* I wish everyone associated with CZ the best of luck, but now I’m kind of puzzled: if CZ is all about radical epistemic egalitarianism, then what is Wikipedia? I suppose you explain this in this essay that I don’t have time to read now….

* I think CZ is “nostalgia” in the sense that the film genre of “the Western” is about “nostalgia” because it is recalling a past that never existed. I think the basic goal of CZ as I understand it– to get to a document is “more true” through a process that has “more decorum” — is in this sense nostalgic.

* Here’s an interesting link about “soft peer review,” which has come up in a couple of things I’ve read lately about “open source” peer review:

http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/2007/soft-peer-review-social-software-and-distributed-scientific-evaluation/

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet either….

I agree with you that traditional encyclopedias are mostly replaced by the Internet–especially Wikipedia, and in a few years, CZ. Why not build a better mousetrap? If CZ can’t aspire to more than “better fast food”–which I think deeply underestimates our potential–why not better fast food, then?

As to the county fair/nostalgia thing, I’m sorry, but this is silly. I used the metaphor, but I did not advert to “nostalgia”–you did. And I disagree. I went to a county fair last fall and saw lots of people having fun and generally behaving themselves well. I’m sure I’ll go to many more in the years to come. Calling it “nostalgia” is a lame attempt to sidestep the necessity of an argument. The implied conclusion is that CZ represents failed methods of the past. But it does not; if you think it does, sorry, you are simply uninformed about what our methods even are.

As to your criticisms of me not “engaging in conversation”–you’re just whistling dixie. If posting words that directly respond to you isn’t conversation, then what is? Moreover, I announced what I was doing was correcting you–because you got a long wrong, which you did. Then you said “that’s wrong”–and then proceeded to do much the same thing yourself, as far as I can tell. This meta-discussion is unnecessary. But then, as a rhetorician, you must love this, so don’t let me stop you. ;-)

Despite that, I thought I’d comment on some of what you are saying here.

I think the internet in general and tools/sites like google and wikipedia in particular have made general knowledge encyclopedias more or less obsolete. My parents used to have an encyclopedia set, and I remember when I was a kid, 30 or more years ago and long before I was messing with the Internets, looking stuff up in there I was curious about. Look up “Elephant,” and there’s the entry on elephants– at least some general information. Now, I look up “Elephant” online, and I get my general info from all kinds of different sites, including wikipedia and CZ, and I can find both general and much more specific and much more current information.

So while I suppose it’s worthwhile to strive to make something like CZ as accurate or as good or whatever as possible, it seems to me like you’re trying to invent a better mousetrap when the current mousetrap seems to work pretty darn good. Or, taking the view that all general interest encyclopedias are inherently cannot be truly viable/always reliable/authoritative, it seems to me that CV is trying to be a better fast food mean than wikipedia. I am not sure that’s necessary.

As for the county fair thing: that’s a comparison that you made, not me, and, intentional or not, I took your comparison as an image of a past that really didn’t exist. That’s nostalgia.

If you think that academic publishing is always a process full of dialectical decorum and without arguments, politics, bad feelings, and even “flames:” well, then I can say that you have never been the victim of a particularly nasty blind review, you have not been included/excluded from a book collection based on a personal relationship rather than the merit of the work, you have not argued about the inclusion of a point in an article with an editor, you have not been that editor who has had to have that argument with a writer, and you have not been on a tenure and promotion committee that wondered if a colleague’s work actually constituted “real scholarship” or not. I have literally seen or been in all of these different spots over the last 15 or so years. I think it’s fair to say that academic decorum generally limits/prevents the “potty mouth” and “I know you are, but what am I?” sort of conversations that often appear on Wikipedia. But the academic review process is far from pure, believe me.

And the academic review process and what constitutes an academic publication has been under question for some time now. I’ve published about this in a couple of different places/forums. I think that Poe’s effort at self-publishing many years ago now was a good example of that. The online peer review going on with Grand Text Auto is a good example of that. In short, I think folks interested in things like media studies, composition, culture studies, etc., are pursuing a lot of different ways of publishing that’s different from the old school process.

On CZ, everyone, not just real experts, can “vet” articles. Experts can approve articles; perhaps that’s what you meant by “vet.”

I do see CZ in part as an antidote to the bad elements of anarchy and chaos online (including Wikipedia), while retaining the positive “creative chaos” of any bottom-up, open community. But it is much more than that; our project is not well defined as an “antidote” to anything other than, perhaps, sheer ignorance.

Marshall’s narrative about my time on Wikipedia was rather simplistic. If you want a more colorful, fuller account, read my own memoir, which appeared on Slashdot. I’m not sure I am an “angry guy,” or at least, not angrier than most. I have rarely been accused of being terribly an angry person, anyway. You might prefer that I be an angry and hence irrational person, because that would make me easier to dismiss. Sorry to disappoint. :-)

What’s the point of encyclopedias? That’s a puzzling question; use your imagination. Reference works have various uses, don’t they? Would it have a point only if you could allow your students to cite it? Why assume that?

Friend, speaking as philosopher to rhetorician, let me assure you that you know absolutely nothing about what I think of philosophy, neutrality, or knowledge. Suffice it to say that Plato is one of my least favorite philosophers, though I love Socrates.

The comparison of CZ to a county fair, and things like expert review and politeness, cannot seriously dismissed as “nostalgia.” That’s just silly. Academia itself takes its own review processes and dialectical decorum very seriously: you wouldn’t say it’s “nostalgic” to describe such processes and decorum, would you? Anyway, if you spent time on CZ, you would recognize (perhaps only grudgingly) that we do indeed have in fact what you dismiss as “nostalgia.” If it’s a dream, we’re livin’ the dream! :-)