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Intellectual Property Watch tells more about Citizendium, the forthcoming fork in the Wikipedia road:
The new project . . . would involve a system of authors writing in their areas of expertise, being edited by experienced editors who would be their equals, not superiors. . . .
A key difference from Wikipedia would be the absence of anonymous editing, creating instead a “culture of real-world personal responsibility,” Sanger said. There would be a relatively immutable and binding charter, with “constables” enforcing adherence to the charter. The Citizendium also would avoid the “feature-creep” plaguing Wikipedia, where pieces are growing ever longer, he said.
The Citizendium would use the same free software licence as Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License, and would employ a “progressive fork” from Wikipedia, beginning with a mirror of all of Wikipedia’s articles, and then allowing people to make changes to them. Updates made on Wikipedia would automatically be made in the Citizendium too, unless someone had separately changed it on the Citizendium, which would then break the tie between the two encyclopedias.
“I want to help launch something better, if that is possible,” Sanger said. He still supports Wikipedia, but said it was intended to be fun and light-hearted, not a serious resource. All of this is interesting, and the addition of quality control seems indispensable to the long-term future of any community effort, but there is still a sort of Yertle the Turtle zaniness to the idea that we will now have a (somewhat) free rider on the (somewhat) free rider that is Wikipedia.
posted by James DeLong @ 9:37 AM | Free Culture Movement
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