A Look Inside Citizendium

Raindance writes "I've posted an in-depth look at Citizendium, Larry Sanger's new project and Wikipedia's new competitor. In a nutshell, Citizendium isn't just about building a better encyclopedia (though that is their goal) — it's also a pilot project for a new model of expert-guided radical collaboration with implications for things from open peer review to genome wikis. If you'd like to help out, they need both volunteers and donations."

Comments

Slashdot AFD

[Stalyn]

Slashdot trolling phenomena is up for deletion for dubious reasons. For those of us that have been around /. for a long time, it is hard to separate Slashdot's infamous trolling past from Slashdot itself. And also this type of article is what makes Wikipedia great. It's just in-depth secondary knowledge about an online community that would be excluded from a paper encyclopedia.

However several wikipedians believe that the information is not notable or such claims are unverifiable. When it's obvious that the source is Slashdot itself which keeps a written oral history. It would be silly to delete an article about Beowulf* because the sources are dubious or self-referential.

Anyway this just highlights one of the problems of the Wikipedia community. They have self-knighted themselves to be the guardians of knowledge. Anything that does not fit their worldview of what is "Wikiesque" will be removed. The official Wikipedia policies are malleable and can be interpreted to fit their conclusions. It reminds me of what happened in Bolshevik Russia; whatever does not fit the Party line does not exist.

*Yeah I know it's silly to compare Beowulf to the hot grits guy but you get the point.