Beyond Wikipedia: Citizendium

Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt:

Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little brat of online encyclopedias.

Sanger is staging an electronic coup d'état with a new wiki called Citizendium, to be launched early in the new year. But there's a twist: the site will start out as a mirror image of the English version of Wikipedia through a process called "forking."

By making a replica of Wikipedia, Sanger hopes to attract a bevy of experts to the project, who will then refine the wobbly content pulled from Wikipedia's infinite pages to create a resource that is authoritative and reliable. ("We descend upon their content, red pens in hand and start our own new community," he recently wrote.)

"On the day of launch, we have over 1,000 people ready to get to work, and a large portion of them are professors, graduate students, research scientists, legal scholars, technical thinkers and assorted other intellectuals."

Question is, how far will his highfalutin model go in the unruly hurly-burly of cyberspace, where the wisdom of the crowds rules the day?

I've put a link to Citizendium in the Webwriting Resources list, and the article itself has a link as well.

Comments

[C K Brown]

A wiki is a new form of communication that can be edited by anyone with a web browser. WikiÕs can be used for notes, and compiling information which can be useful in classroom discussions and group collaborations. Wikis can be a useful tool in the modern world of high speed information excess. But wikis can be a form of mis-educating people about subjects that they are not familiar with because of the open editing format. Wikis can be dangerous in the wrong hand and can destroy the importance of authorship of information because of their simplicity.