Some thoughts about Citizendium

Hello, I've just joined ''Citizendium'' & read through the policies and tips to authors. I approve the idea of starting an encyclopedia project where ''quality of information'' would be more rigurously ''ensured by imposing some additional standards regarding professionalism''. However, I also have some thoughts (not to say objectives).

First of all, let me express opinion that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia] has already achieved relatively high standards and provides a lot of extensive, understandable, easily scanned and accurate information (see e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtun_people this article]). In the way Wikipedia is created, it should be expected that some information is inaccurate and and that not all contents are of as high standard as one would wish. But the point is that everything improves - the self-organizing community of ''Wikipedia'' has proven an outstanding ability to make constant improvement of every piece of the encyclopedia contents. This ''Wikipedia'' success is predominantly based on massiveness: there are simply enough people who find ''Wikipedia'' extremely valuable to themselves and to others and wish to contribute to this valuable source. Practically the only real threat to the quality is vandalism in its broadest sense (this includes e.g. violently adding contents to an article even when I am obviously less competent that people who brought the article to its current version, apart from just intentional malicious destruction of others' work). It is here where I see the most important difference (improvement) with respect to Wikipedia - in measures to prevent vandalism and strive for high professional standards, especially in the request that authors contrubute under their true identity. Another important set of measures is related to editors and approvement mechanisms, but isn't something like that (just less official and more spontaneous and self-organized) already running in Wikipedia? We should ask ourselves in what sense this newer project will truly bring an improvement with respect to Wikipedia.

My major doubt about the project is related to '''duplication of work'''. At the time the project was launched, an enourmous amount of work have been accumulated in ''Wikipedia''. It is not only about the perception that things that have already been done will have to be done once again. There is also a feeling that many people will be highly demotivated to contribute in a system with so many gaps while everything is already there - in ''Wikipedia''. Even if it is possible to overcome this somehow (and to engage a creative power similar to that of Wikipedia), there will for long time persist a critical dilemma of many contributors about where to engage. Some will believe that ''Citizendium'' has, due to some non-negotiable [http://www.citizendium.org/fundamentals.html policees], so much higher potential as compared to ''Wikipedia'' that it is reasonable to put all the energy into it, but there will be others who will see more beneficial for the global community if they devote their energy to improvement of Wikipedia, which has by now accummulated much larger amount of materials.

It is difficult to resolve the dilemma on a personal level and my opinion is that ithe topic should be discussed more wthin the contributing community. Questions like "What benefits can we expect in long term by launching a new project, instead of trying to improve Wikipedia?" should be posed in a clear way and thoroughly discussed. Maybe it would be more effective to start a campaign within Wikipedia to enforce higher level standards and convince the community to adopt and follow (democratically and spontaneously) the principles that stand in the ''Citizendium'' [http://www.citizendium.org/fundamentals.html policies]?

A typical objection that is often in my thoughts can be expressed by the following question: If all these well-intentioned people with a sense of common good who are unselfishly sacrifising their spare time to create this project from scratch would input the same amount of energy in improving the existent ''Wikipedia'', wouldn't they be able to achieve all that they will eventually achieve by ''Citizendium'' (and possibly in much shorter time)? The section [[CZ:How_to_get_started_as_an_author#What_makes_us_different.3F | What makes us different?]] indicates some answers, but again, I really see the only strong argument in the fact that authors are requested to use their true identity at ''Citizendium''. For example, I believe that with strong enough engagement of enough people it would be possible to achieve that "in group" abbreviations like "POV" would not be used any more in ''Wikipedia''. In the same way it should be possible to gradually achieve adoption of standards that are ''very well stated'' in the [[CZ:How_to_get_started_as_an_author|Get started]] and [[CZ:Professionalism|Professionalism]] pages. And even about the request to authors to use their true identity, it could be argued that it might not be absolutely necessary. Maybe it would turn equally efficient e.g. to introduce a couple of safeguarding institutes (such as ''administrators'', ''editors'' and ''constables'') in ''Wikipedia'' whose members would be required to appear under their true identity, and to design a good automatic mechanism to block editing access to the people identified as vandals?

For me some answers to questions that I have exposed here are not so clear and I will be glad if anybody presents in response clear arguments that can annihilate all the doubts (I call for broader discussion again). It will be interesting to look back in a couple of years and see how much difference did Citizendium actually make with respect to Wikipedia. In any case, I wish good lock to the project and will try to contribute some work.