Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has announced The Citizendium Project, a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia that should launch in a few weeks. Citizendium will be an OA wiki starting with Wikipedia articles but revising them under the guidance of qualified experts. From the site:
The Citizendium..., 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 aresponsible community and a good global citizen....
The Citizendium project is at present entirely independent of the Digital Universe Foundation. [PS: Sanger is also a co-founder of the Digital Universe, which has also been called a quality-controlled Wikipedia.] ...
A "progressive fork" works like this: we will begin with all of Wikipedia's articles, so that the Citizendium will begin as, simply, a mirror of Wikipedia. Then people start making changes to articles in the Citizendium. On a very regular basis, we will refresh our copies of Wikipedia articles. If an entry in the Citizendium has never changed since being copied from Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia version has, then we upload the most recent Wikipedia article. But if the Citizendium has changed an article, then it is not refreshed. Tools will no doubt be written that will allow users to compare the differences between the Wikipedia article and the Citizendium article side-by-side. In addition, of course, people will be able to start brand new articles on topics Wikipedia has not yet covered....
Experts will be expected to work shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary people in this project in more or less the same bottom-up fashion that Wikipedia uses. The difference is that, when content disputes arise, whatever editors are paying attention to the article will be empowered to articulate a resolution--if the article falls in their area of specialization. Furthermore, their decisions will be enforceable. Think of editors as the village elders wandering the bazaar and occasionally dispensing advice and reining in the wayward. Their presence is merely a moderating, civilizing influence. They don't stop the bazaar from being a bazaar.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
