Citizendium?
I found an interesting article on the Library Stuff blog titled Wikipedia and the Trust Factor Wikis are becoming increasingly more popular. My experience with wikis in this class has shown me how useful they can be. Wikipedia itself is being used more and more. The article quotes Wikipedia being used by 33 million people last month. I will admit that I often use Wikipedia to quickly look something up that I am unfamiliar with. I use Wikipedia as a jumping off point before I continue with more in-depth research. Most people don’t think of Wikipedia as a truly reliable source of information because anyone can edit an entry and there is no academic peer review. This causes some pages to contain bias material. It also gives way to vandalism and hoaxes.
This is the reason that Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia is breaking away and launching Citizendium. This will be similar to Wikipedia in that anyone will be able to submit material, however it will be monitored by experts that have been hired. After reading about this new project that could end up replacing Wikipedia I went to the site to get some more information. The wiki has not been set up yet but they promise that the pilot project will be up very soon. However on the page they are asking for donations and are not over confident about the projects success at this point. The project will start out with simply copying all of Wikipedia’s pages then invite people participating in the project to make changes. One interesting point about the project is that it is supposedly going to be completely non-profit. They are looking for sponsorship however not accepting advertisements. This is a quote from the page on why it is so important to the creators that the project be non-profit. “We believe that volunteers—both from academia and from the hacker world—will refuse to contribute to a Wikipedia-style knowledge project if it merely lines the pockets of profit-making enterprise. Besides, the best way to ensure freedom, independence, and neutrality of information is to make sure that the information does not depend on any particular vested interests.” It will be interesting to watch to see if this project develops into anything.