Citizendium: Wikipedia++
Regular readers are no doubt aware of my distrust of Wikipedia. It’s great for untrusted knowledge, the sort you get from a friend of a friend of a friend. However, I wouldn’t trust it for anything important, controversial, subtle, or tricky. Whether it’s Stephen Colbert fans changing the elephant populations or Fox News adding libel to its competitors’ entries, whether Diebold is removing the sections about how its voting machines don’t work or just minor details gotten totally wrong, Wikipedia has more misinformation, disinformation, and lack of information than I think its proponents realize. There is now a way to track such edits, but frankly I don’t have time to babysit the internet.
Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has pointed out these faults in the system, too, and has tried to remedy them with his new project, Citizendium. It’s similar to Wikipedia, but with several problems fixed. There is no anonymity, so it’s easy to tell what was added by a person with a particular agenda. Misuses, vandalism, and libel get you banned for life. There are experts on particular topics who act as editors and settle any disagreements that arise from the authors (anyone can edit a page, but if an edit war breaks out, the expert steps in and stops it).
The whole thing looks much more accurate and relevant (I haven’t found a random page I wasn’t at least mildly interested in). However, I fear that the project will be doomed to failure because the barrier to entry is too high: before editing any page, you actually need to sign up for an account, which involves convincing a real person that you’re a real person, too. This is as simple as pointing to a website that contains your name and email address in the same sentence, but it means that the vast majority of netizens won’t bother signing up. I hope the project pans out, but it’s been a year and they haven’t yet broken 10,000 pages or 10,000 users. We’ll see if this takes off.