One of the cofounders of Wikipedia says there are "serious and endemic problems" in the Wikipedia model, and that's why he founded Citizendium.
Sanger was laid off from Wikipedia back in 2002, and soon stopped all active involvement with the project. He returned to teaching philosophy and playing the fiddle, and he dabbled with ideas for future open content projects, including one that approximated the Citizendium. And then John Seigenthaler called him, looking for answers.
"When Seigenthaler called, I was already resigned to the necessity of making a competitor to Wikipedia," Sanger says. "The effect of Seigenthaler's call was to make me feel to some extent personally responsible for the injustice that Wikipedia was causing, which made my motivation only stronger. When after six to nine months I saw that Wikipedia wasn't going to make any significant changes, it became clear that it was on me to organize a better alternative, if I could."
In September 2006, Sanger issued his manifesto, a document called "Toward a Compendium of Knowledge." In it, he laid out the "serious and endemic problems" that he saw in the Wikipedia model:
- The community does not enforce its own rules effectively or consistently
- Widespread anonymity has a problem—it's attractive to people who want to cause trouble, undermine the project, or simply troll
- The community has developed an insularity that makes it difficult for people who are not already part of the community to get on board
- The "arguably dysfunctional community" is not attractive to traditional experts such as academics
Sanger had hoped that Wikipedia would clean up its act, and he was all but certain that the encyclopedia would eventually put an expert review system in place. After Seigenthaler's call, Sanger found the Wikipedia community's response "completely unacceptable" and concluded that they were no longer able to change in important ways.
It's interesting to see many of my own doubts about Wikipedia echoed by one of its founders. Expert oversight and lack of anonymity ... wow, what a concept, huh? One of the worst problems I see in Wikipedia right now is that an "editor" who is miffed about an article for some reason will just delete it. It's not an encyclopedia; it's a giant communal sandbox, and if you dig around in it too much, you run the risk of finding buried poo.