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I know, I know. . . It's a question that gets asked way too frequently when we're talking about technology, but where the hell are the women in the Citizendium project?
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Chances are you saw mention of the Wikipedia "expert" spin-off around the time it announced its pilot, and then you didn't hear much else. And, like me, you probably promptly forgot about the project.
This weekend my interest in the project's status was renewed when I stumbled across a mention of Citizendium at Ragesoss 2.02, where Sage Ross reports:
I've been keeping my eye on Citizendium, watching as the edit rate dwindles and the policy discussion about licensing stagnates. I hoped that Citizendium would help establish the legitimacy of experts contributing to the work of open content, and that it develop a mutually beneficial relationship with Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, it seems like Citizendium has missed its chance, and is slowly fading out.
(Sage's fuller analysis of the current status of Citizendium may be found here on Wikipedia. She also points us to a podcast that discusses Wikipedia's possible future place, if any, in the academy.)
And so I've been thinking quite a bit about wikis, the intellectual endeavor as represented in U.S. higher education, the distributed and partial nature of knowledge, and what it means to be a public intellectual--as well as how all of these subjects intersect with women's lives.
You can imagine, therefore, that this is going to be a long post.
Mixed feelings about encyclopedia, online or off
As an academic, I have mixed feelings about creating an encyclopedia on a wiki. On the one hand, I'm thrilled that people are finally realizing that knowledge is distributed--that is, it's constructed by multiple people; it doesn't just spring from the mind of a genius. I like employing collaboratively edited projects in the classroom because they reinforce this idea within students.
On the other hand, my students rarely understand the academy's insistence on "legitimate" academic sources--that is, sources that have passed some kind of critical muster, usually peer review by a panel of experts. Nor do my students understand that encyclopedia articles, are, by their very nature, inappropriate sources for academic papers because they omit more than they include. And what they omit is usually the messy, important stuff.
Many academics felt Citizendium held some promise. As a sort of peer-reviewed form of Wikipedia, it would provide a launching point for our students' research projects, a general but authoritative overview of subjects and academic subfields. Such a project, therefore, would require the focused and sustained participation of academics themselves, for academics tend to trust only other academics because they play by the same professional rules. (For Citizendium's own description of the project, see its "About" page.)
In doing research for this post, I can across very few women who have joined the conversation about Citizendium. The debate over its appropriateness is dominated by men. Even more importantly, in skimming the histories of Citizendium's articles, I saw very few contributions by women editors and writers.
What I did find
To better understand the Citizendium project, you should read founder Larry Sanger's essay "Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge." Here's an excerpt:
The most massive encyclopedia in history—well, the most massive thing often called an encyclopedia—is Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has no special role for experts in its content production system. So, can it be relied upon to get mainstream expert opinion right?
Wikipedia's defenders are capable of arguing at great length that expert involvement is not necessary. They are entirely committed to what I call dabblerism, by which I mean the view that no one should have any special role or authority in a content creation system simply on account of their expertise. I apologize for the neologism, but there is no word meaning precisely this view. I did not want to use "amateurism," since that word is opposed to "professionalism," and the view I want to discuss attacks not the privileges of professionals, per se, but of experts. The issue here is not whether people should make money from their work, but whether their special knowledge should give them some special authority. To the latter, dabblerism says no.
Wikipedia's defenders have a great many arguments for dabblerism: non-experts can create great things; the "wisdom of crowds" makes deference to experts unnecessary; studies appear to confirm this in the case
