All of us have used Wikipedia to uncover or check a fact, making the online encyclopaedia one of the web’s fastest-growing sites. But there is some doubt as to whether the “facts” in Wikipedia can always be trusted. Citizendium, a new wiki-based encyclopaedia, uses old-fashioned publishing methods of expert editors to fact-check its entries and police contributions. So how do the two sites compare?

Citizendium is a close sibling to Wikipedia. Both share a founding father in Larry Sanger, but Sanger has specifically created Citizendium in response to criticisms of Wikipedia, some of which he himself has voiced.

Wikipedia’s problems began in late 2005 when retired journalist John Seigenthaler discovered that a biography of his life implied that he had been involved in the assassinations of both John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the US.

Wikipedia took the biography down immediately and began restricting unregistered users, initially by blocking them from beginning new articles within the encyclopaedia, and then last year by delaying all changes made by unregistered users by almost a day.

Despite these problems, Wikipedia, which burst onto the scene in January 2001, has revolutionised an encyclopaedia market that critics claimed had been stagnating. Wikipedia’s most famous victory came from a study in early 2006 when experts from scientific journal Nature concluded it was as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

While Sanger still believes in the Wikipedia ideology of widepread user expertise, he also believes in a structure of respected editors and authors signing on with their own names to give clarity.

Citizendium is Sanger’s response to Wikipedia’s shortcomings. Most of the initial content is from Wikipedia and a community of expert editors, many of whom have have jumped ship from Wikipedia and joined Citizendium.

Sanger believes that, in those areas where academic excellence is needed, many of the experts who join Citizendium (which he describes as the “compendium of everything”) will be PhDs.

“Wikipedia is motivating experts to get involved, as they don’t like to see false information written about their area of expertise,” he says confidently.

But where Citizendium, like Wikipedia, will be different from the works of a publishing company is in the wide range of information it offers and the number of experts accordingly involved. Citizendium will contain entries on everything from Persian history to the cast and characters of the dramatisation of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels.

“Editors will be regarded by their peers,” Sanger says. Although he hopes to attract critics and journalists in many lighter areas, he also salutes the efforts of keen enthusiasts. For example, if someone has created a definitive website on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sanger would be keen to have them on board as the subject expert for that entry.

You can’t look at Citizendium, let alone review it, without comparing it to Wikipedia, and there is some obvious crossover in look and feel. The two applications are part of the Web 2.0 generation, so users should expect some similarity.

Navigating around Citizendium is an almost identical experience: the left-hand panels share the same terms and links. Citizendium has fewer photographic images on the front page and less text, so it looks slightly more spacious.

The site uses icons rather than photography to add colour to its pages. Each icon is for an “entry point” to subject groups including natural science, social science, humanities, arts, applied arts and sciences, and recreation. Below each entry point are hyperlinks to the subjects it contains such as biology, anthropology or even library and information science. IWR reviewed the site within a week of Citizendium going live and found many still had yet to be populated with usable content.

On its front page Citizendium claims to be working on 1,240 articles. Visitors can follow the hyperlinks to look at the exhaustive list of subject areas being edited, which include buddhism, cyber-terrorism, CPM-GOMS, and Bleak House. From the project page you can see the profile of the editors.

In a straight comparison between the two wiki-based encyclopaedias, the incumbent wins hands down. Why? Simply because it already has the content. Without content, online resources become worthless and don’t attract repeat visitors.

With climate change on everyone’s lips, we went looking for some expert edited information. On Citizendium there was none, just a link to the greenhouse effect at the top of the search results, but that is a term that isn’t used a great deal at present. Compare this to the Wikipedia effort, which contained a detailed article. The Wikipedia article also included detailed graphs of carbon levels taken from the Vostok ice core. On top of this, the article was balanced, covering all areas of the climate change debate as well as related subjects such as ocean variability, human influence and biodiversity.

Citizendium is a great concept and a big step towards the maturing of wiki-based information. It is still in beta and should not be judged too harshly, but it’s difficult not to feel the service has gone live too early, with too little useful content to attract users and perhaps a community to keep contributing to it.