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Monday, October 30, 2006

More on Citizendium

Barbara Quint, Citizendium: A Kinder, Truer Wikipedia? Information Today, October 30, 2006.  Excerpt:

They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but over the last year, the venerable (in Internet time) Wikipedia online encyclopedia 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”. 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.

“Wikipedia has accomplished great things, but the world can do even better,” said Sanger, editor in chief of Citizendium. “By engaging expert editors, eliminating anonymous contribution, and launching a more mature community under a new charter, a much broader and more influential group of people and institutions will be able to improve upon Wikipedia’s extremely useful, but often uneven work. The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable.”

Wikipedia and the new Citizendium operate under the GNU Free Documentation License rules, which means content can be shared relatively freely as long as all parties follow benign and courteous behavior --e.g., crediting the creators or issuers of the information for their work....

The structure of the new service involves three layers of participation: “[E]ditors will be the experts in their fields and [will] decide on content questions; authors or the rank and file contributors; and constables or community managers, who make decisions on behavioral matters.”...

 However, in the short time since its inception, Sanger said that they have already gathered “close to 400 applications and identified over 200 plausible editors. Between three quarters [and] two thirds of the people have Ph.D.’s...and come from very distinguished universities.” ...

As to the nitty-gritty issues of financial support, voluntarism seems the main basis. Citizendium receives in-kind donations of support and hardware from universities like Purdue and corporations like Steadfast Networks; grants from companies that want to use their content (though the companies could just use the GNU FDL rules to get it at no charge); sponsorship, with possible subtle credits similar to PBS announcements; individual donations; and a mysterious, “exciting and innovative” funding model “that will be revealed in good time.” The Citizendium Foundation has begun the application process for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status....