Citizendium

Coordinates	30°19′10″N81°39′36″N
Name	Citizendium
Logo
Screenshot
Collapsible	yes
Caption	The Citizendium homepage with default format. Screenshot taken on 2 January 2010
Url	http://en.citizendium.org/
Slogan	An encyclopedia project—and more!
Commercial	No
Type	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Optional (required to edit pages)
Language	English
Content license	CC-BY-SA 3.0
Owner	Tides Center
Author	Larry Sanger
Launch date	23 October 2006 (pilot)25 March 2007 (public)
Alexa	88,000
Current status	Beta

, founder and former editor-in-chief of Citizendium]] Citizendium ("the citizens' compendium of everything"; ) is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project launched by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001.

It was first announced in September 2006 as a fork of the English Wikipedia, but that idea was abandoned prior to its March 2007 public launch in favor of emphasizing original articles. The project aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by providing increased reliability. It hopes to achieve this by requiring all contributors to use their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behavior, by providing what it calls "gentle expert oversight" of everyday contributors, and also through its "approved articles", which have undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic experts and are closed to real-time editing.

, it had 15,826 articles, of which 155 had achieved editorial approval, and around 45 contributors making at least 20 edits a month. The managing editor is Daniel Mietchen.

Founder viewpoints

Sanger said in a 17 October 2006 press release that Citizendium "will soon attempt to unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online". In August 2007, he captioned its pages "The world needs a more credible free encyclopedia." The project began its pilot phase in October and November 2006.

On 18 January 2007, a change of plans was announced. Sanger announced on the CZ mailing list that only articles marked "CZ Live", those which have been or will soon be worked on by Citizendium contributors, would remain on the site, and all other articles forked from Wikipedia would be deleted. Not all Citizendium contributors were supportive of this change, but Sanger emphasized that this deletion was "an experiment" and a new set of Wikipedia articles could be uploaded if the experiment were deemed unsuccessful.

Planning for succession of Editor-in-Chief

In May 2009, Sanger reduced his direct activity at Citizendium, and in a message on 30 July 2009, he reminded those on the Citizendium-l mailing list of his previously declared intention not to serve as Editor-in-Chief for more than two or three years after the start of the project. Sanger has reiterated his call for the Citizendium community to prepare an orderly process for choosing a new Editor-in-Chief. Sanger said that he was spending more time on his WatchKnow project, partly because he needs to earn an income—he said the "Citizendium project doesn't earn me a dime"—and partly because the Citizendium community had demonstrated that it could function effectively without his close, daily involvement, and because "there are squeakier wheels in my life just now." He added that stepping aside may "precipitate something of a constitutional crisis, considering that we [Citizendium] never adopted a proper charter." Citizendium finally ratified its charter in September 2010. On 22 September 2010, Sanger stepped down as editor-in-chief and subsequently gave up editorial powers and rights to the project. Sanger did not appoint a successor or interim Editor-in-Chief, and the project's financial position did not become clear until after his departure.

Nature of the project

Fork of Wikipedia

According to statements and essays on Citizendium.org, the project was initially intended to begin as a fork of Wikipedia, carrying a copy of each article—under the rules of the GNU Free Documentation License—as it existed on Wikipedia at the time of Citizendium's launch. However, after initiating the idea of not forking, and then soliciting comments on the matter from Citizendium mailing list and web forum members, Sanger said that a complete fork at launch was not a "foregone conclusion." On 18 January 2007, Sanger announced that the pilot would, as an experiment, only carry articles that had been, or would soon be, worked on by Citizendium contributors, instead of a complete set of Wikipedia articles. He stated that the experiment "represents a reconception of our project's basic aim."

Project goal

The stated aim of the project is to create a "new compendium of knowledge" based on the contributions of "intellectuals," defined as "educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly." Citizendium aimed to foster an expert culture and a community that encourages participants (to be called "authors") to "respect" the expert contributions (by what he referred to as a "gentle process of guidance").

