User:FastLizard4/Is Citizendium Communist?

Is Citizendium a perfect example of active communism?

Why Citizendium will never truly succeed

You've heard about it. Citizendium. Way back when, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger split away and created Citizendium, "The Citizen's Compendium of Everything," in an effort to combat the growing fears of Wikipedia's credibility due to the fact that anyone can truly edit. In basics, Citizendium is a good idea. You log in to edit. But that, like communism, is where the problems begin.

First of all, you must use your real name, which is a major privacy breach for people like me. Their excuse? Well, they made it a little harder to find at the time I am writing this, so I can't say for sure. Anyway, they also said that "our robots.txt file prevents search engines from spidering your userpage and name." However, not all legit search engines currently respond to the robots.txt file, and all non-legit page spiderers also don't respond, meaning that the information you put there is available to the world. While this is mainly a privacy concern, this is really abusive of their power in my view.

Second, after you have logged in to edit, the article must be "approved" by someone on the subject. You know, in the Soviet Union, they had government censors review every piece of public writing and "approve" it for release only if it didn't place the government in a bad light! This sort of thing is not only very unethical in my views for the reason above, but it is, quite simply, not practical! If Citizendium every starts reviving the same kind of editing traffic that Wikipedia does, there will be about 30 requests for approval per second! These sort of things can't guarantee accuracy, either. It is very conceivable that someone could abuse the approval power, and make malicious edits. Sure, it would be caught sooner or later, but the damage would already have been done. If people learn to trust Citizendium with entirety, more people would suffer from inaccuracies on CZ than on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia policy admits that this thing can happen, and has developed a system about it!

Third, another privacy grievance I have is that you must write an autobiography to prove what you know. Right, like I am going to have a list of publications to prove my identity, and will be willing to give out that information. As a teenager, the only "public works" I have to back my identity is my social security number. Like I'm going to give that out to a group of sysops that call themselves "constables." And the "constables" thing is another point that makes CZ look more like a communism.

Below is a list of points they make on their website for "Why Not Edit Wikipedia?" and individual responses for them:

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As a prospective author, you may have questions that we can address effectively.

One question is simple: why not write for Wikipedia instead? We don't wish to be disrespectful to "that other community," but there are some very good reasons.
You are already disrespecting some of the Wikipedia community by putting this here in the first place.

• We have virtually no vandalism, and very few of the "difficult" sorts who are constantly pushing their own idiosyncratic points of view. Several people, independently, have said that we're "Wikipedia for grown-ups." That's because we require real names, at least a brief (and accurate) bio, and the contributor's agreement to follow our Statement of Fundamental Policies.
  • Wikipedia trusts its editors more then you guys do because we are all humans. Also, see my first point (second paragraph and fourth paragraph)
• We have a healthy, reasonable respect for expert knowledge. We make mistakes, of course--they're easy to find in early drafts, which many of our articles are--but you will find relatively few attempts to pass off guesswork and idiosyncratic opinion as expert knowledge.
  • So what is the point of not using Wikipedia if you could apply the same skills there? Also, see point 2 (paragraph 3) for more info about the "approval" system they use.
• A lesser-known reason is that the Citizendium stands for readability and narrative coherence. If you're interested in writing articles that people want to read all the way through, this is the place to do it.
  • Wikipedia already seems to posses this quality, we wouldn't be ranked 9 on the list of most viewed websites.

But, you ask, what are our prospects? They are fairly good. In our wiki's first nine months, we created about as many words as Wikipedia did in its first nine, and our wiki is about as active as Wikipedia was after that amount of time (as Citizendium Editor-in-Chief and Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger, recalls). We have added nearly 3,000 articles and some five million words after about ten months (the first five being a private pilot project). And we're expanding into other kinds of reference content in ways Wikipedia has not tried.
First of all, CZ is currently rated 95,000 on Alexia, where Wikipedia is rated 9. Also, we currently have 6,922,852 articles. Go figure.
In short, we have the better model, and arguably, we are on track to replicate Wikipedia-style growth. As in Wikipedia's case, it will no doubt take some years before our metrics are very impressive. But we're on our way. And we're in it for the long haul!
...See point 2 (paragraph 3) for what will happen if you get to that point

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In conclusion, Citizendium is probably one of the worse wiki-style projects on the web, and should probably change their slogan to "The Approved Citizens' Compendium of Everyting that Has Been Approved"