Citing Wikipedia as a reference for a college term paper will most likely result in a failing grade. University professors have gone to great lengths to discourage the sole use of Wikipedia as an academic resource, especially given the online encyclopedia’s recent scandals concerning fake user identities and faulty information.

And that’s where Citizendium looks to separate itself from its predecessor.

The Citizendium project has been in a pilot stage since September, but has now launched its public beta program. The fundamental concept of the site is similar to that of Wikipedia, save one significant aspect: all entries are subject to moderation (and removal) by Citizendium’s panel of experts.

Well, that’s all well and good, but how does Citizendium determine a person’s expertise?

Here’s a breakdown from the Citizendium Official FAQ:

We will be posting a list of credentials suitable for editorship.  We have not finished constructing this list yet.  A Ph.D. will be neither necessary nor sufficient for editorship.  As a rule of thumb, editors in traditionally "academic" fields will require the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position in the field. 

Editors in "professional" fields require the usual terminal degree in their field and at least three years responsible professional experience, and, in most cases, several publications as well.  Editors in non-academic or "hobbyist" fields require varying other kinds of qualification.  In addition, in the future, persons will be able to become editors by direct appeal to editorial workgroups–this exception should, we hope, take care of the unusual cases.

Citizendium has a long climb ahead if it hopes to match the enormous success that Wikipedia has enjoyed. The key will come in its appeal to academia. If CZ can convince educators at higher institutions that the information contained within its virtual walls is accurate, relevant, and accredited, then it stands a real chance of success, as an entirely new generation of students will be turned on to the site.

The site has one giant advantage in its favor, though. The creative commons license under which Wikipedia operates will allow CZ to immediately begin importing and editing content, which will greatly reduce the time it should take for the site to become stocked with information.

Improving upon Wikipedia’s existing structure without having to reinvent the wheel could be a winning combination for Citizendium. 

Larry Sanger was part of the original team that launched Wikipedia and he’s now behind a new rival, Citizendium, that hopes to improve on Wikipedia and bring accountability to the information listed.

“If there’s going to be a free encyclopedia, I’d like there to be a better free encyclopedia,” says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. “It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving.”

One of the ways Sanger believe Citizendium will improve on Wikipedia, is making authors and editors more accountable for their work and removing the anonymity that shields many Wikipedia entries.

“When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism,” Ewen says. “What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but.”

Sanger’s also hoping that making contributors confirm their identity will help reduce the incidences of vandalism.

Sanger doesn’t expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he’ll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer’s employer prohibits outside writing. But the person’s name would be known to Citizendium.

Citizendium officially launches this week with 900 authors, 200 editors and 1100 articles. Can it really rival Wikipedia? It will be interesting to see if the site can gain any kind of momentum or audience share with a model that is more “elitist” than the open community of Wikipedia. While it will no doubt solve some of the problems of Wikipedia, it doesn’t offer the same level of freedom and open-access that Wikipedia brings to the table. There’s no doubt in my mind that, without the ability of marketers and hobbyists to contribute to Citizendium, it won’t enjoy anywhere near the growth levels of Wikipedia.

Thoughts?

Comments

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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As opposed to Wikipedia, which offers a no-registration free-for-all area in which users can edit and create articles, Citizendium will offer a more controlled encyclopedic environment. Users will still be able to create posts, but will have to register with Citizendium prior to doing so. Registration will allow Citizendium to post the real names of the users involved, helping to keep would-be rowdy posters in check. According to Sanger these practices will improve upon the Wikipedia model by eliminating users who post obscenities or biased information. Said Sanger:

Wikipedia is amazing. It has grown in breadth and depth, and the articles are remarkably good given the system that is in place. I merely think that we can do better.

In addition the new site will employ volunteer editors who will have final say over what is and isn’t accurate. The volunteer editors, whom will be called Constables on Citizendium will serve to oversee articles posted on the site. The Constables will be established experts in their respective fields, and will check the accuracy of posted information rather than the content or form. Sanger commented on the notion of the Citizendium Constable:

These so called constables will play a similar role to administrators in Wikipedia, but they will not be able to make decisions on how articles read. The editors will be responsible for making decisions about content but they will not be able to ban people.

The Citizendium interface will be very familiar to that of Wikipedia, as Citizendium will be a progressive fork of Wikipedia. Citzendium’s databases will actually be populated with Wikipedia articles at launch, but will differ over time as users of the sites add and modify articles and each topic in different ways. An invitation-only pilot version of Citizendium will launch sometime this week, but there is no announcement yet as to when a final version of the site will be fully available.

Wikipedia currently boasts more than 2 million articles in 229 languages. The site attracted 33 million visitors last month alone, which represents a 162-percent increase over the same month a year ago. Said

There are a number of problems with the system that can be solved, and by solving those we can end up with an even better massive encyclopedia.

[via ZDnet]

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*Originally published at TechFreep

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Mike Zazaian is the Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster of TechFreep.com, an online publication dedicated to daily technology and science news. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he majored in Film and Video studies with a sub-concentration in screenwriting. While only a minority of Mike’s formal education encompassed the technology field, he has worked as a web developer, a freelance web designer, and has been a tech enthusiast for the better part of his life.

Wikipedia has experienced significant growth, media scrutiny, and no small amount of mischief or controversy during its short lifetime.

Wikipedia’s benefit of anonymous editing has become a bane to plenty of people. It looks like Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, perceived this in creating the Citizendium fork of the Wikipedia project:

Some response has been less than enthusiastic over Sanger’s announcement. Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote at TechCrunch that it’s hard to take Citizendium seriously:

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington differed with Kirkpatrick through a posting Arrington made on his CrunchNotes blog:

Arrington also noted that Wikipedia’s entry about TechCrunch has a number of errors, which he won’t even think about trying to fix. “The wikipedia community has completely intimidated me to the point where making a change to that site is unthinkable,” he wrote.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.