Citizendium

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything", is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

History

Larry Sanger announced the concept for Citizendium on September 15, 2006 at Berlin's Wizards of OS 4 conference. The project moved on to a pilot phase in October, and formally launched on March 25, 2007.

Founding Principles

The fundamental goal of Citizendium is to create the largest and most reliable encyclopedia in the world. To that end, the project was founded on the following organizational principles:

Open Collaboration

Citizendium is similar to Wikipedia in that it is an open wiki: the public is invited to participate and edit most pages.

Room for Experts

As Sanger has put it, "people who know a great deal about a subject, who are recognized by various societal mechanisms for that knowledge, can add a great of value to Web 2.0 projects, if they are given special roles that recognize their expertise." This principle envisions most edits happening in a bottom-up fashion but certain specific decisions being placed in the hands of subject experts.

A metaphor often cited to describe the project is an extension of Eric S. Raymond's story about The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Sanger suggests that we "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."

Real Names Policy

Contributors are required to login, and to do so under their real names. This may be a hurdle to participation (see Criticisms section) but it's seen as a necessary step for fostering a culture of accountability and professionalism and thus attracting experts to the project. --include: the theory is that people act differently when their good name is on the line--

Article Approval

Citizendium implements an article approval process where particularly good articles may be nominated for approval, pending a review by subject experts. Articles thus approved become the default article served to readers (though people are encouraged to keep improving the article on a "draft" page).

Online Republic

Sanger has repeatedly stressed that he envisions Citizendium as a new sort of internet community, one that contains all the elements of a traditional democratic republic: a constitution, inclusive participatory governance, and an executive, legislative, and judicial branch.

Citations and Notes

Text from prior version (potentially to be re-used with this new structure):

Citizendium is a wiki with the aim of providing internet users reliable information in the form of pleasantly readable text that keeps the reader's interest from beginning to end of an article. Articles are written collaboratively by "authors" (ordinary members) and officially approved by one or more "editors" (typically people with PhD's in a relevant field.)

Reliability of the information is maintained in several ways. First of all, approved versions of articles cannot be edited by just anyone. Secondly, professional qualifications are required to become an editor and mark an article as "approved". If there is not yet an "approved" version of an article, the draft version will be displayed, but here the third method of ensuring reliability comes in: since contributors have to give their real names and people are quickly blocked if they break the rules, there is little or no "vandalism" of even the draft versions which can be edited by any Citizen. One benefit of this is that members spend little or no time "fighting vandalism" and can spend their time writing, polishing and copyediting.