CZ:About

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an open wiki project aimed at creating an enormous, free, and reliable encyclopedia. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. We have over 4500 articles and hundreds of contributors. But we will avoid calling the Citizendium an "encyclopedia" until the project's editors feel comfortable putting their reputations behind that description.

Why is another online encyclopedia project necessary?

We believe this project is necessary, and justified, because the world needs a more reliable free encyclopedia. We hope to create a trusted general reference work by giving people a place to work under the direction of experts, and by expecting personal accountability--including the use of real names. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

What is Citizendium trying to achieve?

What's our goal?

In terms of quality, our goal is to capture the full range of humanity's various understandings and knowledge of reality, and thereby to paint a maximally broad and detailed portrait of our universe as accurately as living humans understand it. An indispensable means to this end is the involvement of many levels of experts who will not only write, but also help guide and, ultimately, approve many of our articles. We expect our approved articles to be, in the long run, as authoritative, error-free, and well-written as encyclopedia articles are expected to be.

In terms of quantity, we have already added thousands of articles, and hope to grow to hundreds of thousands of articles within the near future, and millions after that. This is not the traditional goal of paper-and-print encyclopedias, which have typically sought to offer only mainstream views of the most important aspects of a small number of important topics. Cheap disk space and bandwidth, and the potential of participation by ultimately millions of people, means that we can capture humanity's understanding of reality with far more nuance and detail. Quantity, alone is useless, however, without the trust that comes with high quality, reliable content.

We also want to create a new sort of online community. We welcome experts as well as the general public; we will be built not by top-down orders but as and where contributors wish to work; and we will be organized as a genuine republic of letters governed by a rule of law. There will be no "dictators," but a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules. It also means that we will have very little tolerance for the sort of immature disruption and abuse that plagues so many other Internet communities.

Please join us!

While we need many expert editors involved (some have explained why they're involved), many of our contributors are "authors," not editors, and most lack PhDs. We're a public project led by experts. To get involved, first, join register as an author; second, join the project forums and contribute your thoughts to the discussion; third, join Citizendium-L for important announcements. Editor applicants send a CV and proof of bona fides separately, but they can get involved as authors relatively quickly; for more information on editor applications, again, see our registration page.

International scope

See also: CZ:International

While we have launched only in the English language, this is a digital and international project, with active participants from around the world. There is no central office; the editor-in-chief is in Ohio, our five servers and technical manager are in Chicago, and our current umbrella organization, the Tides Center, is in San Francisco. If the English language project appears to work well, we will launch in a number of other languages.

Our progress so far

We first announced plans for this project on September 15, 2006. Our pilot project got underway in early November 2006, and we entered a "beta" phase, inviting public viewing and participation, in late March 2007. While still a private pilot project, we gained over 180 expert editors and over 800 authors, who together created or began revising over 1,100 articles. Since then, we have grown to over 4,800 articles and 2,200 contributors. At the same time, many thousands of messages have been exchanged on our forums and mailing lists. We are a vital and growing project, as our statistics page shows, and recently our rate of growth has been clearly accelerating.

We're nonprofit and user-supported: we need your support

We are a nonprofit project, in order to ensure maximum participation and the independence of our information. We're nearly 100% volunteer. But server rentals, bandwidth, and basic personnel are all ongoing costs. So we need your help to sustain this important work: donations are tax-deductible. The Citizendium is a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We will be associated with Tides throughout 2007 and intend to become an independent nonprofit probably in 2008.

Further reading

• FAQ
• Statement of Fundamental Policies
• The Citizendium one year on: a strong start and an amazing future (October 2007; first year progress report)
• Press
• Latest press release
• Older press releases: 1 | 2 | 3
• Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (September 2006; original project manifesto; outdated, but articulates the grounds for the project; [essay_shorter.html shorter version])
• Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed (March 2007)
• Why Citizendium editors are involved: some testimonials (compiled winter 2006-7)

Other essays:

• Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge (Edge.org, April 2007)
• How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals (text of keynote at Handelsblatt IT Congress from Jan. 30, 2007)
• Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0? (text of keynote at SDForum from Oct. 24, 2006)
• The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content (articulates one of the Citizendium Foundation's concepts for funding free content)

Larry Sanger is the author of the above writings, unless otherwise noted. Others are welcome to submit essays in a similar vein.

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