An appeals process for disagreements between editors and authors, and between different editors, was planned, according to a provisional "Citizendium Policy Outline" published by Sanger.

On the Citizendium blog, Sanger wrote this caveat about the provisional outline: "This is a work in progress. Therefore, I hope the Wikipedia article about the Citizendium will not say tomorrow that CZ will have features X, Y, and Z. These are in most cases negotiable policy ideas, a place for the invitees to the policy project to work from." Sanger also stated that future versions of the policy outline would be posted on the restricted-access pilot wiki: "The most current version will be available on the pilot project wiki. To see that, you'll have to be a member of the pilot project." Experts are required to verify their qualifications openly, for transparency and publicly accepted authority. Some academics maintain that Wikipedia is a valuable starting point for inquiry, but (as its co-founder Jimmy Wales concurs) should not be used as a sole or principal source of information. Some schools and universities accept no references to Wikipedia in formal papers, while other educational institutions have limited its use to being merely a pointer to external sources.

Regarding Wikipedia, Sanger wrote that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to...academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism."

Originally, Sanger operated as Editor-in-Chief, the "main individual in charge," part of and answerable to a Board of Directors. Sanger stated that final decisions about management structure will not be made "until more of the (future) primary stakeholders are on the scene." In a Citizendium blog entry of 10 November 2006, constable Sarah Tuttle announced the formation of an "executive committee" consisting of herself, Sanger and eleven others, which works on issues of "long term governance" of the project.

Citizendium articles are subject to an "approval" process after they have achieved reasonable quality. An "editor" can determine when an article is ready to be approved. If the article is approved it is then locked, and further editing takes place on a separate "draft" version which may eventually replace the current approved version. There is a dispute-resolution process for disagreements about which version should be selected as approved. In September 2010, the Tides Center officially withdrew direct financial support for the project.

Content

Citizendium original articles are available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (cc-by-sa). "Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are also available under [the] GNU Free Documentation License [version] 1.2". The decision for a commercial-allowable license for its original articles comes on the heels of extended community debate, with about half of Citizendium contributors preferring a non-commercial license. The decision was announced on 21 December 2007, about a year after the launch of the pilot project, with Larry Sanger's essay on the reasoning behind the decision.

History

Pilot project

The project was announced by Sanger on 15 September 2006, at the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Berlin. He gave no deadline for the full launch of the wiki. However, on 2 October 2006, Sanger released a pilot project announcement that envisioned a fully functioning wiki within "one to two months."

In an apparent attempt to quicken the pace of the project, on 2 October 2006, Citizendium web forum moderator Peter Hitchmough suggested what he called an "alpha test" of the concept. Hitchmough proposed the forking of a limited number of Wikipedia articles to a site where Citizendium web forum and mailing list members could "rewrite a complete section" of Wikipedia content.

Larry Sanger reacted enthusiastically to the idea and at first suggested his already existing Textop wiki as the site for the alpha test. Sanger later posted that Textop would not be a good choice, but showed continued interest in the proposal. He envisioned a "restricted-access" wiki where the idea could be tried and requested further discussion.

No access to the pilot version of Citizendium, even read-only, was allowed to the general public. Sanger stated: "Only invited people will be able to view and edit the pilot project wiki." Sanger also said that constables for the pilot project will be chosen by the chief constable.

In a press release on 17 October 2006, Sanger announced: "the fledgling Citizendium Foundation will launch a six-week pilot project open to potential contributors by invitation". Several editors and other project leaders were named. It was also announced that the Citizendium Foundation had "started the process of applying for 501(c)(3) status [non-profit status]" and had "received a firm commitment for a significant seed grant from a foundation, as well as small personal donations."

The pilot project began operations on 23 October 2006. On 8 November, Larry Sanger reported that 263 user names had access to the pilot wiki, 183 articles on the wiki were "live" (meaning "someone is or intends to be working on them") and there were about 300 total edits to the wiki on 7 November.

