Citizendium

In mid-September 2006 Larry Sanger, who had been chief organizer of Wikipedia in its first year and was then director of collaborative projects at the Digital Universe Foundation, unveiled plans for a new project, Citizendium, at the fourth Wizards of OS conference in Berlin, and on September 15 published an essay, “Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge,” setting out his reasons. Under the plan, Citizendium would closely resemble Wikipedia, but authors would write in their areas of expertise and be edited by experienced editors acting as their equals; it would not allow anonymous editing, aiming instead for a “culture of real-world personal responsibility,” and would have a relatively immutable and binding charter enforced by “constables.”⁠[1][2][1][1]

Sanger then planned to use the same GNU Free Documentation License as Wikipedia and a “progressive fork”: Citizendium would start by mirroring all of Wikipedia’s articles, and any article changed on Citizendium would no longer be refreshed from Wikipedia. He said he still supported Wikipedia but considered it “committed to its amateurism,” which he saw as a problem for an encyclopedia, and said, “I want to help launch something better, if that is possible.” Martin Haase, a board member of Wikipedia Deutschland and a linguistics professor at the University of Bamberg, challenged his motives on the spot, arguing that the better course was to improve Wikipedia; Sanger acknowledged that he had left because the community was dysfunctional and that he did not think it had changed. He hoped at the time to launch the project on September 30.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

In an interview at the conference, Sanger explained that Citizendium meant “The Citizen’s Compendium” and would initially be called an “experimental workspace.” The reasons he listed for starting it were that the Wikipedia community did not enforce its own rules effectively or consistently; that widespread anonymity attracted people who merely wanted to cause trouble; that the community’s leaders had become insular; and that such a community was off-putting to academics and other potentially valuable contributors. The new project would have an “editor” role filled by credentialed experts, who would work alongside ordinary authors, decide content disputes and mark articles as approved; anyone with the required credentials could declare themselves an editor by listing the evidence on their user page, without approval by a committee. Sanger said that as editor-in-chief he saw his job as articulating the consensus reached in community discussion.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

After a period of limited operation, Citizendium officially launched in late March 2007. Like Wikipedia it was nonprofit, ad-free, free to read and edit, and ran on MediaWiki software; unlike Wikipedia, contributors had to confirm their identities, submit a short biography and use their real names (pseudonyms were allowed in special cases, such as when an employer prohibited outside writing, but the real name had to be known to the project), experts checked articles for accuracy, and unprofessional behavior was strictly moderated. “If there’s going to be a free encyclopedia, I’d like there to be a better free encyclopedia,” Sanger said.⁠[4][4][5][4][2][4][5][4]

Sanger had begun organizing Citizendium the previous year as a fork of Wikipedia, raising $35,000 from a foundation and a private donor, but found the volunteers he recruited online hard to motivate; he concluded that casting the project as a mop-up organization for Wikipedia would lock it into being just another version of Wikipedia, and decided to start over from scratch. At launch the project had roughly 900 authors and 200 editors and 1,100 articles, 11 of them approved by editors. Sanger suggested that even with a quarter of Wikipedia’s contributors it could become a credible competitor within a few years; Jimmy Wales countered that real names were overrated.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

Settling the license took some time: some participants worried that under the GFDL Wikipedia could import improved Citizendium content back into itself, so the project experimented with “unforking” the content it had borrowed from Wikipedia by rewriting it from scratch. In December 2007 Citizendium adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In 2009 there was infighting among some Citizendium users, some of whom complained that the project had progressed too slowly and that the tally of “finished” articles was disappointing; Sanger firmly rejected these claims. Sanger later wrote that he reduced his direct involvement in the project in May 2009, and that he had always said he would step down after two or three years; he had been working on Citizendium full time for almost no pay and needed to focus on WatchKnow, a new project that would pay the bills.⁠[6][6][7][6][6][6]

In July 2010 Sanger said he intended to step down as editor-in-chief of Citizendium, with the executive committee finalizing a charter for future governance; he said he was considering a partnership with, or handover to, an institution such as a university department, a nonprofit think tank or an academic press, and that universities in the United States and the United Kingdom had shown interest. Citizendium then had about 12,000 articles; Sanger said running the project had been “fairly cheap, but not free,” that it could do much more with a bigger budget, and that community-built projects should have no “leaders-for-life.”⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7]

In August 2026 Sanger wrote a retrospective on Citizendium on his personal website, disclosing that as its founder he had a conflict of interest. He wrote that during its funded phase the project operated with the Tides Center as fiscal sponsor and never received enough money to justify creating a foundation; that after aggressive attacks in its early months the project had to require accounts for editing, which sharply slowed its growth; and that Citizendium had more than 15,000 articles written from scratch, was still operating and was now run by Pat Palmer as owner and editor.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6]

Citizendium: Official website: https://citizendium.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]