Citizendium Launches. Does the World Need Two Wikipediae?

Tuesday marked the official launch of Citizendium, a new competitor to Wikipedia in the user-created online encyclopedia space. Founded by Larry Sanger, formerly of Wikipedia, Citizendium promises to be the Emily Post version of Wikipedia. All contributors have to give their real names, submit a short bio, and provide a valid email address (and free services are discouraged as the email address).

If you've been following the saga of Wikipedia, you'll know that the reliability of the content was called into question when one of the editors falsified qualifications for his subject area. You might also be aware that, since the development of Citizendium, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has been downplaying Sanger's role in the creation of Wikipedia, saying that he was more of an underling than a co-founder. Since Citizendium is positioning itself as the "reliable" user-created encyclopedia, where do you go to find the truth?

A quick glance around Citizendium might confuse you; there's been little redesign of the basic Wiki template, which means that Citizendium looks, well, a lot like Wikipedia. And if you read through some of the entries, it may sound familiar as well. In an InformationWeek interview, Sanger admits that approximately 1/3 of Citziendium's current 1100 articles are from somewhere else, including Wikipedia. Citizendium is currently undergoing what they are referring to as "The Big Cleanup" to eliminate these articles pulled from elsewhere.

The real question here isn't which site is more reliable, but rather, can Citizendium really compete? Wikipedia is already the master of SEO, with page one Google rankings on just about any topic you can imagine. So it has the eyes, the established stable of contributors and editors, and the name recognition. Citizendium has the same not-for-profit set-up, but is obviously racing to catch up. And with having to verify each contributor and editor without an automated system, there's obviously going to be a bottleneck at getting contributors up and running quickly.

Sanger obviously has an ideal of what Wikipedia should be in his mind, and is attempting to create that ideal with his own competing site. In truth, I think many of the things he is attempting to do with Citizendium are things that should be changed with Wikipedia, like editor verification. It seems odd, however, that he discourages the use of "free" email clients; I know I'm not the only one who uses Gmail as my "business" account because it's accessible from anywhere, has more room than any of my "paid" email accounts, and is far more searchable than most email clients. He also claims that once the site is running smoothly, he plans to step down as "editor-in-chief" and let the community run itself, which I can see devolving very quickly into a Lord of the Flies scenario. While Sanger's intentions are honorable, I'm not entirely sure there is room for them both.