Wikipedia’s new rival seemed to have a mountain to climb – until now, says linton chiswick
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Back in September 2006, Larry Sanger - philosopher and co-founder of Wikipedia - set up a rival online encyclopaedia, and called it Citizendium.
Its mission: to rewrite Wikipedia without the accidental errors, the deliberate mischief or the endless internal factional disputes that turned some pages into the nasty-nerd equivalent of old-fashioned pissing contests.
Two thousand articles later, the ambitious scale of the task couldn't be clearer, especially in the face of Wikipedia's index of two million (and
growing) articles. Some have argued the whole thing's impractical; others that Citizendium's unnecessary, that Wikipedia works well enough.
However, thanks to the recent actions of a 24-year-old California Institute of Technology graduate student called Virgil Griffith, Wikipedia's beginning to look damaged. Is Citizendium Wikipedia's heir-in-waiting? |
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Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be authored by the people - but they will have to register under their real names
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Wikipedia's recent troubles came courtesy of an internet tool, developed by Griffith (a former hacker who also operates under the name Romanpoet), to show who's editing what, and how.
WikiScanner sifts through Wikipedia's anonymous edits, retrieves the IP addresses (the Web's equivalent of fingerprints) associated with each edit and connects them back to large corporations and organisations - including Walmart, the CIA, the BBC and the Church of Scientology. It's uncovered a long and growing list of suspect tampering.
Some of it is truly bizarre. Take, for instance, the 'erotic spanking' entry, edited from inside the IRS, the American tax agency, which details how a paddle hanging on a wall as a threat to the children might actually be 'primarily used for erotic paddlings given by one spouse to the other'. Presumably this isn't IRS policy.
However, WikiScanner has also revealed Wikipedia's dark side. Diebold - the private company responsible for electronic voting systems in the US - appears to have
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Citizendium vs Wikipedia
Competitors to Wikipedia
