Citizendium

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything", is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

What exactly does Citizendium represent?

Citizendium is a wiki with the aim of providing internet users reliable information in the form of pleasantly readable text that keeps the reader's interest from beginning to end of an article. Articles are written collaboratively by "authors" (ordinary members) and officially approved by one or more "editors" (typically people with PhD's in a relevant field.)

Reliability of the information is maintained in several ways. First of all, approved versions of articles cannot be edited by just anyone. Secondly, professional qualifications are required to become an editor and mark an article as "approved". If there is not yet an "approved" version of an article, the draft version will be displayed, but here the third method of ensuring reliability comes in: since contributors have to give their real names and people are quickly blocked if they break the rules, there is little or no "vandalism" of even the draft versions which can be edited by any Citizen. One benefit of this is that members spend little or no time "fighting vandalism" and can spend their time writing, polishing and copyediting.

For more information, go to CZ:Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians.

Citizendium has its own Executive Committee and they are dedicated to improve Citizendium.