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Citizendium: a fork of wikipedia
Larry Sanger, one of the early wikipedians, today announced here in Berlin a fork of Wikipedia, to be called Citizendium.
This was part of a very interesting talk on Quality Management in Free Content, where Ulrich Pösch, described how by introducing more openess into the peer review process of the Atmospheric Chemistry and Pysics (ACP) journal, they were able to get a 25 fold increase in the number of comments compared to other journals, and moved to number 1 most quoted articles in their area in the space of 4 years.
Martin Haase covered the different tools wikipedia is putting into place to combat vandalism, increase the stability and quotability of wikipedia, how they are now publishing books from the peer reviewed content of wikipedia. No doubt Wikipedia has been a tremendous success. It is leading to a huge number of research papers, with some very interesting results (wikipedians are in fact very well educated on the whole) and is probably the most researched encycopedia ever.
It seems that the free wheeling and anonymous movement of wikipedia does get to be very offputting for a lot of more research oriented people, specialists, who may have some very high standards of knowldege. This is what is leading Larry Sanger to create a somewhat more hierarchical wikipedia fork where anonymity will not be allowed, and with a notion of an editor, with somewhat more responsibility over the content of the articles.
Clearly we are seeing a slow merging of the cathedral and the bazaar models, each side extending and adapting the ideas from the other, which is completely in the spirit of open source and dialog.
Posted at 03:44PM Sep 15, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in General | Comments[0]
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