On 3/25/07, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Folks,
It is now live with 1,100 articles.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
Further, there are red links on the main page in areas such as earth sciences, theater, education, sports, architectecture, visual arts, journalism, military and the media. It is probably where Wikipedia was in early 2001.
So now they're live, and they still have decided what license to use.
http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/03/23/we-are-definitely-undecided-about-the...
If you follow that all the way to the forums and their on-wiki discussion page, you'll find a lot of sloppy reasoning salted with just a bit of sense. Some of them seem to think it would be a good idea to take Wikipedia content and relicense it under CC-by-nc so that Wikipedia couldn't reincorporate their changes. Many more think it will be desirable to at least cut Wikipedia off from any use of what Citizendium produces from scratch. And in order to avoid the license complications, they're talking about the possibility of authors having to share copyright with Citizendium, so that Citizendium could work out individual commercial deals. (One of the few well-informed discussants brought up the possibility that doing so might make Citizendium liable for their content and bypass the safe-harbor provision, but no one seems to be worried about that.)
One interesting possibility (if unlikely) they discussed would be to intentionally misinterpret/reinterpret/ignore the GFDL by relicensing Wikipedia content under CC-by-sa, with the hopes of establishing compatibility in court. I know little about the legal aspects or the chances of success, but if it worked it would be nice for us... it would give a chance to switch licenses without having to take the legal risk.
Also check Sanger's snarky manifesto "We Aren't Wikipedia": http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/03/21/we-arent-wikipedia/
-Sage