CZ:About

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an open wiki project aimed at creating an enormous, free, and reliable encyclopedia. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. We have over 1,000 articles and hundreds of contributors. But we will avoid calling the Citizendium an "encyclopedia" until the project's editors feel comfortable putting their reputations behind that description.

Why necessary

We believe this project is necessary, and justified, because the world needs a more reliable free encyclopedia. We hope to create a trusted general reference work by giving people a place to work under the direction of experts, and by expecting personal accountability--including the use of real names. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

Our goal

What's our goal?

As to quality, our goal is to capture humanity's multivarious understanding of reality, and thereby to paint a maximally broad and detailed portrait of our universe as accurately as we understand it. An indispensible means to this end is the involvement of many experts who will help guide and, ultimately, approve many of our articles. We expect our approved articles to be, in the long run, as authoritative, error-free, and well-written as encyclopedia articles can be expected to be.

As to quantity, we hope to grow to hundreds of thousands of articles within a few years, and millions a few years after that. This is not the traditional goal of encyclopedias, which has been to offer up only mainstream views of the most important aspects of the most important topics. Cheap disk space and bandwidth, and the potential of participation by ultimately millions of people, means that we can capture humanity's understanding of reality with far more nuance and detail.

We also want to create a new sort of online community. We welcome experts as well as the general public; we will be built not by top-down orders but as and where contributors wish to work; and we will be organized as a republic governed by a rule of law. This last means that there will be no "dictators," but a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules. It also means that we will have very little tolerance for the sort of immature disruption and abuse that plagues so many other Internet communities.

Please join us!

While we need many expert editors involved (some have explained why they're involved), many of our contributors are "authors," not editors, and most lack PhDs. We're a public project led by experts. To get involved, first, join register as an author; second, join the project forums and contribute your thoughts to the discussion; third, join Citizendium-L for important announcements. Editor applicants send a CV and proof of bona fides separately, but they can get involved as authors relatively quickly; for more information on editor applications, again, see our call for applications.

International scope

While we have launched only in the English language, this is a digital and international project, with active participants from around the world. There is no central office; the editor-in-chief is in Ohio, our five servers and technical manager are in Chicago, and our current umbrella organization, the Tides Center, is in San Francisco. If the English language project appears to work well, we will launch in a number of other languages.

Our progress so far

We first announced plans for this project on September 15, 2006. Our pilot project got underway in early November 2006, and we entered a "beta" phase, inviting public viewing and participation, in late March 2007. While still a private pilot project, we gained over 180 expert editors and over 800 authors, who together created or began revising over 1,100 articles. Since then, we have grown to nearly 3,000 articles and 2,000 contributors. At the same time, many thousands of messages have been exchanged on our forums and mailing lists. We are a vital and growing project, as our statistics page shows.

We're nonprofit and user-supported: we need your support

We are a nonprofit project, in order to ensure maximum participation and the independence of our information. We're nearly 100% volunteer. But server rentals, bandwidth, and basic personnel are all ongoing costs. So we need your help to sustain this important work: donations are tax-deductible. The Citizendium is a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We will be associated with Tides throughout 2007 and intend to become an independent nonprofit probably in 2008.

Further reading

• FAQ
• Statement of Fundamental Policies
• Latest press release (from spring 2007)
• Older press releases: [1] | [2]
• Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge (September 2006; original project manifesto; outdated, but articulates the grounds for the project; [essay_shorter.html shorter version])
• Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed (March 2007)
• Why Citizendium editors are involved: some testimonials (compiled winter 2006-7)
• Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge (Edge.org, April 2007)
• How to Think about Strong Collaboration among Professionals (text of keynote at Handelsblatt IT Congress from Jan. 30, 2007)
• Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0? (text of keynote at SDForum from Oct. 24, 2006)
• The Role of Content Brokers in the Era of Free Content (articulates one of the Citizendium Foundation's concepts for funding free content)

Larry Sanger is the author of the above writings, unless otherwise noted. Others are welcome to submit essays in a similar vein.