Citizendium, the new wiki project from Larry Sanger (one of the co-founders of Wikipedia) launched publicly yesterday. Citizendium is a lot like Wikipedia, but with more emphasis placed on responsibility and the policing of content--two things arguably lacking in Wikipedia. Before you can contribute to Citizendium, users must apply for access, and it's not just a casual name and e-mail address; you actually have to provide your real name and sell yourself to the service's content cops in 100 to 500 words.
The site's content is managed and controlled by community moderators called "constables." After being screened and chosen even more carefully than ordinary contributors, constables are given the power to manage user submissions and general content. Constables aren't paid or given compensation for their services, it's purely a volunteer gig. Likewise, contributors receive nothing besides the prestige of creating and editing content for the service.
There are just more than 1,000 entries on the site. This pales in comparison to Wikipedia's 1,700,000 plus, but Citizendium just launched. Wikipedia's been live since early 2001.
Citizendium is an interesting experiment (a term coined by its founders, not me). It's too early to say whether or not it will become a serious competitor to Wikipedia. To my mind, Citizendium is setting itself up for problems.... Read more
There's been a lot of talk about "killers" recently, namely potential YouTube competitor Joost. And for a while, we've known that Wikipedia would soon have a potential rival in Citizendium, a project announced several months ago. But Citizendium's different: founder Larry Sanger isn't aiming to shoot down Wikipedia; in fact, he was one of that site's co-founders. Rather, he's aiming to use Wikipedia's model and existing content to build something that he hopes will be better--and less of a free-for-all. Though anyone can be a Citizendium "author," contributors will be required to use their real names, thus eliminating the anonymity that has made it easier for some dubious edits to be made in Wikipedia. There will also be "gentle expert oversight" to provide some guidance, and presumably to prevent future wiki-vandalism in the manner of Stephen Colbert.
Now, Citizendium has launched a preliminary site where interested users can register and test the site out. It already has a base of more than 150 expert editors and 350 "authors," who have been testing the site out since November. The new encyclopedia also has new non-profit status through the Tides Center organization, and will be accepting tax-deductible donations (it's holding a pre-launch funding drive right now). By the end of the year, however, Citizendium hopes to be independent of Tides.
It'll be interesting to see whether or not Web users find Citizendium a more trustworthy alternative to Wikipedia, or whether their impression will be that it's too restrictive a model. As is the case with pretty much every brand-new site that we profile on Webware, we'll have to see what unfolds.
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