It seems Wikipedia has become so counterproductive; one of the founders of the online encyclopedia went off and created his own, separate site.  Citizendium, created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, ended its pilot program on Sunday, March 25 and began its beta site the following Tuesday.

According to Times Online, the site will hold its democratic ideals while monitoring posts and making sure that they and posters are legitimate.  Contributors to the new site are required to give their real names, and experts from the various fields will be asked to fact check material that is posted.  Reliability is marked by a green tick on the website.

I consider myself a pretty consistent Wikipedia user.  And while I assume everything I'm reading is fairly accurate, I try not to take everything word for word.  Especially recently with more encounters of frauds that pretend to be scholars.  Recently a 24-year old man from Kentucky with no higher education was discovered posing as a tenured professor of religion and an expert in canon law.  He was recognized by the website administrators and users as a professional, under which he had posted false information.

There have also been other damaging cases of posts that falsely convict certain individuals as murders, such as the post about a journalist who was accused of assassinating both Kennedys and eating JFK.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia de facto leader, denies the unreliability of his site, saying that anonymity leads to irresponsibility and that he is unaware of the quality of the discourse on the website.

Citizendium is up and running its beta site, currently containing over 1,000 articles with over 100 contributors.

The site almost identically resembles Wikipedia in layout and the search engine is the same.  The only difference is one advertised by Sanger: that Citizendium is more accountable and reliable than Wikipedia.  If you just want to do research on any topic, I suggest sticking with Wikipedia for the moment, but if you feel you have something to offer to the encyclopedia, then give Citizendium a shot because the site very much lacks information.  Time will tell whether the site will hit or miss.