Citizendium

Citizendium is a free online encyclopedia created as an alternative to Wikipedia, founded in 2006 by Larry Sanger.

The citizen’s compendium of everything

Quotes

The world needs a more credible free encyclopedia.

• The citizens' compendium of everything
  • Former subtitle

• The world needs a more credible free encyclopedia.
  • Former caption on Citizendium’s pages by Larry Sanger

• The Citizendium is a small, supportive community of collaborators who work on articles which could not be developed in Wikipedia, that are different from what Wikipedia now offers, though not necessarily either better or worse. Please understand that we love Wikipedia; most of us consult it several times per day. But we also understand its limitations, and that's why we support The Citizendium also, not as a competitor but as supplement. We acknowledge and honor Wikipedia's successes in seeking to be a complete compendium of everything; it would be futile to duplicate that effort. We also believe that the philosophy of "less is more" sometimes applies, where an important aspect of a topic can be emphasized without trying to include everything known about a given topic in a single article.
  • “Who we are in 2021”

• Citizendium is a wiki project aiming to creating objective encyclopedic articles about virtually any subject, of a type which could not be written in Wikipedia. Our contributors use their verified real names, in a congenial and supportive online community. We welcome experts as well as the general public who would like to share their knowledge. Topics range from the universal to the highly local, including parks and school sports teams.
  • What is Citizendium?

• Citizendium is devoted to keeping its content "family-friendly." In addition to policies on article inclusion, neutrality, and others, Citizendium has a policy concerning obscenity and violence. Citizendium is meant for readers of all ages, and so should have as little sexually objectionable or gratuitously violent material as possible.
  • Archive:Family-Friendly Policy

• Probably, we will not have graphic depictions of the sex act or photographs of human sex organs; we will have few articles about pornography; we will not catalog every sex position and every fetish; we will not have gratuitous, and shocking pictures of gore (e.g., crime scene photos); and so forth. That said, we will have articles about sex, sex organs, sadomasochism, famous murders, war atrocities, etc., and some other topics that you probably would not want to explain to your five-year-old in detail.
  • Family-Friendly Policy

Quotes about

Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to [Citizendium] in a few more years. —Larry Sanger

• As you know, Citizendium stopped being "my" project a long time ago. But until this morning, I still owned the domain name.
  • Larry Sanger

• Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia.
  • Larry Sanger, quoted in The Jewish Chronicle (26 October 2006).

• Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to [Citizendium] in a few more years. Uh, ;-)
  • Larry Sanger, "A passel of recent mentions" at Citizendium.org (1 May 2008).

• New participants to Wikipedia know that their contributions will have a significant audience; becoming a Wikipedia editor is trivial and instantaneous; since it lacks this immediate quality, Citizendium failed to attract the crowd.
  • Mathieu O'Neil

External links

• Official website