Wikipedia founder signs up academics for rival site

The estranged founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written entirely by members of the public, is to launch a rival that he says is less likely to be riddled with errors. Larry Sanger says that vast swaths of the anarchic encyclopaedia he helped create in 2001 are in desperate need of an editor - and that is what he is promising for his new project. The launch of Citizendium.org, which begins testing in the next few days, is the latest chapter in the bitter public feud between Sanger and Jimmy Wales, with whom he conceived Wikipedia in 2001. And it comes as Wikipedia is still reeling from the revelation of embarrassing errors and the activities of malicious hackers. Sanger has begun signing up academics furious at the mistakes and generalisations they find on Wikipedia’s articles on their specialist subjects, and vowed to give these experts a special role to shape articles on Citizendium.org. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium will insist that members of the public making changes do so using their real names. It will throw out troublemakers and those who do not defer to expert editors. (The Independent,October 18, 2006)

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>