Citizendium launches

A competitor to Wikipedia has been officially launched this week (though it’s been around for a while): Citizendium, a somewhat rough looking ‘citizens compendium of everything’ promises to be loosely controlled and edited, and to offer ‘gentle oversight’ that improves on Wikipedia. You can check it out at http://www.citizendium.org/ but will need to sign up to really view it. I had a few wrinkles doing so with Safari on my Mac but did so eventually and chose the random page option to get a feel for it. I was taken to an entry, as luck would have it, on Sean O Casey, the Irish writer which admitted at the end that this article “was originally based on, and may contain material from, the Wikipedia entry with this title”. Of course I had to try that out and found that is certainly was based on it. In fact, it was it, practically word for word with only minor editing and minus the image. Further reading reveals a decision to fork Wikipedia articles for Citizendium but this is now under review and as the discussion surrounding the resource indicates, there is currently an experiment ongoing to unfork all these articlees to encourage new, original versions from people. This makes Citizendium a real-time experiment in human behavior in information space. It will make for interesting viewing.