In 2006 one of the two founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, launched Citizendium. Citizendium basically is an improved version of Wikipedia, with a different model regarding sign-up and collaboration policies. The main goal of Citizendium was to come up with a model that could target the unreliability of Wikipedia. This unreliability is one of the major criticism of Wikipedia. Although an 2005 research test by British journal Nature concluded that regarding the investigated articles, Wikipedia was as good as the renowned Encyclopedia Britannica , many in the scientific community still regard Wikipedia’s unreliability a fact. So in comes Citizendium.

The first glance of Citizendium tells me it is not finished yet. The layout gives quite a bad impression. Wikipedia’s strength isn’t just that it has millions of articles online, is extremely high-ranking for most of its articles and has an extreme good performance. It’s first strength is that it is so clearly set out, organized and has perfect readability. Citizendium on the other hand looks like the web-design of a first-grader. There is a color gradient that (apart from its ugliness) takes away a lot of the readability, the font types are rather clumsy configured, too much empty space is used by the main layout and the logo looks like it was designed in Microsoft Paint.

If you read the many pages that describe the setup and goals of Citizendium, it becomes clear that there were tremendous ideological and strategic concerns. Wikipedia is pushing on this new model with all its weight and with a mere 9000 articles completed a lot of work needs to be done before there can be some relieve. So let’s look at some the setup and goals.

One of the major differences is that Citizendium being build on a network of known people, and their ‘real-life’ achievement are taken into account. When signing-up for an account, one has to give a reference to a website, from which one can confirm your identity. In this way Citizendium is trying to have only serious writers and editors, so people are accountable for their contributions. So the anonymity that is present in Wikipedia is thrown overboard. One begins to wonder what this will do to Citizendium’s take on controversial subjects. It is known that Wikipedia has been misused in the past . There are numerous sites that are trying to report a certain kind of misuse; for example ‘Wikiscanner’ is reporting about anonymous contributions that can be tracked back to a certain kind of organizations. In this way governmental, religious or corporate interest that might have been involved are exposed. But anonymity also can function as a relief to ‘forms’ of social control, peer pressure and precautious behavior for reputation damage. Some subjects are by nature so controversial (for example cultural conflicts, exotic lifestyles, ethical trends or criminal allegations) that a unbiased discussion can only be blossom when there is some form of anonymity or identity protection. Nowhere on the Citizendium page is a strategy described how to deal with these matters. Hereby it becomes clear that Citizendium is less keen on dealing with controversy, which is fair because of the relatively low part of knowledge that is subjected to it. Still, it must be said that for some people, what makes Wikipedia interesting is the ’discussion’ section at articles, which give an nice array of different perspectives on controversial subjects (political issues, alternative medicine, etc).

A second major difference between Wikipedia is that Citizendium is using expert guidance and control. There is a system of governance over all the articles, where all the articles are to be divided into certain workgroups. These workgroups are roughly divided in the following six categories: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts, Applied Arts and Sciences, Recreation. A explanation for the choice of these categories is absent though, I guess it was a choice for an more traditional approach to knowledge categorization. Citizendium’s goal for a higher quality relies for a large part on the functioning of these workgroups. However the guidelines, how these workgroups should be organized or what the lines of command will rely on, is quite brief. On the ‘about page’ it simply says:

“We welcome experts as well as the general public; we will be built not by top-down orders but as and where contributors wish to work; and we will be organized as a genuine republic of letters governed by a rule of law. There will be no “dictators,” but a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules.”

Still, what can we learn from this is that the system of governance will likely be more a result of the efforts of individuals to push or rejects certain issues, then their proven expertise in the real world. Then it still becomes questionable is this model really can enforce an extreme high reliability.

The site has Blog page of its own, which contains small anecdotes and articles. While this blog is made by the founder, Mr. Sanger, it kind of gives the impression that so much of Citizendium is still evolving around him. Speaking of the person, there appears to be an performance pressure, because of his involvement with Wikipedia. Because of his leave and subsequent criticism the other founder, Jimmy Wales, has come back at him and his Citizendium. Wales claims that Mr. Sanger was not a real founder of Wikipedia, but merely an important employee at the start-up. Subsequently Mr. Wales has pointed out the possibility of filling Wikipedia with Citizendium’s acquired knowledge, thereby rendering all efforts cumulative to Wikipedia’s growth.

I would conclude that Citizendium can’t be expected to replace Wikipedia, but can likely become a valuable system for a growing movement in ‘open source science’. In this movement Citizendium’s goals to focus on reliability and quality are fair. Together with a vision of setting up a network were participants are both collegial and congenial and have the possibility to write for academic credit (under its sub-project Eduzendium) Mr. Sanger has definitely done his part in the quest for widespread knowledge integration.

Bookmark on del.icio.us.