Wikipedia rival vows to clean up the riffraff

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.

Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, thinks the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.

Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Mr. Ewen thinks Wikipedia’s anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself — not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.

“When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism,” Mr. Ewen says. “What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but.”

Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name “Essjay” had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology Ph.D. he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.

Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn’t always collegial. It’s a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they would never say to someone’s face.

Story Continues →