Citizendium - Wikipedia with More Expert/Editor Control

[mouser]

For those of you who haven't heard about it, Citizendium is a "fork" of the original Wikipedia encyclopedia project that is designed to overcome some of the (perceived) weaknesses of Wikipedia, mainly having to do with lack of expert oversight.

From official announcement (http://citizendium.org/):

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected.  In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

And a good long thoughtfull recent essay on it (hat tip http://www.nedbatchelder.com):

• http://moderndragons.blogspot.com/2006/10/citizendium.html

Make sure you read the end of that, it's quite good.

[mouser]

I've been on record for a long time that the lack of domain-experts is a real weakness of these social network content sites like digg and wikipedia, and i think it's shocking that wiki implementations have such poor ganularity in editing role permissions.  See for my essay on democratic-style expert selection.

[vegas]

Looks like they went with SMF Forums http://smf.citizendium.org/ - go figure 

[brotherS]

From official announcement (http://citizendium.org/):

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected.  In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

I like the more 'anarchist' approach of Wikipedia. From the article you linked:

That said, I am troubled by some aspects of Sanger's Citizendium. Aside from its pretentious title (which participants are already saying must be changed), this feels in some ways like an attempt by old-guard academics to retake control of humanity's knowledge. - Jason Sanford

Those were almost exactly my thoughts after I heard about Citizendium on the radio!

Two more great quotes from the article:

Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they're going to break. Because that is what works. - Jimmy Wales

My belief is that Wikipedia's success dramatizes instead a change in the nature of authority, moving from trust inhering in guarantees offered by institutions to probabilities created by processes. - Clay Shirky