Open Access News

Larry Sanger, How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals, a talk at the Handelsblatt IT Congress.  Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Citizendium.  Excerpt:

...What I want to talk about now is how we might organize professionals from many different companies and from many different countries to collaborate on information resources that everyone can use, presumably for free. For example, imagine an international federation of journalists getting together to exchange information and summarize ongoing news stories, so that they (and everyone else) could find the latest information about a developing story by looking in one place, rather than having to read many different articles....

What’s really exciting to me is that a growing number of professionals are interested in exploring these possibilities. In the last two or three years I have been approached by quite a few different people and groups, from many different fields, who are interested in starting broad-based, open collaborations for different professional communities and for different purposes....

One of my main objections to Wikipedia is not that it is too open, or too collaborative, but simply that the system makes no special roles for experts. I think it is possible to have a very open and strongly collaborative system that has special roles for people who know a lot about a field.

In fact, that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with a new project that I first announced last September in Berlin, called the Citizendium....

I want to conclude by telling you a story, a science fiction story. What would our future look like ten years down the road, if strong collaboration among professionals were then thriving on a massive scale? It might look like this. You’ll have to forgive as I now let my imagination run wild.

“It is now the year 2017. There have been practically unimaginable amounts of information on the Internet since the early 2000s, but much of it has been of questionable quality. In recent years, however, professional collaborations have created huge amounts of reliable information, and this information is free and easy to find....

“In education, at the primary, secondary, and university levels, the tools of the trade have undergone a complete revolution. Because there are tens of millions of high-quality, expert-approved encyclopedia articles, students and teachers can find reliable information on every topic they study amazingly quickly. These articles are integrated with original sources, all of which are available digitally now....

“Most of us no longer spend much time finding or organizing information, because that is already done for us by an international army of collaborators; we spend our time, instead, directly accessing and personally making sense of the information....

“The profoundly easy access to every sort of information now in 2017 has made us view information less as a proprietary thing, controlled by powerful elites, and more as a shared thing, like oxygen, open to whomever is interested in it. And since there is so little friction in discovering what is known in a field, innovation has accelerated even faster than it had been in previous generations.

“But arguably the most stunning impact of the collaborative revolution has been on India, China, and increasingly, many other countries in the developing world. In every corner of the world with access to the Internet, a new Enlightenment is taking place, because the intellectuals in each different country of the world are no longer confined to their own books and magazines and the few that they are able to import from abroad. They have access to the same information as the stock broker in New York City, and the college professor at Oxford, and the computer programmer in Berlin....