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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."
What is interesting about citizendium is they don't even have anything actually running yet.
One of the nice things about wikipedia is that it has nearly 1.5 million articles in the english language version.
There a lot of knocks against wikipedia in the article, but the reality is that it is running and extraordinarily useful already to many people.
My impression is citizendium are going to copy wikipedia articles (and likely even use wikipedia's software), then edit them to be better and then try to stay in sync if they can with wikipedia.
I think it'll be worth checking back in 3 years to see how they've done, but at this point way way to early to tell. I personally am not to optimistic, but do wish them well.
Hi all, yep we've been making progress. The big news is that, after a few weeks of negotiation with many different possible hosts we've chosen one today and they instantly put up a server for the pilot project for us. We didn't exactly plan for this Slashdotting, but you should know that we will have a pilot project wiki up in a few days. There's lots of other news. We've got three very experienced sysadm/network admin guys making up the lead technical team, we've got a commitment of significant support from a foundation, we've formulated a Statement of Fundamental Policies, we're gearing up for a major recruitment drive, etc. I could go on but I'll save it for the press release which should come out Friday next week.