A few notes about Wikipedia’s article “Citizendium”

Page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium

This is yet another article that looks credible and authoritative to someone who knows little about the subject. But, in fact, it’s simply an awful article.

• The article is badly, badly in need of an update. The article as it stands would have been servicable in 2010. But it’s 2026. It is basically about how Citizendium declined 15-20 years ago, which is an inherently biased framing. Why not say it launched well, then became the slowly-growing Wikipedia alternative it would become? It’s true that it declined from its initial launch time, but again, it’s 2026, and that’s very old news, and Citizendium is still going. It’s petty for Wikipedia to be writing this about a very small competitor.
• Where is the discussion of Citizendium’s content? Kind of important, considering that this is an encyclopedia, after all.
• If you’re going to tell the early history of Citizendium (CZ), why not actually explain the reasons that motivated CZ in the first place?
• “Sanger left for financial reasons” is weird, unnecessarily vague phraseology. Bomis laid me off because they lost the ability to pay me; I didn’t simply walk away because I felt like earning more money. And I left in two different ways at two different times. First, I was laid off, so I resigned as chief instigator (my self-claimed title at the time), because I didn’t want to devalue my professional labor. Second, about ten months later, quietly, I permanently (or permanently until 2025–26) separated myself from Wikipedia. This happened when I gave Jimmy Wales an ultimatum, that he do something about the bad actors who were driving off the better contributors, and also that he give some sort of low-key approval function to experts. For details, see: https://larrysanger.org/role-in-wikipedia/my-role-in-wikipedia-links/
• The article implies, falsely, that I was merely a subordinate employee, rather than the chief co-founder of Wikipedia, who had the idea and lead the executed of it. Yes, I was paid as an employee as I did this; but that was indeed my assigned job.
• The body of the article leads with a dryly-framed “Founder viewpoints” section: the October 2006 press release spoke of “unseating Wikipedia” and there was apparently a Financial Times prediction about “explosive growth”—not because these are informative, but because they are ironic in retrospect. This is rhetorical framing, especially because it is now 20 years on. And it did grow explosively for a time.
• The raw article-count comparison to Wikipedia (“2,999,674 fewer than the English-language version of Wikipedia”) is laughably adolescent in tone.
• “The foundation was never registered” seems to be presented as a kind of criticism, sourced to a 2020 forum post by the treasurer. This needs context. The project operated under the Tides Center as a fiscal sponsor during its funded phase, and frankly we were never offered enough money to warrant creating a foundation.
• The article says I “reduced my direct activity” in May 2009 and quotes me about “squeakier wheels” and needing income. This is accurate in isolation, but the framing implies I lost interest or abandoned the project. In fact, I had always said I would step down after two or three years, which is exactly what happened. The article omits this context. Why? And it’s true: I had been working full time on CZ and getting paid almost nothing. I needed to devote all my attention to a new project that would pay the bills. (I never have been independently wealthy.) That new project, by the way, was WatchKnow, later WatchKnowLearn, soon followed by Reading Bear.
• Quoting me about a potential “constitutional crisis” again looks like a pointless criticism: as you yourselves say in the next sentence, “Citizendium finally ratified its charter in September 2010.” There never was a constitutional crisis. And I was simply being fastidious at the time; as anyone in the project could have told you, there was a great deal of charter material already in place, that we were acting under, from early on. That was a thing Wikipedia never could say. Wikipedia, by contrast, really has had a constitutional crisis, and for a long time, and it has been devastated in many ways as a result.
• The article trumpets every negative assessment it can find (Ars Technica’s “dead in the water,” the O’Neil crowdsourcing critique, the Financial Times “jump ship” blog post). But there was almost no space to favorable coverage or to the genuine intellectual arguments for the project’s model. We had a lot of supporters, but Wikipedia cannot be bothered to notice that. I dare say that CZ still has plenty of supporters.
• The family-friendly policy is presented in a way that makes it sound prudish or censorious. It is neither. The actual policy was simply that we would not host gratuitously explicit content—a perfectly reasonable editorial standard, shared by most reference works in history, and most “family” websites generally. What is wrong with you people, Wikipedia?
• The “professionalism” policy is likewise presented as noteworthy or unusual. I think we called it “collegiality” as well. Well, I suppose it is noteworthy in a way. But the fact that Wikipedia appears to find it strange to expect professional behavior from contributors says more about Wikipedia than about Citizendium. And the tone is now ironic, considering that Wikipedia maintains its own aggressively enforced policy against rudeness, at least rudeness by new contributors and contributors in questionable standing.
• The decline statistics are given with remarkable specificity—e.g., monthly active editors in 2015—while, again, the project’s actual content and accomplishments receive almost no attention. 15,000+ decent articles written from scratch (CZ early on abandoned its plan to fork Wikipedia), available for free, is nothing to sneeze at. This would be like McDonald’s covering a small niche restaurant by listing its relatively small clientele and ignoring the food.
• The article relies heavily on mailing list posts and forum threads, which I found interesting. Isn’t that against Wikipedia’s policies? Mind you, I don’t think it should be against Wikipedia’s policies, but it sure looks like “original research.” Some of these are my own statements, no doubt carefully selected out of long discussions. Hmm.
• There is “recent status,” but no section on “Reception” or “Legacy” that treats the project’s ideas seriously—and the fact is that CZ has been part of the discussion of online encyclopedias for a long time, and not just as a cautionary tale. The concept of expert-guided, real-name collaboration has influenced many subsequent projects and discussions about knowledge quality online. This is an important gap.
• The article does not mention that many of the problems CZ tried to address—anonymous vandalism and expert exodus—have also beset Wikipedia. We arguably did a better job addressing them.
• It is also worth mentioning that we ended up having to lock down the website against anonymous contribution because there was a very aggressive campaign to attack CZ in the early months, requiring us (without much more technical assistance) to require users to create accounts. This ended up slamming on the breaks of CZ’s growth.
• The unexplained article count decline from ~17,956 to ~16,440 is unfair. Did you even bother to look why? Did you not notice that reflected cleanup and quality maintenance? Wikipedia itself could stand to do some of this itself.
• Finally, consider everything else missing from the article. No discussion of the quality of Citizendium’s approved articles. No discussion of the broader intellectual case for free-and-open expert-guided encyclopedias. No mention of the people who contributed serious, high-quality work to the project, nor what that work looked like; how many thousands of hours of labor have gone into it? And it has been used and benefitted the world, you know. No acknowledgment that CZ operated on close-to-zero budget, competing against a project backed by tens (now hundreds) of millions in annual donations. No mention of the hostility CZ faced from Wikipedia’s own community. What active efforts have been by some Wikipedia editors to undermine the project? I wonder.
• Finally, and this really irks me, there is no mention of how Citizendium has changed under Pat Palmer’s tenure as owner and editor.

For shame, Wikipedia, for shame.

Grades
Overall: D−
Completeness: F
Competency: D
Neutrality: F
Scholarship: C−
Currency: F
Simplicity: C

Credentials: founder of Citizendium, co-founder of Wikipedia; other experience with online encyclopedia projects and many websites.
Stance: I acknowledge a soft spot for Citizendium and the great band of editors it has attracted over the years, both when I was there and afterward.
Conflict of interest: As founder of Citizendium, I am, of course, biased. But I also know as much about the topic as perhaps anyone.
Representative of subject: I cannot speak for Citizendium today, but I can speak for it for the years 2006–10 or so.

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