprises having a strong interest in particular software resources will readily employ people to work on these projects, making the lack of royalties on commercial uses less of a negative. It's not so easy for us, although we might think about attempting relationships of this sort with "enterprises" of knowledge such as universities, research funding organisations, think-tanks and private R&D organisations. However, ultimately we do get a payoff. Any commercial enterprise making derivative works has to feed back its changes. I think ultimately we will benefit more if we allow commercial enterprises to make use of our material, and use this as a means to gain support and publicity, than to cut them out.
Incidentally, one "share" which authors of free software get which CZ/WP contributors don't, is that if you look at the source code of a particular patch, it will invariably have comments noting, "Written by My Name, copyright me" or something like that, and this will usually be sustained across copies. There's no such comparable credit for our work. A better focus than the licensing might be to look at ways of making it easy to sustain versioning history (and thus author credit) across different projects that make use of collaborative knowledge repository content.
-- Joe
