Wikipedia rival vows to clean up the riffraff

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In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.

To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable -- and relatively small -- price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.

But Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Mr. Sanger -- who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) -- its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.

And that's precisely what Mr. Sanger hopes to change.

This week, Mr. Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.

Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.

"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Mr. Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."

Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different -- not only because of Mr. Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?

To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia -- Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few.

However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.