Tom Morris

Citizendium: the wiki for grown ups

I have recently been participating in the Citizendium, a new wiki encyclopedia that was set up to try and build an encyclopedia without some of the problems with Wikipedia. Citizendium is a project started by Larry Sanger who co-founded Wikipedia.

What’s different about Citizendium? Well, one of the primary differences is that you have to register in order to edit, and you have to register with your real name and provide a brief description of who you are, which is verified before you can participate. This typically takes 24 hours. Another difference is the split between three classes of user: authors, editors and constables. Authors are fairly obviously the people who edit the wiki.

Editors are people with a specific, high-level, real world expertise in a subject - usually signified by having a Ph.D in the subject (equivalent expertise is accepted for non-academic subjects). Editors can check over articles and then mark them as ‘edited’. This is basically freezing their contents - creating a stable branch which they validate. On those articles, work is then conducted on the ‘Draft’ branch, which the editor then moves over into the stable, public-facing branch periodically. This is to prevent you going to the wiki and looking up, oh, Immanuel Kant and getting back “Kant was a big willy-head. Yours, x_LaRouche_x!”

Constables are there to solve dust-ups in the Citizendium community. They serve much the same function as administrators, but they do not make any decisions about content. There are rules about separation of powers - constables can make decisions only about pages they aren’t involved in writing.

The community also has pretty strong rules about not engaging in personal attacks. The site encourages people to avoid writing “encyclopedese” - preferring well-constructed and non-boring prose.

It’s certainly a fun place to be. Yesterday we had the monthly Write-A-Thon, where people have an online party trying to crank out a lot of new pages in a day. I’ve started pages on Yochai Benkler, Humanism, Tim Berners-Lee, Capital punishment, Recieved Pronunciation and Prayer. Before the Write-A-Thon, I’ve also written pages on Continental philosophy, Unicode, Alternative medicine and more.

It’s tremendous fun contributing to Citizendium, and it’s something I’d encourage you to do. Request an account and join in. I’m trying to organise the Citizendium Local Library Storm - if you are in or near London and are interested, please do shout.

ISPs: let my people go unlimited!

Ashley Highfield has blogged about a report arguing that the iPlayer has changed how broadband should be offered. The Telegraph says that television should be streamed rather than offered via download. Bullshit!

Let’s take a common use case - you want to watch a programme again. If you have a download sitting on your desktop, you can watch it as many times as you like. Okay, there are problems for the BBC with rights-holders, lawyers and other corporation bureaucracy. I don’t really give a shit. The user experience of downloaded files is a good one. You can watch them as much as you like, back them up to a DVD and keep watching them forever. Give me that over streaming anyday, where you have to download the same file over and over again every time you watch it.

I think that Trading Standards and other consumer regulators need to step in and slap the “unlimited” broadband peddlers with a giant wet fish. They are lying to their customers. If you shape P2P traffic, you are not providing an unlimited service, you are limiting the speed for one application. If you have a “fair use policy”, you are not providing an unlimited service, you are limiting it - but just doing it vaguely. I have membership of a library in London, which I pay an annual subscription for. This subscription entitles me to access the library at any time it’s open. Imagine the “fair use” version. You are allowed to come into the library, but if you use it more than an arbitrary and undefined amount each month, we will Have Words With You. Fuck that!

The ISPs have entered a difficult business, and are whining. They need to invest in infrastructure, rather than bitch to journalists that users are using the unlimited services which they have been solved. Until they significantly increase their infrastructure investment, everything the ISPs say is crocodile tears.

Don’t worry. The iPlayer will still be irrelevant in all this. Anyone who’s got more than three braincells will get their television through the Medium That Of Which We Cannot Dare Speak Of.