Citizendium was launched in October 2006 as a pilot project to build a new encyclopedia, at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who was the cofounder of Wikipedia (with Jimmy Wales) in January 2001, but resigned later on, over policy and content quality issues. Citizendium - which stands for a "citizen's compendium of everything" - is a wiki project open to public collaboration, but combining "public participation with gentle expert guidance".
The project is experts-led, not experts-only. Contributors use their own names, not anonymous pseudonyms (like in Wikipedia), and they are guided by expert editors. As explained by Larry in his essay "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge", posted in September 2006: "Editors will be able to make content decisions in their areas of specialization, but otherwise working shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary authors." There are also constables who make sure the rules are respected.
Citizendium was launched on March 25, 2007, with 1,100 articles, 820 authors and 180 editors. There were 9,800 high- quality articles in January 2009, and 11,800 articles in August 2009. Citizendium also wants to act as a prototype for upcoming large scale knowledge-building projects that would deliver reliable reference, scholarly and educational content.
# Encyclopedia of Life
The Encyclopedia of Life was launched in May 2007 as a global scientific effort to document all known species of animals and plants (1.8 million), including endangered species, and expedite the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued (about 8 million).
This collaborative effort is led by several main institutions: Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The initial funding came from the MacArthur Foundation (US $10 million) and the Sloan Foundation ($2.5 million). A $100 million funding over ten years will be necessary before self-financing.
The multimedia encyclopedia will gather texts, photos, maps, sound and videos, with a webpage for each species. It will provide a single portal for millions of documents scattered online and offline. As a teaching and learning tool for a better understanding of our planet, the encyclopedia wants to reach everyone: researchers, teachers, students, pupils, media, policy makers and the general public.
The encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, who was the first to express the wish for such an encyclopedia, in an essay dated 2002. Five years later, his project could become reality thanks to technology improvements for content aggregators, mash-up, wikis, and large scale content management.
As a consortium of the ten largest life science libraries, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) started the digitization of 2 million documents from public domain spanning over 200 years. In May 2007, when the project was officially launched, 1.25 million pages were already digitized in London, Boston and Washington DC, and available in the Text Archive section of the Internet Archive.
The Encyclopedia of Life is built on the work of thousands of experts around the globe, in a moderated wiki-style environment, for the general public to be able to contribute. The first pages were available in mid-2008. The encyclopedia should be fully "operational" in 2012 and completed with all known species in 2017. The English version will be translated in several languages by partner organizations. People will be able to use the encyclopedia as a "macroscope" to identify major trends from a considerable stock of information - in the same way they use a microscope for the study of detail.