Background
Citizendium: The Emergence of Professionalized Crowdsourcing
First, there was Wikipedia: the anarchic, anything-goes, Wild-West style of information gathering and dissemination on the crowdsourced frontier. Now there's Citizendium, where authors are named and editors shape the entries (we might even call it "pro-am"), marrying together open source culture and the culture of academe. It's an encyclopedia written by the crowd, but on very different terms.
As with most all things, it starts with a story of conflict -- a story of disagreement between two people. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Larry Sanger (Citizendium) shared a vision of free and accessible information, an ever-growning self-refining encyclopedia of whatever the crowd could imagine. But how would accuracy be ensured? How would the site be policed? Who would be credited for their work, and how?
There was a split, or as contributor Michael Ho has written "Citizendium became less of a fork, and more of a knife." Wikipedia emerged as the very standard of the wise crowd -- and the unwise crowd. Now Citizendium is gearing up to launch as an alternative.
