Wikipedia Founder to Launch Citizendium

Posted on September 19, 2006

Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger is launching a new project called Citizendium. The new compendium website will be similar to Wikipedia except it will have editors manage different topics.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

You can read more about the role of editors here on the Citizendium site. Stephen Colbert mocked Wikipedia with his Wikiality episode and Wikipedia has had trouble with current events in the past -- Ken Lay's death is just one example. Maybe Citizendium will help resolve some of the issues. Some on Slashdot are comparing Citizendium to Nupedia, which was a free content web encyclopedia that used a peer-review process.

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