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Wikipedia co-founder seeks to start over
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A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.
Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.
Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia — or any other single source — as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right.
That's where these guys really diverge. Wales argues for self-improvement, with Wikipedians constantly tweaking the rules that guide them. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists — anyone who could enhance the project's credibility.
He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.
While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief.
Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. But the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.
Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust.
After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online.
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