In a Tuesday press relese, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger announced plans to launch a rival site to the online encyclopedia. The new wiki project, Citizendium, will draw upon community experts to offer greater reliability of information.

Which Would You Choose?

It’s 2:33 a.m., and your essay on European Socialism is due in a little over seven hours.

Running out of time and feeling the tinge of desperation creep up your spine like the first cruel waves of an ether binge, you surf on over to this Wikipedia people keep talking about to gather up more source material.

The heavens open with streams of online content, and the paper practically writes itself.

A week later, your professor hands the essay back to you with a giant “F” plastered across the front. Feverishly scanning the document, you come to a comment in the bibliography

“Wikipedia is not an approved information source for this class.”

Shock gives way to acceptance, and despair inevitably ensues.

Does this story sound familiar? It should, because it takes place every day throughout the nation’s college campuses. Many students are turning to Wikipedia for reference purposes, and finding out the hard way that academia at large refuses to acknowledge the site as a credible information resource.

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, is looking to change all that.

Since his well-publicized departure from the popular wiki project, Sanger has been one of Wikipedia’s harshest critics. In a press release on Tuesday, he announced a new wiki project aimed at providing the online community with a reliable, accredited reference source.

The new project is entitled the Citizen’s Compendium, or Citizendium for short.

Citizendium will initially mirror Wikipedia’s content, but Sanger plans to build upon that knowledge base by enlisting the services of expert editors and contributors in an effort to surpass Wikipedia in terms of accuracy and reliability of information.

Sanger comments on the endeavor, “By engaging expert editors, eliminating anonymous contribution, and launching a more mature community under a new charter, a much broader and more influential group of people and institutions will be able to improve upon Wikipedia’s extremely useful, but often uneven work. The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable.”

Potentially interested contributors can sign up here. More information on testing, content and the project’s scope can be found in the press release.

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.