CZ:Biology Workgroup/Biology Week/Academic recruitment/Letter

Subject: Wiki Encyclopedia Invites Biologists to a Weeklong Open House

Biology Week, an online "open house" for biologists, biology students, and anyone else interested, begins September 22 on Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/), the next-generation wiki encyclopedia started by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.

We want to extend a special invitation to biologists at research institutes, colleges and universities across the world. The Citizendium project needs your specialist knowledge to become an up-to-date, reliable general reference work.

What makes Citizendium “next-generation”?

Online knowledge projects, of which the Wikipedias are the most prominent, have shown that the internet is fertile ground for swiftly accumulating and sharing information.

There are clear advantages to contributing to online resources. Unlike traditional works, online information need never go out of date. Paper reference works are limited in scope, but online encyclopedias are able to accomodate comprehensive articles on every subject. Furthermore, being online virtually eliminates publishing costs, and, like Wikipedia, the Citizendium is free.

In the wake of Wikipedia’s wild success, many other knowledge projects have sprung up, from collections of pop culture trivia to earnest, specialist projects such as Scholarpedia and the Encyclopedia of Earth.

As academic users know, however, the Wikipedia model is far from perfect. Citizendium was founded on the proposition that we can do better. In particular, the Citizendium believes that if a reference work is to be truly useful, it must be reliable. Though anyone can write articles for us, we want and need experts to help insure that our information is correct and up-to-date.

We grade our articles according to their reliability, and put a disclaimer at the top of all of our articles with unverified information. Credibility is lent to an article in a very traditional way, i.e. by means of approval by experts ("editors"). So that readers know the articles they read are reliable, approved versions are closed to editing, but can be worked on further out of the public eye (on “Draft” pages); these drafts may themselves become approved later on.

By being online, our articles can be associated with large amounts of supplementary information. Of course, this includes the usual multimedia suspects: pictures, videos, timelines and so on. The Citizendium also strives to provide our articles with annotated bibliography, and, when the subject matter demands it, high-level, technical discussions of a topic (“Advanced” articles).

During the week, editors and authors from the project's Biology Workgroup will be on hand to meet and greet new people on the wiki. Citizendium is open to all contributors, expert and amateur alike, but we particularly need the participation of academics and researchers. Please join us for Biology Week!