Citizendium Founder & Wikipedia Co-Founder, Larry Sanger, Discusses Projects

Newsmaker: Wikipedia today, Citizendium tomorrow
Is Citizendium a project the library community should support?

Two exchanges from the interview:
Wikipedia has grown to be quite big. How do you plan on competing with them? Do you really think we need another wiki?
Sanger: I think we absolutely need another wiki–first of all, simply because Wikipedia lacks credibility, unfortunately. It’s a good starting place, as people say–on some subjects anyway–but it isn’t really what we want out of a reliable reference resource. And frankly, I don’t think that the Wikipedia community is prepared to make the changes that I think need to be made in order to transform Wikipedia into something that’s really reliable.

In some ways the Net that we know is based on the idea of being anonymous. Why doesn’t Citizendium allow this? Why do you have to reveal who you are and use your real name to use Citizendium?
Sanger: Well, there’s a couple of different reasons. First, anonymity tends to make people into jerks if they have any tendencies in that direction. They lack accountability and because they lack accountability that enables some people to disrupt the process. And there’s some other reasons too, though. The biggest other reason is that if we use real names, the whole of the project looks a lot more credible. If I look at the page history for an article and I see nothing but real names, I have some confidence that if someone has put in some really egregious error, they’re going to be reined in. I don’t have any such assurance if there are a bunch of pseudonyms and mere IP addresses.

Source: News.com