To some traditional publishers and information professionals, Wikipedia founding member Larry Sanger is the original agent of chaos and a threat to their existence. His latest vision, Citizendium, as reported exclusively by IWR last month, is a reference service that sounds spookily like the existing book-publishing model. Citizendium takes Wikipedia’s “anyone can contribute” model and adds a traditional publishing twist – experts will edit and judge the content that goes up online for reference use.

Citizendium is described as the “citizens’ compendium of everything” and will take its initial content from Wikipedia. The Wikipedia material will then be repackaged, with contributions and corrections from academics and subject experts. Sanger called the service an “experimental new wiki that will combine public participation with gentle expert guidance”.

Discussing Citizendium with IWR, Sanger says the main difference between it and Wikipedia is that those who contribute content will have to use their real name and that it will have expert editors.

Expert advice
Academics and information professionals worry about students using Wikipedia and failing to learn good information literacy skills. There is also concern that the information on Wikipedia is not good quality. Sanger says Citizendium’s experts will rid it of the failings of Wikipedia, but as a man of the dotcom era rather than the printed and bound generation, Sanger’s definition of an expert is radically different from the one used in the publishing world.

But Sanger is confident that Citizendium will attract the sort of experts that major publishing houses would consider for reviewing their literature. “Wikipedia is motivating experts to get involved, as they don’t like to see false information written about their areas of expertise.”

He hasn’t finalised the criteria for expert selection yet, but says: “A PhD is neither necessary nor essential, but most of the editors in an academic area will no doubt have a PhD.”

Taking a lead from journal publishing, Sanger says: “Editors will be regarded as peers.” He adds that for academic areas an editor will be likely to have published articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will cover everything from stem cell research to the cast and characters of TV shows like Dr Who. Sanger says that areas of popular interest also have genuine experts. “The world’s greatest experts are not necessarily academics – for example, there are academics on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although it’s kind of pathetic. But there are journalists, critics, bloggers and some very well-done fan websites. All have a clear set of evidence that shows they have an unusual level of knowledge of the topic.”

Sanger says experts will have to specify their credentials to become a Citizendium expert on a user page, as well as offer links to independent sources highlighting their credentials.

He admits, though, that Citizendium offers experts who make their living from writing or publishing material little or no incentive to offer up their knowledge.

Wikipedia has already shown there is a wealth of people prepared to create content or offer expertise for free. “There is a quorum of people who are willing to volunteer for the good of the world,” says Sanger. He adds that he has “dozens” of editors lined up, including PhDs. “A lot of them are disaffected Wikipedia members,” he says.

Sanger is passionate about the difference between an academic expert and an expert on model cars or TV shows – and equally passionate about seeing both types as equal. He describes people’s lives as a life’s work becoming knowledgeable on any subject they chose.

“It would foolish not to consult them, and with the internet it is possible to consult them. There is a potential here now to create a global village of experts who can be consulted on everything. The results could be really useful. A wiki-like project with experts was not possible until now. We needed Wikipedia to show the way.”

Sanger is not anti-establishment or looking to tear down the pillars that have held up the publishing industry for the sake of it. He is passionate about a new way of creating an information repository and the power of the internet to do that.

“I have no desire to put the likes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business. I like Britannica.”

He believes the two publishing models can exist as neighbours. “We are non-profit; most of our contributors will be volunteers.”

Even so, there is little doubt that a free and well-researched information resource will pose a significant threat to publishers that charge for access, particularly if, as a recent study showed, Wikipedia is as factually correct as Britannica.

Seeking philanthropists
Despite Citizendium’s non-profit status, Sanger is researching revenue models to pay for its running and possibly for some experts. Sponsorship is a possibility, using a statement form of branding rather than display adverts. But Sanger’s preferred revenue model is to attract philanthropic individuals to pay for the content on certain subjects.

“We are inviting ordinary people who require a certain piece of information to pay for its production. They will pay for the content as a gift to the world.” In this scenario, Citizendium acts as a content broker, selecting and paying an independent author. “Patrons will specify the content, and will be recognised for it as the patron, but they cannot choose the person who writes the content,” Sanger says.

Of the phenomenal growth of Wikipedia, Sanger says: “It is simply a matter of convenience. Most of the information on Wikipedia is locatable on the web, but Wikipedia brings it all together in one place.”

And that is also why Sanger believes that Wikipedia will not be replaced by Citizendium. “Wikipedia has a giant support network. It’s hard to imagine that Citizendium could ever damage it.”

