We have launched!
As of 2:15 PM, Eastern, we are live. Whether or not you are signed in, you can read everything on the wiki. The pilot project is over — I would argue a solid success.
A long AP feature story announcing our launch is available widely. Here’s a copy from USA Today. There is also an interesting sidebar being titled, “Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia.” (That’s news?)
Hello Larry and everyone at Citizendium.
Congratulations!
All success to you. Citizendium will grow to be one of the tiny minority sites which are truly useful and contribute to our well being.
Chris
Comment by Chris Desouza — March 25, 2007 @ 4:36 pm
congratulations to all. hope this would add fuel to editors and contibutors to go ahead with the project of making citizendium. all the best
indra
Comment by indra adhikari — March 25, 2007 @ 8:53 pm
Hello, I’ve noticed that Citizendium has a whole bunch of live articles which have been taken whole-cloth from Wikipedia without any attribution whatsoever. I believe this is a violation of the GFDL. Could someone work on this? I think it’s only polite to give credit to the actual writers of many of your articles.
Comment by Maggie — March 26, 2007 @ 8:53 am
We’re working on it systematically, in fact–see http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:The_Big_Cleanup
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 26, 2007 @ 9:43 am
Hello!
It’s Mike3 again… Although I’m not going to join the project as I still do not agree
with some of it’s rules — not enough, at least, to *endorse* them especially (when I
discovered that I had to do *that*, my bit of want to join Citizendium disappeared.).
I still have some concerns about the lack of anonymity, and whether or not experts in
the positions they are in will or will not introduce undue mainstream bias (Neutrality
issue.). Although many of the long and nice discussions I had helped to alleviate a
significant level of these concerns, they are not gone fully. But now that the Citizendium
has launched, I can watch it and see how well it performs, to see if my concerns really
do have any basis in fact or not. Finally, I got to read it! Some of the “approved”
articles do seem more encyclopedic than those on Wikipedia, more like the paper
encyclopedias I’ve read. But most of them are on casual, non-controversial topics. Where
I’ll really be curious about is when the Citizendium gets to doing “hot topics” like
abortion, George W. Bush, death penalty, anything labeled as “pseudoscience”,
religion (although a few religion articles are there, it doesn’t seem any have been
“approved” as of yet.), etc. Those are the kind of things where a truly neutral
point of view is difficult to get at — I’ve seen a lot of NPOV debates about them on WP,
and I think *those* are what will really test Citizendium’s neutrality. So I’m really
curious as to how this goes. It could be a good encyclopedia if all works out and the
neutrality I hope for is achieved.
Comment by Mike3 — March 26, 2007 @ 10:27 am
I wish you the best of luck.
Comment by Vlad M. — March 27, 2007 @ 2:20 am
Hi there,thanks for this challenge to wikipedia,there’s nothing like competition and i love it,Naa from Ghana,West Afica
Comment by Naa — March 27, 2007 @ 2:57 am
I just applied to be a contributor.
I didn’t find the Citizendium through a media link, it was a result of reading some web pages that complained about Wikipedia’s arbitrary, clique-y, heavy handed editorial style… Evidentially, there’s quite a few fans out there already for the Citizendium!
If I understand it correctly, it seems to me you have come up with an elegant solution to Wikipedia’s flaws - Have a relatively simple, straightforward initial page… And then let people battle it out on the unapproved sub-pages.
Thank you for starting a knowledge community where people are ultimately allowed - And encouraged! - To make up their own minds!
- Dave
Comment by Dave — March 31, 2007 @ 3:12 pm
I hope this encyclopedia does good.I like facts, and for students , don’t need mistakes. I hope you add tons of articles like wikipedia, but make sure they are accurate.I hope maybe i can add to list , i don’t mind having experts check it. I would like articles to be updated as soon news comes in that is part of article,so can stay current.Good luck with this web site.
Comment by Mark H. — March 31, 2007 @ 9:48 pm
In response to Maggie (March 26)
I am afraid you don’t understand the concept of the GFDL license. GFDL means there is no author, no one can claim ownership. Everything on Wikipedia may be freely published everywhere now and in the future. Once applied, it will remain in affect forever.
Comment by Rienk Kuipers — October 13, 2007 @ 3:50 pm