Report on Citizendium
Eight months after launch, Citizendium is still evolving but has not reached a critical mass of participation. The project is a wiki encyclopedia led by Larry Sanger, which distinguishes itself from Wikipedia with "gentle expert oversight" and the use of real names by its contributors. It received a flurry of media attention in October and November 2006, but generated only modest publicity for the site's public opening in March 2007.
The site is now averaging less than 200 article edits per day and has approximately 2400 live articles; by comparison, Conservapedia ("the conservative encyclopedia you can trust") generates about 1000 article edits per day and has produced about 15,000 articles since going live in November 2006. Because of its real names policy and verification process for new users, however, Citizendium has virtually no vandalism and little disruptive behavior. According to Citizendium's statistics page, new article creation has held steady at about twelve per day over the last two months.
Between July 12 and July 19, the project added about two new "Citizens" per day. The influx of new users has fallen considerably each month since March. Citizendium's registration process is much more demanding than that of many other wiki encyclopedias, and is currently done via email. On the Citizendium blog Sanger recently reported a backlog of dozens of account requests; nearly two dozen accounts were added between July 20 and July 22. Sanger has promised a 24-hour turnaround for future account requests. Delay between account request and account creation likely accounts for the significant disparity between the number of new accounts added each month and the number of users making their first edit (in recent months between one half and one third of the number of new accounts).
Though intended as an open content project, Citizendium has yet to decide on an appropriate license for its original content. In policy discussion on the Citizendium forums and on-wiki, some users favored the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (which would make original Citizendium content compatible with Wikipedia), while others preferred a Creative Commons license, possibly one that excludes commercial use. There has been little discussion about licensing since early June. Citizendium requires content derived from Wikipedia articles to be listed under the GFDL, with a link back to the Wikipedia source.
Citizendium began as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia, from a Fall 2006 database dump, and many of its articles still bear the imprint of their Wikipedia origins. In January, Sanger ordered the deletion of all Wikipedia articles that had not been substantially modified by Citizens. However, after the unmodified Wikipedia articles were purged, many users added up-to-date Wikipedia content without acknowledging the source. This has created a challenge in identifying all Wikipedia-derived content, some of which has changed substantially from its original form.