Bridging the Pro/Am Divide
May 11, 2009
The term ProAm or Professional Amateurs refers to people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards. In a new media context ProAms need not have any publicly recognised Journalism credentials, however they may have certain knowledge and skills required to make an effective contribution to a Wiki by becoming a citizen journalist. For the purpose of this blog, I will talk about how ProAms contribute as citizen journalists on Wikipedia and Citizendium.
Wikipedia was co-founded by Larry Sanger. Sanger had issues with the reliability of the Wikipedia, and in response, formed Citizendium. Sanger identified some core prinicples relating to why Wikipedia works. These are open content license, focus on the encyclopaedia, openness, ease of editing, collaborate radically, authors don’t sign articles, it offers unedited, unapproved content for further development, neutrality, it started with a core of good people, and it enjoys the Google effect. Ironically, Citizendium undermines these principles and doesn’t acknowledge the social dynamics Wikipedia does. It is much more structured, relies on reputation, and relates to professional image. Citizendium aims to be more like a traditional encyclopedia. This is obvious through the presentation of the site with its formal grey colour and sober structure.
Citizendium stresses that it is not a top down, dictatorship but rather a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules. It claims to be more of a public project guided by experts.
Wikipedia is more ad-hoc and encourages equipotentiality and follows community protocols. In contrast, citizendium is based on a hierarchy using only authors and editors who are experts in their knowledge field. If you want to become an editor of Citizendium you must first submit a CV and your articles have to be approved. This differs to Wikipedia which favours consensus over credentials.
I think Citizendium and Wikipedia are actually more similar than they appear as they both have a strong focus on amateur journalists. The key difference between them is the editorial process. The ProAm debate is based on what works and what doesn’t work and which has most to contribute: experts or amateurs? producers or produsers? hierarchies or heterarchies? taxonomies or folksonomies?
Bruns says that expert influences should be ‘organic’ members of their community rather than ‘artificially introduced foreign bodies’ and that their influence on the community is as much from an organic status of leadership rather than externally recognised expertise. Kevin Kelly’s perspective on what works is that ‘the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add, design and top-down control to get to where we want to go’. I think that a balance between, and appropriate recognition of both traditional experts and community produsers is important for the future of collaborative engagement.
I conducted a search for ‘new media’ on both sites with interesting results. Wikipedia’s response was that ‘new media was in need of attention from an expert on the subject. In addition, the tone of the information they did have may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. There were no matches for ‘new media’ on Citizendium. These results indicate the immediacy of Wikipedia and show how it can act as a repository of current issues. The editorial processes of Citizendium such as submitting a CV to be an editor, may be a deterrant for participants, which can lead to a time-lag in current information updates.
I completely agree with what you are saying about the need for a balance between professionals and amateurs. I don’t think one can exist (or at least reach its full potential) without the other. Without the professionals, the amateurs would not have had the original content to feed off in order to create their own content. Leadbeater and Oakley say that “to be a creative producer it helps to be an avid consumer” which I think sums up my opinion quite nicely.
I like the example you gave about the search you did for “New Media”. I think that highlights the double-edged-sword that is Wiki; you can have quick but perhaps questionable data or something considered to be perfect but it takes much longer to come out. I say ‘considered to be perfect’ because I don’t necessarily believe something written by an ‘academic’ is always going to be one hundred percent accurate. However, as a whole, material written by an academics is likely to be accurate more of the time.
Overall, I think I agree with your general stance on Wikipedia, although I am not really a fan of Citizendium. I think if you are going down that road, using academic or “professional” articles, you might as well use Britannica.
Thanks for your comment
Your views on the need of balance between professionals and amateurs are really well grounded in theory and I agree with n6905633 above that such a balance cannot be attained without the presence of both professionals and amateurs in a Produasge environment. As Pro-Am roles continue to evolve in a Produsage environment the debate surrounding its consequences becomes ever increasing, or as Flew puts it, when Pro-Ams are networked together, they can have a huge impact on politics and culture, economics and development. By exploring Pro-Ams in the context of citizendium and Wikipedia really allows for a greater understanding of the role it is playing in a new media environment. And I think it highlights that ideas on Pro-Ams are not so black and white, and there is in fact a lot of grey area. The example of the ‘new media’ search into Wikipedia I think further illustrates this. And I have to say that I agree that the editorial process of citizendium of submitting a CV to be an editor is a big deterrent for participants. But I have to say I think that Pro Ams provides societies with innovation, deeper social capital and healthier democracy as they are creating new, distributed organisational models that are innovative, adaptive and low-cost.
hi Lozzamae!
Interesting blog! From the response of comments below, it really seems that you have sparked a common flare that other bloggers simply can’t over look. Reading over your blog ‘Bridging the Pro/Am Divide’ gave me a much deeper understanding of ‘professional amateurs’ and the inner workings of the divide between the pro’s, and the am’s. In particular I found your concluding paragraph to be of great interest, especially the way in which you obtained your results to justify your argument. Searching ‘new media’ in web sites such as wikipedia (the heterarchial user led encyclopedia) and citizendium (the encyclopedia to which only scholars can contribute) was an innovative way to uncover relevant information in order to distinguish the differences and similarities between the two sites. Clearly though, there was a difference and a significant difference. Wikipedia, having a larger user community, seemed to be up to date with ‘new age’ terms, and in comparison, citizendium displayed no search results and was obviously not as up to date, despite having an all academic work force. Your argument has been in the back of my mind for some time, though I haven’t managed to get it out in words. The way in which you proved the success of the amateur over the professional has made your argument easy to understand and furthermore it was supported by relative justification.
Well done on a great post!