Co-founder launches a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia

Larry Sanger, co-founder with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, has launched a new project that will build on Wikipedia's knowledge base with added "expert guidance".

The Citizendium Project, "a citizens' compendium of everything", is described as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia - meaning it will start as a mirror of the Wikipedia site and allow anyone to contribute changes to articles, but combine "public participation with gentle expert guidance". The ultimate aim is for Citizendium to "become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects".

Sanger is not new to projects that challenge the populist way in which Wikipedia is edited - an issue which led to his departure from Wikipedia in 2002.

Since then, Sanger has been the driving force behind Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE), which itself is now part of the larger Digital Universe project. The EoE invites contributions from "scholars, professionals, educators and other experts" to contribute or edit topics, but the new Citizendium project will be less elitist.

Sanger was employed by Wales' company Bomis at the beginning of this decade to work on the Nupedia project, a freely available online encyclopedia written by experts that eventually morphed into Wikipedia.

Sanger was the only ever paid editor on Wikipedia - for 14 months until his resignation in March 2002 - and there has been much bad blood spilled in articles on Wikipedia and in his blog about his dissenting views on the project's editorial modus operandi.

According to the article on Sanger himself, the Wikipedia project "put 'difficult people, trolls, and their enablers' into too much prominence; these problems, [Sanger] maintained, were a feature of the project's 'anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise'."

Controversy over the editing culture among Wikipedians is increasingly being aired on the internet. One site which is starting to gain currency is Wikitruth.info - which uses Wikipedia's own software to track the antics of Wikipedians.

Contributions to this site are provocative, rambling and "edgy" ("Follow the money trail to Jimbo's piggybank" is a good example), and clearly nerds-on-nerds territory. But it's jolly educational!