Hi,
I was at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin this weekend where Larry Sanger has announced his plan to fork (the English edition of) Wikipedia at an unspecified point in time in the future with unspecified mechanisms of updating the content from en.wikipedia automatically. You can read this on wikinews, citizendium.org and some blogs. It would be pointless to repeat the factual details here for two reasons:
1. The facts are already outlined in the links above. Read it there 2. The amount of facts itself about the most interesting aspectsis surprisingly low.
Larry's response to two question I asked leaves me with the impression that he should have spent more time thinking about the concept itself. The most critical part are left to a catch22 thing "its only a proposal".
What bothers me most is that Larry's fifth proposal for an encyclopedia comes when plan 3 and 4 ("Encyclopedia of Earth" and the "Digital Universe Encyclopedia") have not surfaced yet. Larry might or might not use the argument that he does not bear responsibility in having the EoE miss about three announced dates to be released. During the talk, he did not mention those projects a single time (only after I specifically asked him about this).
So we might or might not see a Citizendium some time. We might discover that Larry is able to find a sponsor for this which may or may not be the DUF. We might discover that his proposed constable role is more efficient in enforcing policy and a friendly atmosphere. Or not. We might be able to discover the Citizendium as a perfect source of high quality encyclopedic content that can be imported into Wikipedia. Or not.
It was fun talking with Larry. He is a nice person, insightful and friendly. He listens, he responds, he is polite. When I mentioned several first thoughts I had about the Citizendium, he listened to it carefully and answered honestly. Calling Citizendium a Potemkin town does explicitly not mean that there is something wrong with Larry. I would very much like to be proven wrong. Until then, I urge anyone to focus on the real things that do exist, including its problems and the attempts of people who are trying to fix them (by fixing them, not by talking that somebody should do something).
Mathias