CZ:About

The Citizendium, a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an open wiki project aimed at creating an enormous, free, and reliable encyclopedia. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, feels that we can achieve this crucial improvement over earlier wiki-based attempts at collecting knowledge through measures such as adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. Currently, we are drafting a charter for our project, and once this is finished, you will be able to read more details here.

What is Citizendium trying to achieve?

Quality
Our goal is to capture the full range of humanity's various understandings and knowledge of reality, and thereby to paint a maximally broad and detailed portrait of our universe as accurately as living humans understand it. We also expect our approved articles to be, in the long run, as authoritative, error-free, and well-written as encyclopedia articles are expected to be. We believe that an indispensable means to this end is the involvement of many levels of experts who will not only write, but also help guide and, ultimately, approve many of our articles — so far, they have done so for 0 articles.

Quantity
We have already added 16,414 articles, and hope to grow to hundreds of thousands of articles within the near future, and millions after that. This is not the traditional goal of paper-and-print encyclopedias, which have typically sought to offer only mainstream views of the most important aspects of a small number of important topics. Cheap disk space and bandwidth, and the potential of participation by ultimately millions of people, means that we can capture humanity's understanding of reality with far more nuance and detail. Quantity, alone, is useless, however, without the trust that comes with high quality, reliable content.

A new sort of online community
We welcome experts as well as the general public; we will be built not by top-down orders but as and where contributors wish to work; and we will be organized as a genuine republic of letters governed by a rule of law. There will be no "dictators," but a regularly changing group of people tasked to manage a public trust in conformity with a relatively stable code of rules. It also means that we will have very little tolerance for the sort of immature disruption and abuse that plagues so many other Internet communities.

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