Archive:Why I contribute to CZ

Here is a collection of personal explanations of why we contribute to the Citizendium (CZ).

Please place testimonials in alphabetical order. Don't worry about repeating what others say; write what you think.

Larry Sanger

I started the Citizendium partly in order to give the world a better alternative to Wikipedia, but to put it positively, because I saw an enormous and unexploited opportunity to bring everyone together to create a truly high-quality free reference resource. (For more in this vein, see CZ:Why Citizendium?)

But why do I continue to lead and contribute to CZ? I believe in this project. We are approaching 10,000 articles, which I believe will be a psychologically important milestone. Our articles tend to be substantial, well-written, and, when not actually authoritative, well on their way to being so. We have a robust community of self-starting intellectuals, independent thinkers who are "early adopters." I am especially proud of the fact that, with a few exceptions aside, we are able to work together as colleagues, and this in spite of the fact that no one invited us specifically; we personally chose to learn about the website and then participate. It is a testiment to what is possible, that we can work together, experts and the general public working shoulder-to-shoulder, as well as we do. But CZ is what it is not because I or anyone planned it, but because of the very laudable individual initiative of over a thousand contributors, and hundreds of regular contributors. It fills me with pride to think that we have shown the world that Web 2.0 with "gentle expert guidance," with "village elders wandering the bazaar," can actually be made to work, visionless naysayers aside.

CZ is continuing to grow steadily, and I still maintain that there will come a time, in the perhaps not-too-distant future, when we will reach a tipping point, and we will be flooded with a lot of new people who will make us grow much faster indeed. But the project even in its present state is worthwhile. Our articles tend to begin life at a high level of quality, and for the most part they steadily improve. We are approaching a point where we will actually be useful as a general information resource, and difficult for our detractors to ignore. Because we are strongly collaborative and are seriously committed to neutrality, we do have an excellent chance of becoming, after some more years (it is hard to say how long), the most reliable general information resource online, period--outshining Wikipedia, of course, but also Britannica as well. --Larry Sanger 18:14, 3 November 2008 (UTC)