The Citizendium is, in some people's minds, an improvement over Wikipedia. Everyone has a story about or has heard about Wikipedia's early struggles with unchecked and unreliable editing and contributions. Unfortunately, Wikipedia still suffers from that stigma. The Citizendium, which was started by one of theWikipedia founders, aims to create a free reliable online encyclopedia. Citizendium requires that authors and editors use their real names and submit a C.V. to prove their expertise on a topic. The Citizendium is in its infancy right now, only 5,000 articles, but those articles are reliable. Like Wikipedia, the Citizendium provides links to related topics and to cited sources.
Application for Educators
The Citizendium is a good online reference for everything that a typical encyclopedia would provide. The Citizendium's advantage over an encyclopedia found on a bookshelf is that the Citizendium is constantly evolving to account for new discoveries and developments. I feel comfortable directing students to the Citizendium as a general reference. The links provided within each general reference article are good and reliable for further study within a topic.
I'm away on my annual "school's out for summer" fishing trip. A few of the blog posts this week will take a look back at some resources that I wrote about in the early days of this blog before it had much of a following. I'll be back online on Wednesday evening at which time I'll be moderating comments.
1 comments:
There may well be around 5,000 articles currently at Citizendium which are reliable but other than that, this number is incorrect in two ways: First, only a minority of the articles at CZ has yet been formally assessed for reliability (110 as of now), and second, the total number of "live" articles stands at about 11,000 (you can see the exact numbers clocking up on the Welcome page).
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