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Leslie Brooks has a short piece up asking “where the hell are the women in the Citizendium project?” I’m not impressed by the tone of the piece itself, but I think it is a good question (we do have more male than female contributors). Really, I think the question should be expanded to women and wikis in general– I would imagine that Wikipedia may be equally or moreso biased toward male contributors, but it’s just easier to tally up contributions by gender when people are editing under their real names. Regardless, engaging both male and female contributors is something we really need to think about.

I’m writing this as a personal response to Leslie’s blog post, not an official rejoinder.

Dear Leslie,

You can criticize with the intent to help, you can criticize with the intent to explore greater philosophical issues, or you can criticize to produce a neat little snarky blog post. I feel your post straddles the second and third.

Honestly, I think you cover some interesting philosophical ground– maybe wikis can be (tend to be?) biased against women (why is that?). It could be that, by bringing in many academic experts, Citizendium brings some of the biases you mention. I don’t know– but I find these issues interesting and I’d like to hear more.

But you don’t do real dialog about these issues any favors by only linking to criticisms of us (most of which I consider long-since rebutted) and ignoring all the other interesting things and quality dialog going on at Citizendium, nor by ignoring the most valid point of comparison (Wikipedia), nor by not offering any suggestions on what to do.

So I ask you, Leslie– please show your colors. Either make some suggestions on what we can do to help attract female contributors (keeping in mind there are many constraints involved with building an encyclopedia), or don’t. With respect, I submit that- particularly when dealing with volunteers- it takes more to make a positive difference in the world than a snarky blog post.

In the end, I think we’re on the same side. We all want Citizendium to be a welcoming place for female contributors (for philosophical, practical, and moral reasons), and we at Citizendium have thought about the issue and take it very seriously. We’re a group of volunteers that are juggling a lot of initiatives, and sometimes worthy causes don’t get the attention we would like to give them. If you give us a good, easy-to-implement idea, we very well may divert some of our precious, finite resources into it. We would love to have more women editing at Citizendium and are committed to it! And so if you have suggestions on what we can do to bring this about, we’d love to hear them.

But if you do want to suggest changes to Citizendium (and this goes for anyone), please:
1. don’t try to hijack our deliberation process with name-calling like Kali Tal did– she did her cause (a good cause) no favors by her actions– and
2. keep in mind that the vast majority of us are volunteers, that we’re operating under many (and sometimes non-obvious, complex) constraints connected to our main goal, that of building an encyclopedia, and that assuming good faith, being respectful of those you’d like to influence, and meeting people halfway aren’t just platitudes– they’re an important part of effectively working with people and bringing about the change you want.

So, thank you for raising the philosophical issue, Leslie– and I mean that sincerely– but I wish you had put more meat and more respect into your article.

Update, 7-24-07: Interested readers, please see the discussion attached to my crosspost on the Citizendium blog.

From the New York Times article Make Money, Save the World, on efforts to decompartmentalize modern philanthropy by encouraging ‘for-benefit corporations’ or ‘for-profit charities’:

“There’s a big movement out there that is not yet recognized as a movement,” said R. Todd Johnson, a lawyer in San Francisco who is working to create an online wiki to engage in the give and take of information for what he calls “for-benefit corporations,” another name for fourth-sector activities. […] Still, whatever participants call it, the fourth sector faces challenges. Current legal and tax structures draw strict lines between for-profits and nonprofits, and fiduciary obligations prevent asset managers from making investments with any aim other than maximizing profit.

[…] “What we are constantly coming up against is our tax laws and our culture,” Ms. Berry said. “The whole fabric of society wants us to make money on one side and do good with it on the other. What we’re saying is: What if we did both things at once?”

She and others argue that current laws, tax structures and definitions of fiduciary responsibility encourage companies to shift costs onto society.

Mahalo, as I noted in my launch coverage back in May, is “a search engine where users get hand-crafted portal-like results for common search queries.” Mahalo’s founder Jason Calacanis and I are both connected to Larry Sanger, so between that and being fairly intrigued by the idea I’ve kept my eye on the project.

I like Mahalo. It gives me good content for certain searches, and gosh darnit, it’s friendly. But my major philosophical problem with Mahalo, which I laid out here, is that it’s not really on the correct side of the technology curve. Having humans make portals for common search terms may work well compared to other options today, but algorithm-based search (e.g., Google) will keep getting better and better in almost every metric whereas human-based search can’t*. Google is pretty much guaranteed to improve over time, because it can benefit from iterative algorithm tweaks, large and small, but Mahalo is based on non-iterative human labor and so has to work for every inch of improvement on every page (and simultaneously spend many man-hours battling page rot). I’m not going doom-and-gloom on Mahalo, because I think they’ve got some really good stuff going on, but let’s be honest– it’s a tough spot to be in.

*Granted, I expect Mahalo to do cool things with crowdsourcing additional links on topics and getting editors to filter and sort the best submissions. This sort of strategy has worked for Slashdot– but it’s an unproven technology in search. In some fashion I think Mahalo will be able to crowdsource freshness, but it may not be enough to keep every page as fresh as one would like.

Essentially, I believe Mahalo needs something up its sleeve to stay competitive in the future, something that can connect it to the world of the algorithm. History seems to bear this out: Yahoo’s human-crafted web directory looked as good on paper then as Mahalo’s human-crafted search portal strategy does now— but Google’s algorithms ate Yahoo’s lunch. Similarly, the human-powered DMOZ just couldn’t compete against Google. Google’s algorithmic approach allows it to have a “special sauce” of algorithms, if/then context switches, and exceptions that it can apply to almost every page on the internet, tweak at will, and combine with sophisticated intent predictors drawn from users’ searches to get pretty great search results. This is a very powerful, iterative strategy, and it allows Google to keep its results fresh without any human overhead. I would generalize this as ‘Technological progress in search is relentless and algorithms are impressively tweakable, scalable, and improvable compared to human evaluation, and Google is very good at using these these facts to eat peoples’ lunches.’

