Wiki's Weak War of Words

Wikipedia now has a competitor.

If one somewhat dubious on-line reference site wasn’t enough, Citizendium has thrown its hat into the community-based wiki world.

Created by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, Citizendium claims to improve the Wiki world “by adding ‘gentle expert oversight’ and requiring contributors to use their real names.”

Like many things in the Wiki world, there’s already debate about Sanger’s claim to be a Wikipedia co-founder. Surprise, surprise.

I am personally not a fan of Wikipedia. That being said, I have used the site on numerous occasions to find quick tidbits of information that were surprisingly unavailable at other reference sites.

I have even verbed a word and begun “Wiki-ing” things. It’s as much fun as it was when we started Google-ing things.

I find it amazing that so many people have taken the time to research, write and publish so much information. Is that what we are supposed to do with all of our free time?

Citizendium thinks so. In fact, Sanger believes that community contribution is so important to everyone that they will recreate Wikipedia all over again. Yeah, right!

If you can't already tell, I believe that Citizendium faces an uphill battle in taking on Wikipedia. Here’s why:

• The name, Citizendium, just isn’t as catchy as Wikipedia.
• The .com extension would have been better than .org.
• Techies and uber-geeks love to create acronyms and nicknames, and Citizendium doesn’t seem to lend itself to those things.
• Wikipedia is almost ubiquitous. Even the Citizendium home page calls the site a new wiki project. Duh!
• Does anyone really want to create all of the same entries that can already be found on Wikipedia?

Good luck, Citizendium.