The Citizendium Project: Wikipedia for Pros

They say that wisdom of the crowd has been so corrupted with self-interest. Wikipedia, one of the fruits of this democratic and collaborative process, has become less and less reliable as a source of information. This has prompted them to restrict access to certain pages in the wiki world to prevent abuse. Ahhh, chaos theory? *heh*

So what’s the solution? Enter Citizendium, the wikipedia for grownups.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an “encyclopedia,” because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability–including the use of real names–is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

Let’s hope this one solves the problem. Or, will it?