Obviously I don’t have The Solution for how Mahalo should try to answer Google. I do think Mahalo is right to try something new, since nobody’s had any luck trying to out-Google Google, and I also think Mahalo’s on to something with its “search portal” idea. But I can’t get away from the feeling that turning one’s back on algorithms is trying to swim against the current.

So here’s my two-part idea: (1) build a back-end to allow Mahalo to automatically import tagged content into its search portals and (2). use algorithms to figure out what tagged content is worth bringing in.

(1) The tagged-content import system: this setup would draw in relevant, tagged content from elsewhere (like Flickr and Youtube, but blogs, too– the sky’s the limit) to automatically populate e.g., a “content grab-bag” section of Mahalo portals, perhaps heavily weighted toward images, with thumbnails. If someone’s at the Mahalo portal for Fugu, most content tagged Fugu will be quite relevant, and there are often powerful indications of how good tagged content is (community ratings, views, links, etc) which could give sorting methods plenty of fodder to work with. Basically, there’s lots of great tagged content of all stripes out there, tags enable more streamlined and fresher aggregation, and content aggregation is what Mahalo is all about. It seems like a pretty natural fit.

(2) Using algorithms (not editors) to power the system: by using algorithms, adding this sort of content doesn’t add extra effort per page and it also automatically stays fresh. I think it’s the perfect complement to the human-crafted search results and would help Mahalo portals stay dynamic. Basically, it’s the perfect toehold for introducing and benefiting from algorithms in Mahalo. That said, you could certainly use the tagged content import system with editors making the calls instead of algorithms… it’d just be a lot more man-hours and it wouldn’t stay as fresh. And there might not be as much of a point, since the editor could go out, find, and add such content independently. What might be the most attractive option is a hybrid algorithm-editor solution, where algorithms automatically populate sections of Mahalo with tagged content once per day, but editors go through and veto anything that doesn’t fit. Algorithms could be tweaked to try to give more ‘relevant/informative’ content or more ‘fun’ content, depending on the topic (this might not be in the first system revision!).

Eventually, Mahalo could branch out to become a hub which aggregates all sorts of tagged content on a given topic and displays them based on algorithm, user, and/or editor input… or people could submit various types of content and each Mahalo page could be somewhere between a Digg/Slashdot hybrid for almost any type of content on that specific topic (wouldn’t that be cool?). But that’s getting a little far afield. In the short-term, I think the combination of human-crafted results and being able to dynamically populate search portals with fun & relevant content would serve Mahalo well. It’s a combination that Google can’t have, and it’d also give Mahalo a leg up on Wikipedia as a portal to the freshest and most diverse content on a topic.

A tagging back-end would also help integrate some local search capabilities into Mahalo: Mahalo could determine a user’s location through various means (whether their search phrase included a location, by tracing their IP, by user preferences, or with a “where are you?” input box), and then return relevant content that was also tagged with their location (and synonyms).

Lest I get ahead of myself, this idea isn’t an automatic homerun. It’s new and untested- I don’t know of anybody who’s done this sort of content aggregation based on tags. Largely, this idea would depend on figuring out clever ways to source and sort through tagged content (hey, if you didn’t want to roll your own algorithms right away maybe you could somehow use a Google appliance to help sort tagged content!), and the proof would be in the relevance of results. It might be a homerun and it might be a dud. But given the potential benefits (especially in freshness) and near-effortless scalability to all Mahalo pages, it sure seems worth testing.

Bottom line: Mahalo’s pretty darn cool as-is (as a Minnesotan, I like how friendly it seems), and I don’t doubt that Jason has some further ideas up his sleeve. But using tags and algorithms to aggregate content, though no magic bullet, seems like a promising direction which would allow Mahalo to effortlessly go local, keep pages fresh, and start to take advantage of algorithms while still keeping true to its core vision of being “human-powered search”.

Edit, 7-13-07: It seems to me that a good strategy for Mahalo is fostering communities around its portal pages. Communities like dynamic content, thus my suggestion of dynamically bringing in tagged content (it’s an inexpensive way to keep things fresh). Per a previous email, I’d also suggest setting up some sort of ‘alert’ system, where Mahalo sets up automatic Google searches for all the terms they’ve done, and if any sites that weren’t originally in (for instance) the Google top 10 break into the Google top 5, that entry gets flagged as “there’s something happening on this search term that might make our portal stale — have a guide check it out”.

From a column entitled “How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community“:

Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling — removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly — so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.

Clever.

Now, the astute reader may object that this is more of an anecdote than a quote– so here’s your official quote of the week, from famed neuroscientist György Buzsáki when asked what coursework he might do differently in hindsight: I’ve often wondered about going into neuroscience so I found this particularly poignant.

We do not quite understand where our curiosity and motivation come from. Occasionally, we dream up an ideal life with constant happiness and success but attempts to define universal happiness and success always fail. Even if I confine your question to the “most effective road to systems neuroscience”, it is hard to make up an ideal curriculum. Perhaps, I wish I had learned more math and engineering, and got exposed to a world-class laboratory environment from the beginning. But whereas possession of tools is useful in answering questions, the critical factors in science seem to relate to asking an important question and building up a sufficiently intense motivation to solve it. Living in a suppressive regime at the time when my interest in the brain emerged made me focus on inhibition. This may not have happened under other conditions. Hardship and failure can be as formative of character and creativity as a barrage of positive feedback and supportive advisors. (emphasis added).