This winter, in my Computer Science 280 class, I was introduced to a very interesting website: Citizendium. Well...interesting isn't exactly how I would put it, seeing as the site is very empty and boring and soul-crushing. However the fact that it exists is interesting.
For the uninformed, Citizenidum is, on the surface, exactly like Wikipedia. They have very similar layouts for their home pages, they both use the same system for editing their articles, and they even share a similar mission statement:
Wikipedia: "The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Citizendium: "Citizendium is a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and update knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free."
Seems fairly harmless, right? Aside from being an apparent duplicate of Wikipedia, Citizendium seems to be a perfectly okay website. However, it's really much more..."intellectual".
Citizendium was founded by Larry Sanger, who also co-founded Wikipedia and acted as its only paid editor from January 15, 2001 to March 1, 2002. He eventually left Wikipedia due to lack of funding and also criticizing the nature of the site, mainly the ability for anybody to edit any article, regardless of their credibility. This is the main thing that differentiates Citizendium from Wikipedia: in order to edit Citizendium, you must have an account with your real name, and it must be approved by the administrators. It requires a working email address. In order to be an administrator, you must have bachelor's degree and be at least 25 years of age.
Citizendium does state that it isn't an "expertpedia", but that doesn't mean that it comes off as one. The hoops that one must jump through in order to create an account easily scare off people who just want to edit something, or add a page about their favourite movie/book/chemical compound. It does help the site itself, who want to maintain an air of professionalism, but it prevents the project from actually becoming known to others. If you refer to my post on memes from a few weeks ago, you'll be able to relate to the fact that the best way to become known on the internet is through word of mouth; nobody is talking about Citizendium anywhere.
This has a domino effect on the website: nobody visits it, so nobody writes articles on it. Because nobody writes articles, nobody refers to the articles when trying to find a reference or quick snippet of information. Because nobody cares about the project, nobody funds it. As of writing this Citizendium only has enough money to keep the server run for "a few more months".
Another reason for Citizendium's lack of notoriety is that the site has a very haughty atmosphere. Sanger might think that Wikipedia has a "poisonous social and political atmosphere", but the truth is Citizendium is pretty bad. One look at its FAQ can tell you this. Citizendium strives to be a better Wikipedia, because apparently Wikipedia isn't trustworthy. This is preposterous. Wikipedia is easily as trustworthy as Citizendium claims itself to be, and this is because of the biggest rule Wikipedia has: Citations! Anything you put in a Wikipedia article must be cited, otherwise it will be removed simply by principle. By saying that Wikipedia isn't trustworthy, essentially they say that the concept of citing itself is not trustworthy. By saying this, Citizendium is saying that any article written, ever, cannot be considered trustworthy or academically acceptable unless reviewed by a select group of peers and administrators. The truly wallbanging part of this is that there is a large amount of Citizendium articles themselves that lack citations, or any proof that what is written there is genuine.
To put things simply, Citizendium is a hypocritical, ego-stroking website that strives to be something big and cool like Wikipedia, but lacks the resources or the common sense to gain said resources that would allow it to do so. The concept is inherently flawed, to the point that it is impossible to gain any ground back with the common masses.
