November 21, 2007
Citizendium, One Year Later
It’s now been a year since Larry Sanger created Citizendium, an open-source encyclopedia catering to academics turned off by Wikipedia’s disinterest in credentials and its combative editing style. So how’s the project going?
According to Mr. Sanger — who co-founded Wikipedia before growing disenchanted with the site — it’s humming along nicely. Citizendium now boasts about 3,900 articles, he writes in a progress report, although only a fraction of those pieces have been “certified” by the site’s staff of volunteer editors. That number pales in comparison to Wikipedia’s two million or so English-language articles, but Mr. Sanger predicts that “at some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively.”
Citizendium is only now stoking its efforts to recruit contributors, Mr. Sanger says, and the site is also intensifying its fundraising efforts.
For many scholars, though, Citizendium will only be successful if its articles are in fact more reliable and cogently written than those at Wikipedia. The jury’s still out on that count, but color Tim Lee of The Technology Liberation Front unimpressed. Citizendium’s article on the economist Milton Friedman, he says, is “extremely short and frankly not very good,” while the Wikipedia article is twice as long and “much more accurate.” Obviously one article can’t speak to the value of the entire enterprise, but it seems clear that some observers will be holding Mr. Sanger to a fairly high standard. —Brock Read
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