Get published on Wired.com by May

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-growing self-refining encyclopedia of whatever the crowd could imagine. There was a split, or as contributor Michael Ho has written "Citizendium became less of a fork, and more of a knife."

This week Assignment Zero contributors will be investigating this split before publishing on Wired.com a definitive piece on the emergence of Citizendium. Can you volunteer time over this next week to help cover the story? Everyone who participates will be included in Wired's byline. Just visit the Citizendium homepage and 'join the team' (it's a link in the left-hand column under "team members." There' you'll also find an outline of the story and a list of what's been done and needs to get done.