Columbus, Ohio (USA), February 2007 - Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, who left the project in 2002, announced his counter-project Citizendium at the Wizard of OS 4 conference in September last year in Berlin, and the new platform recently opened its doors. But it was a start with obstacles.
Larry Sanger intended to prevent the vandalism from which Wikipedia suffers by focusing on real, proven expertise. In his encyclopedia, only profound knowledge should be found. To achieve this goal, he made a distinction between authors and editors: The authors are allowed to work freely on the articles, similar to Wikipedia. The editors then make the definite decisions about the content and thus assume responsibility for the correctness of the information. This, though, turned out to be easier said than done.
In his blog, Sanger reports that a number of authors had joined the project, but the first results were poor. He initially imported articles from Wikipedia as starting material, but he violated the license rules: in some texts, the source isn't mentioned, and the history of the various versions is missing. At the end, the crude material was deleted with the intention of motivating the collaborating authors to work independently. At least one checked article about biology can be found at the present time.
Furthermore, the problem of vandalism is still a crucial point. Though authors are asked to write under their real names, there seems to be no control mechanism to check the names and email addresses for correctness. As a result, vandals can easily log in and overwrite the pages of Citizendium, meaning Sanger hasn't yet solved the problem. He is currently seeking donations and sponsors to establish a financial base for his project.
