Sean-Ward.com

I came across an article about Citizendium on Ars Technica, and figured I would post something about it. While the name does take some getting used to (it’s a combination of “Citizen Compendium”), it might be nice to see it get somewhere or even succeed.

The founder, Larry Sanger, was a co-founder of Wikipedia, and wrote Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge, in which he lists the following issues with Wikipedia:

* The community does not enforce its own rules effectively or consistently. Consequently, administrators and ordinary participants alike are able essentially to act abusively with impunity, which begets a never-ending cycle of abuse.
* Widespread anonymity leads to a distinguishable problem, namely, the attractiveness of the project to people who merely want to cause trouble, or who want to undermine the project, or who want to change it into something that it is avowedly not–in other words, the troll problem.
* Many now complain that the leaders of the community have become insular: it has become increasingly difficult for people who are not already part of the community to get fully on board, regardless of their ability or qualifications.
* This arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to some of the most potentially valuable contributors, namely, academics. Furthermore, there is no special place for academics, so that they can contribute in a way they feel comfortable with. As a result, it seems likely that the project will never escape its amateurism. Indeed, one might say that Wikipedia is committed to amateurism. In an encyclopedia, there’s something wrong with that.

I’ve known people who argue against Wikipedia based on these points, and I can even agree with him on these points, however, only as far as a similar-yet-different solution to Wikipedia such as Citizendium, and not a closed source, like Britannica. Aside from saying that, I’ve skimmed the essay, and found it to be an interesting idea. For the sake of having a user-driven encyclopedia still available online, I hope it the best.

Sadly though, I can see it failing, based only on the fact that the name may sound “stupid” (according to a couple diggers), and academia is still fearful of things like this, due to Wikipedia.

The pilot program can be found at http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page.