Wikipedia, the popular community-driven online encyclopedia, is doomed to “amateurism” and should be complemented by a more serious effort, says one of the project’s creators who announced plans to launch an alternative.
Larry Sanger, chief organiser of Wikipedia in its first year, unveiled his plan at last week’s fourth annual Wizards of OS conference in Berlin....The new project will be known as the Citizendium. It would closely resemble Wikipedia, but would involve a system of authors writing in their areas of expertise, being edited by experienced editors who would be their equals, not superiors. (There would be a mechanism for resolving disputes between them).
A key difference from Wikipedia would be the absence of anonymous editing, creating instead a “culture of real-world personal responsibility,” Sanger said. There would be a relatively immutable and binding charter, with “constables” enforcing adherence to the charter. The Citizendium also would avoid the “feature-creep” plaguing Wikipedia, where pieces are growing ever longer, he said.
The Citizendium would use the same free software licence as Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License, and would employ a “progressive fork” from Wikipedia, beginning with a mirror of all of Wikipedia’s articles, and then allowing people to make changes to them. Updates made on Wikipedia would automatically be made in the Citizendium too, unless someone had separately changed it on the Citizendium, which would then break the tie between the two encyclopedias.
“I want to help launch something better, if that is possible,” Sanger said. He still supports Wikipedia, but said it was intended to be fun and light-hearted, not a serious resource.
Addressing Amateurism or Personal Vendetta?
“One might say Wikipedia is committed to its amateurism,” he said. “In an encyclopedia, I think that is a problem.” His new “experimental workspace” would be a wiki that “aspires to be as good as a real encyclopedia,” he said....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/19/2006 10:05:00 AM.
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.
