Citizendium: building a better Wikipedia

One of the things made clear by the Great Unforking is that someone involved with Citizendium loves snakes. Of the 350 current articles that exist in the A-E section of the encyclopedia, a full 45 of them concern snake varieties. Thus, if you don't know your Atheris ceratophora from your Atheris nitschei rungweensis, Citizendium is a good place to start.

Atheris ceratophora,
aka, Eyelash Bush Viper

The snake material comes courtesy of a Netherlands-based IT consultant who is a "serious amateur herpetologist with a keen interest in viperid snakes." The fact that one can look up the real name and biography of an article author does give Citizendium a different feel from Wikipedia, just as Sanger hoped it would. He talks about how "cool" it is to "look down the recent changes page and there's nothing but real name after real name"—and it is cool. Citizendium feels like a collaboration between real people, all scattered about the globe but interested in creating a body of knowledge together. Wikipedia feels... different. The contributors, hidden by screen names, feel less real and less accountable.

On the other hand, those often-anonymous Wikipedia contributors have created an almost unbelievable repository of pop culture material that complements the traditional encyclopedic subjects. If you want to know more about River City Ransom or The Jetsons, Wikipedia is your place. If Citizendium seems like the serious uncle, Wikipedia is the fun-but-slightly-disreputable cousin who takes you to the amusement park to drink beer and ride the Tilt-a-Whirl.

This may sound like flippancy, but it's not. Wikipedia is a fun place to hang out, to learn at least a little about the craziest variety of things. Will Citizendium's scope be that broad, or will it limit itself to the interests of the academics who will (hopefully) populate the community?

"Speaking for myself, I'm an inclusionist," says Sanger, who says that he is open to anything—almost. Decisions about what to include will be up to the community, of course, but the Charter that guides Citizendium will include some statement about "family-friendly content." The goal is to make Citizendium a safe resource for teachers to recommend and for students to access in schools. While some sexual topics will be covered, these will be "very tasteful and there's not going to be graphic photographs."

Progress!

Citizendium currently has over 500 participants, most of whom have been individually screened. Growth has been sometimes erratic; Sanger says that the site gained 50-75 contributors on a single day after being featured on Slashdot. Edits have now topped 500 per day, which Sanger says compares favorably with the earliest days of Wikipedia.

Progress may look slow from the outside, with less than ten articles "approved" by editors so far, but Sanger points out that the approval process didn't begin until December, and that plenty of other articles are being worked on. In a few months, Citizendium will emerge from its private phase and really begin to publicize itself, but the date for such a move has not yet been set. The project currently runs on a shoestring budget, and going public depends in large part on whether it can raise the necessary funds or secure the equipment needed to handle the traffic load.

The worry is that a site which collapses beneath a crush of visitors is unlikely to bring many of them back for a second look. When Citizendium initially made its sign-up process automatic, the wiki was unreachable for six hours. Before making a public splash, Sanger hopes to have 16 servers in place, though he acknowledges that Citizendium cannot yet afford this.

The project has been supported by a couple of key grants from foundations, and it also accepts donations from users. Citizendium has recently been granted nonprofit status by affiliating with the Tides Center as one of their projects, but hopes to gain its own nonprofit declaration shortly.

But apart from the amount of donations and the number of edits, Sanger says that the most exciting aspect of the project's growth has been the realization that editors and authors can in fact work together in a civil way. "The main reason there are so many edit wars on Wikipedia is that there are so many immature people involved who have never really learned the values of collegiality," he says, but notes that the Citizendium community has behaved "extremely well" so far.

To Sanger, this is vindication of his thesis that experts still have a place in the egalitarian Web 2.0 world. But what if Wikipedia comes to the same realization? If Wikipedia were ever to adopt the core Citizendium policies, or even puts some sort of article approval mechanism in place that can help ensure accurate information, Citizendium could be in trouble. When I ask Sanger about the possibility that such a move will make his work irrelevant, he pauses. "Good question; maybe," he says, before arguing that Wikipedia is no longer capable of making that sort of structural change.

No dictator for life

Sanger has no plans to head the Citizendium project indefinitely; he has already announced his plan to step off the leadership team in two or three years. But what will the project look like at that time?

If it's still around, Citizendium will probably bear little resemblance to the tiny encyclopedia that exists today. Right now it's a resource for eight approved articles on Barbara McClintock, Biology, Chiropractic, Horizontal gene transfer, Metabolism, RNA interference, Vertebral subluxation, and Wheat. To progress from this to a world-renowned resource that can surpass Wikipedia sounds almost like a pipe dream when you consider the size difference between the two projects—and yet even Wikipedia had to build itself from nothing.

Citizendium actually launches with a head start; though Wikipedia content has been "unforked" from the encyclopedia, users who want to create a new article have the option to import the current Wikipedia text to use as a base.

Sir Thomas Browne, in his famous Pseudodoxia Epidemica, records an old legend concerning snakes. "That the young Vipers force their way through the bowels of their Dam, or that the female Viper in the act of generation bites off the head of the male, in revenge whereof the young ones eat through the womb and belly of the female, is a very ancient tradition," he says.

Though Citizendium can no doubt tell us authoritatively that this is nothing but a slander upon the noble snake, it's an intriguing metaphor for the project, which set out to build upon (and then overtake) the earlier project that still feeds it content. Of course, as Browne set out to show people, the snake story was only a legend; baby snakes don't devour their parents at birth, and Citizendium doesn't look set to dethrone Wikipedia any time soon. But no encyclopedia can tell the future; will we all submit to "gentle expert guidance" five years from now?