Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger has launched a new project called Citizendium for quite some time and now it is in beta version. Citizendium, stands for “The Citizens’ Compendium” consists of over 1,100 articles in its database and 187 editors at the time of writing, the founding purpose is to create a much more credible information than the predecessor Wikipedia, according to Larry Sanger.

As I visited some of the articles listed in Citizendium, the information, example is business is neither not updated nor is not comprehensive. Meanwhile, you’ll only find the articles categorized under the 1 and A to G. It seems that they are lack of sufficient people in drafting the articles on the web. To report accurately and fairly, to see the world in the global perspective, and to be the citizens’ voice in the world, a simple fundamental an organization must-have is: you need a lot of people. No doubt their idea of founding is good: To better than Wikipedia and thus, the editors are carefully selected and they almost all hold credible qualifications and positions in their own fields, but my sense is that for a news startup, setting a strict criteria in qualifying an editor in such a manner, as real name, biography of up to 100-500 words, and etc. their ideas is great, but I wonder how many of us will want to join as an editor unless one hold a very impressive academic and work background. If not, the peer pressure is there. As a human being, we always need a reason why we should do a particular thing, in this case, join and act as an editor where we still have the chances to make Wikipedia a better place for us to find information that we want.

Broadly speaking, the success of Wikipedia is attributed to the participation of a huge group of people worldwide. Participation, edition, feedbacks, albeit these all are little things, but little things made the big impact and they are the building blocks of a success web 2.0 model.