Wikipedia co-founder to launch competing project

One of the original founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, is creating his own online encyclopedia site. His reasoning for doing this is that he believes, as many others do, that Wikipedia’s current content is distorted and simply not as accurate as it should be. This is because Wikipedia allows anyone to edit and enter information to an entry.

Sanger would create a site that is invitation only and would only allow “experts” in a given field to enter articles for a certain subject. The invite only system would also cut back on the “edit wars” as he calls them. This is when people who can’t agree on what is fact and what isn’t edit each other’s posts to reflect their personal opinions. The site would be private at first, as it will take time for the expert authors to apply for posting ability. Then the content must be written, approved and published.

The site would also be created initially with some of the existing content currently on Wikipedia’s site. The new site would be permitted to do this under the GNU Free Documentation License. Eventually, this would be replaced with more and more of the expert’s content, thereby making the site more credible and accurate.



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