Archive:Why I contribute to CZ

Here is a collection of personal explanations of why we contribute to the Citizendium (CZ).

Please place testimonials in alphabetical order. Don't worry about repeating what others say; write what you think.

Nick Gardner

A long-retired economic adviser, I stumbled upon Citizendium, started tinkering with one of its articles, and became absorbed with the task of conveying the meaning of a maze of mathematics and charts to intelligent people who were familiar with neither. Finding myself in largely unoccupied territory, I then rambled around, starting an article here and there and waiting expectantly for expressions of dissent or agreement from the dozen or two people listed as economics authors. Getting no response from them or anyone else, I think I would have given up had it not been for some words of interest and encouragement from Martin Baldwin-Edwards. (By this time I had already come to believe –for reasons that I shall explain - that I had been writing stuff that people who read it would find interesting and useful.) Martin had proposed a prioritised programme of work to fill in the gaps in CZs coverage of economics, and I set myself to work on that programme. I then found that there had been many advances in economics since I had last tried to keep abreast of it , and I started getting a lot of satisfaction from a fresh learning experience. I still am. But all of this is perhaps too personal to me to be of interest to others, so I shall turn to my reason for believing in the value of citizendium.

Like many another working economist, I had become aware of the view among intelligent and well-educated “laymen” that economists were incapable of agreeing upon anything, had lost contact with reality, and were given to delusions of superior understanding of questions that were really only a matter of commonsense. I had also become aware that, although there was more than a grain of truth in that view of the practice of economics, much of the commonsense DIY economics of those intelligent laymen was sadly mistaken – with sometimes damaging consequences to them and others. So there – I thought – was a task worth undertaking: to find, understand and explain those developments of economic theory that were firmly connected to reality by good empirical evidence, as well as explaining some of the apparently promising ideas that had not yet attained that status. I was convinced that it had to be done without using the charts and higher mathematics which are the tools of the academic economist’s trade (and which the academics are prone to display to impress their readers), and without burdening the reader with a lot of inessential intellectual history, so I adopted the practice of consigning all of that stuff to subpages (where it might help economics students to impress their tutors). In that way I hoped to avoid some of the manifest shortcomings of the Wikipedia treatment of economics.

So I value Citizendium for letting me do those things, but mainly because I see others taking the same approach to other subjects – often to very impressive effect. It is a matter of great regret to me that I have not been able to provoke lively discussions with fellow-economists, and I still yearn for the development of a collegiate process of generating articles - but maybe that will come in time.

Larry Sanger

I started the Citizendium partly in order to give the world a better alternative to Wikipedia, but to put it positively, because I saw an enormous and unexploited opportunity to bring everyone together to create a truly high-quality free reference resource. (For more in this vein, see CZ:Why Citizendium?)

But why do I continue to lead and contribute to CZ? I believe in this project. We are approaching 10,000 articles, which I believe will be a psychologically important milestone. Our articles tend to be substantial, well-written, and, when not actually authoritative, well on their way to being so. We have a robust community of self-starting intellectuals, independent thinkers who are "early adopters." I am especially proud of the fact that, with a few exceptions aside, we are able to work together as colleagues, and this in spite of the fact that no one invited us specifically; we personally chose to learn about the website and then participate. It is a testiment to what is possible, that we can work together, experts and the general public working shoulder-to-shoulder, as well as we do. But CZ is what it is not because I or anyone planned it, but because of the very laudable individual initiative of over a thousand contributors, and hundreds of regular contributors. It fills me with pride to think that we have shown the world that Web 2.0 with "gentle expert guidance," with "village elders wandering the bazaar," can actually be made to work, visionless naysayers aside.

CZ is continuing to grow steadily, and I still maintain that there will come a time, in the perhaps not-too-distant future, when we will reach a tipping point, and we will be flooded with a lot of new people who will make us grow much faster indeed. But the project even in its present state is worthwhile. Our articles tend to begin life at a high level of quality, and for the most part they steadily improve. We are approaching a point where we will actually be useful as a general information resource, and difficult for our detractors to ignore. Because we are strongly collaborative and are seriously committed to neutrality, we do have an excellent chance of becoming, after some more years (it is hard to say how long), the most reliable general information resource online, period--outshining Wikipedia, of course, but also Britannica and others as well. --Larry Sanger 18:14, 3 November 2008 (UTC)