Citizendium -- which stands for "The Citizen's Compendium" - was
launched in March 2007 as a pilot project to build a new encyclopedia,
at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy
Wales in January 2001, but resigned later on over policy and content
quality issues, as well as the use of anonymous pseudonyms. Citizendium
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, and they are guided
by expert editors. There are also constables who make sure the rules
are respected. There were 1,100 high-quality articles, 820 authors, and
180 editors in March 2007, 11,800 articles in August 2009, and 15,000
articles in September 2010. Citizendium also wants to act as a
prototype for upcoming large scale knowledge-building projects that
would deliver reliable reference, scholarly and educational content.
May 2007 > The Encyclopedia of Life, to document all species of animals
and plants
The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) 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 cataloged (about 8 million). The
encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at
Harvard University who, in an essay dated 2002, was the first to
express the wish for such an encyclopedia. The multimedia encyclopedia
has gathered texts, photos, maps, sound, and videos, with a webpage for
each species, to provide a single portal for millions of documents
scattered online and offline. The first pages were available in mid-
2008. The encyclopedia should be completed with all known species in
2017. The English version will be translated in several languages by
partner organizations.