All,
I don't know how Scott Martin got on our Waitlist, but there was his email address, listed in June. I didn't add it, honest. My guess? He forgot that he added it himself. I don't send random people invites, trust me. We've got enough to deal with as it is.
I never bought into a "cult of the expert." My interest has always been to crowdsource high-quality, reliable information. I wasn't seeing it come out of Wikipedia, and thought perhaps a slight rebooting, with Citizendium, might gain traction. It was always an experiment, and I'm glad it's still kicking, FWIW.
Infobitt--which I can't discuss in any detail here--is an attempt to tackle the same problem in a completely different way, and to crowdsource something nobody has ever had any luck crowdsourcing before: front page news.
As people who know me well know--which means, maybe, one of you--my heart really is with crowdsourcing, and while I still think experts are crucial to reviewing information (and Wikipedia ought to adopt an expert review process, as I first said 12 years ago), I don't have anything remotely resembling an expert fetish. I regularly flout expert opinion in my own field of training (philosophy), in writing about
early childhood education, and otherwise. I merely hold the ordinary unremarkable opinion that experts, when opining about their fields of expertise, are generally better sources than the rest of us, and I think this is something that online content designers ought to bear in mind.
Will Infobitt have expert managers? No.
Will Infobitt have a bias? That depends on the participants, and it will also depend on our success in implementing a certain feature that I won't describe. Generally, the system will naturally exert a moderating influence on extreme opinions. I'd love to tell you all about why we should crowdsource news, and what the crowd can do, but my PR person would kill me.
I've started a variety of sites because I love starting things. I seem to start losing interest as the maintenance phase kicks in. Infobitt will probably be different, for reasons I won't explain right now.
I'll say it once again for the peanut gallery, who can actually look these things up on my website: Wikipedia was my idea. I formulated the original proposition, and was given a very free rein to manage the project, as Jimmy Wales was very much a "hands off" manager; after all, starting a free encyclopedia was the job the Bomis partnership hired me to perform. I named the project and led it for its first 14 months. It wouldn't exist if I had not started it. If I didn't insist that it was going to be an encyclopedia, against a bunch of people who wanted to be free to make it whatever it wanted to be, no encyclopedia would have emerged. In the process of correcting various people in their various ways of not making an encyclopedia, I more or less defined--with the help of many others, of course--how to use a wiki, driven by a wonderfully wide-open community, to make an encyclopedia. Nobody knew how to do it before I showed them how, day in and day out. I took a lot of flak for doing it, too. A lot of people got very mad at me when I told them, for example, that dictionary definitions are not encyclopedia articles, or that they can't include their half-baked theories in an encyclopedia article, or whatever. Unless there were someone in charge of the project actually making it clear that the community wouldn't tolerate certain kinds of bullshit, the site would have quickly been filled with bullshit, as most wikis up to that point were. Before Wikipedia, nobody knew how to use wikis to build an information repository of the sort associated with Wikipedia (and Wikia, and many corporate and expert wikis). You know, at the same time Wikipedia started, Bomis started a Bomis wiki. I didn't participate. It went totally to hell. It was a waste of time. Why? Because nobody at Bomis was insisting on any sort of mission, rules, or standards for the Bomis wiki. Anyway, the point is that on Wikipedia, I showed people the basics, and actually it took less than 14 months to show them the basics. Unfortunately, it would have taken longer than 14 months to show them how it should really be done, but let's not go there.
As to WatchKnowLearn, last time I looked, it was doing great. It's a niche site, for teachers, who love it. And even more of a niche site,
ReadingBear.org, hasn't been out long enough to get a lot of traffic. Reading Bear is the #1 Google result for "free phonics"; WKL is #5 for "educational videos". Another site I helped start,
Encyclopedia of Earth (I wrote planning documents, original policy including neutrality statements, closely advised the editor-in-chief in the early stages in 2005-6), is #1 for "earth science encyclopedia." I'm actually quite proud of all of these. They're educational and non-profit and (like Citizendium) not well-funded (actually, EoE might be); but they were time well-spent.
Infobitt is, suffice it to say, a different kettle of fish from all of these. Don't worry, when it's launched, I'll enjoy talking your ear off about it. I'm quite excited about it.