But he sees advantages to the growing number of wiki reference sites. “The increased number of people on a complementary reference source will make more people aware of what Wikipedia has done.”

Sanger’s relationship with Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia with him, has undoubtedly changed over the years. Nevertheless, he retains an obvious attachment to Wikipedia as an institution and information repository. The people behind it, including himself, are secondary to its impact on the information landscape. Which is fitting when you consider that, with the sole exception of creating a theoretical model, Wales and Sanger have played second-fiddle to the hordes who have written and edited Wikipedia’s pages of reference.

“Most Wikipedians will not be attracted to the Citizendium model. Most people who have contributed to Wikipedia like it because it creates no distinctions among the levels of knowledge among members.”

Describing the character of a Wikipedia contributor Sanger says, “Wikipedia is a niche that appeals to a huge portion of anti-elitist egalitarians, people who are the anti-intellectual part of the world, and, let’s face it, who always will be.”

So what are Sanger’s reasons for creating a second form of Wikipedia? “Intellectuals should be involved in Wikipedia,” he says. “Strong critics of Wikipedia think that the world is not benefiting from Wikipedia because the information hosted on it is biased.”

Sanger says that this isn’t his view. On the contrary, he believes the world will benefit from being able to see the views and information on Wikipedia – and that the world will further benefit from having a wiki that is edited by experts. After all, Britain has 10 national newspapers, all of which report the same issues day in, day out, all with different experts and vastly different points of view. Few people would argue that this situation was anything but beneficial to the nation’s knowledge.

Although Sanger doesn’t believe there will be any mass exodus from Wikipedia to Citizendium, he does expect some members to jump ship and join the Citizendium project. “We will be siphoning off some people, but these are the people that are already heavily critical members of the Wikipedia community,” he says.

Free information
To fully understand Sanger’s view on free information, members of the publishing and information community should read his paper on the future of free information, which can be found on the Digital Universe site (Sanger was employed by the Digital Universe founders because of his experience at Wikipedia).

In the pages of IWR and in most debate, the term information resource is usually assumed to mean a published product, whether journal, book, web page or database. But to Sanger an information resource is, “something from which one can get a piece of human-communicated information that has some reasonable presumption of reliability”.

The key phrase here is “human-communicated”, and Sanger elaborates on it as being quite literally a human being such as a librarian, but also covering non-human (but human-mediated) products such as books.

The paper also reveals Sanger’s belief in quality information. “Some sort of robust expert involvement and leadership will increase the accuracy of a resource,” he says in what is clearly a defining difference between his ambitions for Citizendium and the Wikipedia model.

Sanger’s paper is also where he deftly defends the colossal amount of information on Wikipedia, especially against those who criticise it for containing information on celebrities and video games. “I find this view puzzling. So long as the information really is accurate, then there seems to be no advantage in excluding it.”

Throughout his paper, Sanger is clear that he respects books and libraries and that he understands the limitations of all information resources, whether offline or online. But he also reveals an underlying passion to try and create an infinite resource of human information. At present, he sees wiki technology as the way forward for that ambition.

Who is Larry Sanger?
Anchorage, Alaska, is right in the top left-hand corner of a map of the world. The remote city is where Larry Sanger spent his formative years, having been born in the state of Washington.

He arrived at the online world as a result of a Masters in philosophy from Ohio State University. “From the age of 17 I wanted to be a philosophy professor, but after completing my degree, I realised I didn’t want to do that as a career.”

He describes philosophy as a “habit” and wanted a way to suport it. This was the late 1990s and the world was getting into a lather about the Year 2000 bug (Y2K) precipitating IT meltdown.

Sanger set up Y2K News Reports, which quickly became a major resource for news and information on the bug. “This site was widely read,” he says. But come January 2000, Sanger was looking for a new project to feed his habit. It was at this time that he met the other founding father of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.

Wales’s company Bromis had created the Nupedia, an online encyclopaedia. “It was a condition of my employment to finish my PhD,” Sanger says. “He wanted the editor in chief to have a PhD.”

Sanger voiced concerns about Wikipedia as the project grew beyond their dreams. From the beginning he was worried about the perceived lack of credibility and that overzealous members of the community were given too high a prominence.

Sanger split with Wikipedia in 2005 and became a philosophy lecturer. But by December he was back in online reference information as the director of distributed content programs at the Digital Universe, a web-based reference resource that requires a specialist browser. He’s now developing the Citizendium as a standalone product.

He describes his relationship with Wales as “off and on”. Although they may not be best of friends, he says, “I doubt either of us holds a grudge.”