[WikiEN-l] Knowino

[Thomas Larsen]

Hello folks!

Most of you are probably familiar with Citizendium, the competitor to
Wikipedia that Larry Sanger started back in 2006. Citizendium is now
dying under the weight of a massive bureaucracy, which was landed upon
the project either far too early or far too late in its development at
a time when there were not enough users to support it. A cursory
glance over the forums at http://forum.citizendium.org will reveal a
great deal of bickering and quarrelling, and very little progress.

Several months back, I decided to create a "fork" of Citizendium
called "Knowino". (I guess I intended it more as a social than a
technical fork—so far we've imported quite a few mathematics and
physics articles from Citizendium, but my main aim has been to run the
community in a less bureaucratic and top-down way than Citizendium.)
You can find it on the Web at:

   http://knowino.org

Knowino is still very, very much in the development stage (one could
argue that a wiki never really *leaves* that stage), ;-) but so far
here are the main things that differentiate Knowino from Citizendium
and/or Wikipedia:

   * Anyone can contribute. Creating an account and signing in is
recommended, but not mandatory. (Unlike Citizendium, where you have to
create an account under your own real name.)

   * Expert contributors are invited to review articles using Flagged
Revisions. (Unlike Wikipedia. The process for selecting expert
contributors still needs to be fleshed out a little.)

   * Temporary content "forks" (splits) are used to facilitate dispute
resolution. (Unlike both Wikipedia and Citizendium.)

   * We allow multiple articles, written from different approaches, on
individual topics. (Unlike both Wikipedia and Citizendium. I suppose
we'll see how this turns out in the long run.)

If you're interested, I encourage you to check out Knowino at
http://knowino.org.

Thanks,
Tom.


-- 
Thomas Larsen
http://basicprogramming.org