Hi all, This is about a recent conference talk on Wikipedia which mentioned Citizendium and why it will supposedly fail.
--- On 7th September I attended a talk at Edinburgh University by Dr Greg Myers, professor of rhetoric and communication at the UK's Lancaster University, entitled entitled 'Technology, Interaction, and the Construction of Facts in Wikipedia'. http://www.baal.org.uk/conf2007/abstracts.pdf (British Association for Applied Linguistics conference abstract, p.69) http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/297 (Greg Myers) http://www.citizendium.org/whyczwillsucceed.html The talk was mostly about the ways Wikipedians converse on-line, using lots of jargon like POV (point of view) or renderings of spoken language like 'erm' to represent themselves and characterise others, but he did mention Citizendium - to claim it would never work. Why? Myers, in what was otherwise a very good talk about the pragmatics of wiki discussion and 'edit wars', sadly fell into the double trap of assuming that (a) Citizendium is experts-only; and (b) because there are fewer articles and a lower edit rate, it'll never be able to compete with Wikipedia. The counter-arguments we all know, but the point is that these assumptions seem pervasive, and have infiltrated academic discourse. Myers is no Wikipedia-lover, though. He *did* mention anonymity in broadly negative tones, and noted that on Wikipedia expertise is generally unrecognised as meriting authority - so we do see observations that Wikipedia is an unreliable reseource. But Myers's conviction that Citizendium would almost certainly never work seemed surprisingly passionate, as though the academic community love the idea of Wikipedia being a free forum for anyone to build. Indeed, one delegate in the audience seemed to think Wikipedia was an anarchist's heaven (cf. recent WikiScanner controversy, revealing sympathetic edits made by corporations and governments). No-one criticised Wikipedia, and it's a pity we ran out of time before I was able to reveal my identity and take him to task over Citizendium! John Stephenson (constable) _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
