Aiming for a kinder, smarter online encyclopedia
They wanted to build an online encyclopedia that was more authoritative than Wikipedia. But the volunteers behind Citizendium are learning that writing about, well, everything is no easy task.
"Difficult is an understatement," said Nancy Sculerati, an associate professor of medicine at New York University who wrote the "Biology" entry.
The 1,000 or so authors and editors working on the website, which went live last month, want to make a smarter, kinder Wikipedia by having experts approve all articles posted on the site. They're requiring that contributors use their real names, which they say will eradicate some of the vandalism and inaccuracy that have marred Wikipedia.
By allowing anyone to write and edit entries, Wikipedia has amassed 6 million articles in 250 languages since its 2001 launch. It's a cultural phenomenon, attracting 191 million worldwide visitors in February, according to ComScore Networks.
In many cases, the democratic approach has created detailed entries that can be updated much more quickly than a printed encyclopedia. But in other cases, it has led to factual inaccuracies and doubts about the writers' credibility.
Last month Essjay, a prolific Wikipedia member featured in a New Yorker article, was found to be a 24-year-old from Kentucky, rather than the tenured university professor he had claimed to be.
In an interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales defended the website, saying that Essjay's articles were well-written and accurate, and that the site's many contributors quickly noticed and corrected mistakes.
Try as they might, Citizendium's founders are finding it's pretty tough to do a better job than Wikipedia.
They've been working for nearly six months on the Herculean task of agreeing on how to organize all of the information in the world. So far, editors have approved only nine of the roughly 1,000 articles that volunteers have written. Visitors can see all of the entries, but the approved ones are distinguished by a green checkmark. The nonprofit Citizendium has found writers for only six of about 40 topics its editors have identified as most important.
"You simply can't legislate or give orders to people," said Larry Sanger of Columbus, Ohio, who founded Citizendium. "It's a volunteer project, and people will end up doing more work for the project if they feel free to go where their hearts take them."
