Monday, February 16, 2009

Citizendium or Wikipedia

Wikipedia has is the big dog for online encyclopedia. It not only has millions of articles, but is ranked #8 on most visited websites. Is bigger always better? Larry Sanger, one of the cofounders of Wikipedia, does not necessarily think so. He believes that better is better. So he began an new online encyclopedia, Citizendium. These are the three differences between Citizendium and Wikipedia (according to Citizendium)
  • All contributors must apply for membership in the project under their real names
  • All articles are reviewed by experts in their particular fields, offering suggestions and criticism as the articles evolve with the goal for each article to be "approved"
  • That vandals, trolls, and disruptive editors are quickly and permanently banned from further work on the project.

While I applaud Citizendium approach and philosophy, I don’t know how much the average internet user understands or cares about such issues. Wikipedia has already corrected some of the problems that have plagued them, and I am confident they will continue to make Wikipedia more reliable. Regardless of how you feel about such issues, none of us should be relying on either Citizendium or Wikipedia alone. Any issues worth researching are worth checking more than one site.

Citizendium
http://en.citizendium.org
Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like Citizendium might be a solution to the Wikipedia grumpiness. It wouldn't be nearly as open to all, not knowing what the registration requirements would be. Of course any registration process is going to cull out many people.
    I'm going to go check it out right now! Thanks for the heads up!

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  2. I just went to citizendium site, it's really well done and I found some of the entries easy to read and understand. I'd like to learn more about registering with them to add information. But I'll do that after May 2009!

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