Since it was first created in 2001, Wikipedia has become one of the Internet’s most popular website, receiving over 750 million views a month. Wikipedia has quickly become one of the most popular destinations for people to go to in all the research for information about practically any subject in the world. It’s easily the world’s most popular encyclopaedia, and with good reason: any single person in the world can edit any single article or entry within Wikipedia. What results is what is probably the world’s most up-to-date encyclopaedia.
Yet, along with this feature comes Wikipeida’s biggest and most obvious flaw: it’s, sometimes blatant, inaccuracy. Just imagine, a 10 year old kid could easily edit the entry on, say quantum physics, anyway he wants and no one could stop him. Of course, someone will eventually spot the mistake, though the keyword here being “eventually”.
This is especially so when you consider how false information in the Wikipedia entry on US political figure and journalist, John Seigenthaler, was left undetected for four months. In that time, anyone who read that Wikipedia article probably thought he was a suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and his brother.
Hence, in an attempt to create a more accurate version of Wikipedia, Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger spearheaded a new project: Citizendium. It was only recently that I stumbled upon this site, and I have to say, the idea of it is pretty exciting. First introduced in 2003, Citizendium is pretty similar to Wikipedia in many ways, in that a large number of people contribute to the encyclopaedia instead of there being a single publisher. The difference between them, is in who gets to edit the articles. Readers who wish to edit articles and Citizendium must first sign up to be a member. Not only that, members are required to sign up with their real names and e-mail addresses, and moderators even require a bachelors degree to be eligible. Furthermore, before articles are published, they are subject to verification by the site’s moderators.
On the whole, Citizendium places a very heavy emphasis on “experts”, as they are the ones who effectively manage the site and ensure that only quality, and more importantly accurate, information gets posted on the website for the world to see. However in the FAQ page of Citizendium, they clearly state their need for the constant support of their “non-expert” editors and contributors. However, the emphasis on experts might not be a bad thing after all, as that might help deter the same anonymous pranksters who are intent on ruining Wikipedia’s articles.
However, Citizendium is still in its infancy stages, having roughly 9000 articles at the time of this writing according to their website. In terms of quantity, it’s still a far cry from what Wikipedia now is. With a much smaller pool of editors as well, the rate at which the quantity of its articles increases is also going to be relatively slow as compared to Wikipedia, since practically anyone can edit any article in Wikipedia. Citizendium is surely giving up a lot in order to strive to become a very accurate source of information.
How useful and accurate and Citizendium going to be? Only time will tell. Personally though, I’ll stick with Wikipedia for now, even with its inaccurate articles. When Citizendium matures though, perhaps that will be the time to switch.
Here’s hoping that Citizendium eventually achieves its goal, for the good of everyone.
