CZ:We aren't Wikipedia

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Revision as of 23:28, 20 March 2007 by imported>Larry Sanger
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How does the Citizendium differ from Wikipedia? Let us count the ways.

  1. We've got editors. They are experts in their fields, and we respect them for that. They work shoulder-to-shoulder with everybody else on the wiki, but in their specializations they have the right to approve articles, to settle content disputes when necessary, and articulate article plans. They can also participate in editorial decisionmaking bodies.
  2. We use our own names. Not only do we require people to sign in, we require them to use names that they attest are their own real names. We also go to some lengths (without making absolute guarantees) to verify identities--and greater lengths for editors.
  3. We have very low tolerance for disruption. Our Constabulary has some pretty firm rules which requireprofessionalism. This means that not only do we have rules against personal attacks, blatant violations of the neutrality policy, and so forth, we actually enforce them.
  4. We have no vandalism. Excluding the short period in which we permitted self-registration, we have had zero vandalism--none.
  5. We use an older version of the neutrality policy. Wikipedia has added all sorts of bells and whistles to its original neutrality policy. We've gone back to the original.
  6. Since we've got experts on board, we don't make a big deal of citing sources. The editors we have on board create the sort of sources that Wikipedia cites.
  7. The license differs. We are using [check this!] the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC-by-nc) license for our original articles.
  8. Contributors share their copyright with us. Contributors give to the Citizendium Foundation a nonexclusive right to relicense their work. This allows the Citizendium Foundation to be the sole entity that licenses the entire Citizendium corpus.