In a 17 January 2007, post to the Citizendium forum, Sanger stated that "we have had only 10–20 (very) active people out of 500 accounts created." As a result, Sanger decided to delete all articles besides those marked "CZ live" from the pilot project in an attempt to motivate greater participation. On 22 January 2007, Citizendium experimented with a new self-registration procedure: read/write access was granted automatically after creation of the account. On 19 January, Sanger announced the formal organization of Citizendium as a legal non-profit organization.

On 16 February 2007, in response to rising site vandalism, automatic account creation was put on hold while increased protections were being put in place to counter vandalism. The next day, page moves were limited to constables as an additional measure against vandalism. In addition, Sanger continued the process of un-forking the Citizendium from Wikipedia by inviting contributors to delete any Wikipedia content that had changed only superficially since it was imported.

Inauguration

On 25 March 2007, Citizendium ended its pilot phase and went live, into its beta phase, and the site became publicly readable. The launch coincided with a feature-length Associated Press article that ran widely, with a title in USA Today of "Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia."

The day prior to launch, Sanger released an essay, "Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed" in which he stated that activity at Citizendium grew from 100 edits a day in the first month to over 500 prior to launch. After the launch, on 27 March 2007, a press release quotes Sanger as saying "You don't have to choose between content and accountability. We have shown that we can create open and credible content. We can, in fact, be open to all sorts of participants, but still hold people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community."

Sometime after the launch, it was noted that Citizendium's family friendly policy would mean the project would likely tend to avoid articles on slang terms for sexual activity, and particularly explicit articles on sexual practices. The Citizendium has a "professionalism" policy for editors, which Sanger said is different from most online communities.

On 29 June 2007, Sanger announced an initiative via the project-wide mailing list that he dubbed "Citizendium 2.0". Characterizing his comments as a "project planning document", Sanger detailed a series of initiatives designed to launch Citizendium into its next phase of development. The document outlined plans for a judicial board, an advisory board, a personnel manager, a new chairman of the editorial council, wider participation in the project by volunteers, a system of subpages for articles, and an expanded article checklist.

Later developments

At the project's one-year anniversary in September 2007, Citizendium included 3000 articles written and revised by 2000 people. A number of media reports appeared in late October and early November 2007 about the anniversary of Citizendium. A story in the Financial Times quoted Larry Sanger predicting strong growth for the project: "At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively – say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude. And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate."

Citizendium was honored on 5 December 2007, as an award finalist of the Society for New Communications Research. The Society describes itself as a nonprofit global think-tank "dedicated to the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society". The Society chose Citizendium for an award because it considered it "a leading organization" in these respects.

Library writer Walt Crawford noted in April 2009 that Citizendium appeared to be in an "extended lull", with a constant rate of creation of new articles at around 13-14 per day and a decline in the number of active authors. In August 2009, Richard Waters wrote in the Financial Times technology blog: "At best, Citizendium could be called a qualified success. Launched in March 2007, it currently lists 11,810 articles – 2,999,674 fewer than the English-language version of Wikipedia." Mathieu O'Neil, Principal Researcher at the Australian Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy, wrote in a March 2010 article on crowdsourcing that "new participants to Wikipedia know that their contributions will have a significant audience; becoming a Wikipedia editor is trivial and instantaneous; since it lacks this immediate quality, Citizendium failed to attract the crowd."

The project currently has a core of 25 contributors who make more than 100 edits a month, with 90 participants making at least one edit during March 2010. Median word count has dropped from 468 words per article in October 2007 to 151 in May 2010. For June 2010, the number of users making 1, 20 or 100 edits per month all were at their lowest point since the project went public in March 2007.

References

Further reading

External links

Citizendium.org

Citizendium Blog

Citizendium discussion list and archives

Citizendium forums

"Larry Sanger's essay: Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge" (longer version) 15 September 2006

Category:Online encyclopedias Category:Internet properties established in 2006 Category:Web 2.0 Category:MediaWiki websites Category:Free encyclopedias Category:Collaborative projects Category:Advertising-free websites