Building a better alternative?

Wikipedia co-founder starts all over -- this time with real names.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.
To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable -- and relatively small -- price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.
But Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Sanger -- who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) -- its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.
And that's precisely what Sanger hopes to change.
This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.
Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.
Wants to improve concept
"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."
Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different -- not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?
To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few).
However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.
Problems with anonymity
Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.
Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself -- not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.
Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name "Essjay" had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology doctorate he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.
Sanger contends that Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility -- and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.
Response
Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. But he says most Wikipedians who adopt pseudonyms want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would with their names.
Plus, he says, an online identity -- or none at all, since participants can opt to be tagged merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses -- frees contributors to leave their "real world" baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content.
"I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site," he says. "I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."
Vandalism
A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.
Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.
Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.
Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia -- or any other single source -- as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research.