A kinder, truer Wikipedia?
Excellent writeup of the Citizendium by Barbara Quint.
They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but over the last year, the venerable (in Internet time) Wikipedia online encyclopedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) has faced an international furor over its reliability and accuracy. The collaborative processes used to create the service have been tweaked, but concerns still rumble through the Web. Now one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has begun development of a competitive service, the Citizendium or “Citizen’s Compendium” (http://www.citizendium.org). Sanger was one of the first and most authoritative voices to question the untrammeled openness of the Wikipedia procedures. While retaining his true believer status in support of the wiki model of public collaboration, Sanger intends to generate a new community ethos that defers to the authority of expert editors and requires contributors to use their own names, without the shield of anonymity. The main source for Citizendium content, however, will consist of Wikipedia itself as reviewed, edited, supplemented, and vetted by Citizendium. Original articles will also be part of the new service. …