Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, left that experiment in 2002 as it became apparent that Wikipedia would either have to close its doors to anonymous edits to salvage the reliability of its information or continue to allow anonymous edits and be faced with continuous vandalism and reduced dependability.
The instructors at my school who require research papers do not, as a rule accept Wikipedia as a cited resource, although they encourage their students to use the site as a starting point when searching for Internet articles in support of a research question. (Our podcast on the subject is available from the June, 2006 archives of this blog).
Enter Sanger's newest efforts at socialized knowledge building. Citizendrium is a wiki would-be substitute for Wikipedia which attempts to encourage scholarly resourcing by requiring authors to use their real names and utilizing editors, an experiment Sanger refers to as "gentle expert oversight".
Sanger's essay on the viability of the project is optimistic [link] and the wiki currently sports about 1200 articles [link] even though it went "public" just this month.
It will be interesting to see if our research-oriented instructors change their minds about socially created knowledge given these new developments.
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