Archive:Why I contribute to CZ

Here is a collection of personal explanations of why we contribute to the Citizendium (CZ).

Please place testimonials alphabetical order.

Larry Sanger

I started the Citizendium partly in order to give the world a better alternative to Wikipedia, but to put it positively, because I saw an enormous and unexploited opportunity to bring everyone together to create a truly high-quality free reference resource. (For more in this vein, see CZ:Why Citizendium?)

But why do I continue to lead and contribute to CZ? I believe in this project. We are approaching 10,000 articles, which I believe will be a psychologically important milestone. Our articles tend to be substantial, well-written, and, when not actually authoritative, well on their way to being so. We have a robust community of self-starting intellectuals, independent thinkers who are "early adopters." I am especially proud of the fact that, with a few exceptions aside, we are able to work together as colleagues, and this in spite of the fact that no one invited us specifically; we personally chose to learn about the website and then participate. CZ is what it is not because I or anyone planned it, but because of the very laudable individual initiative of over a thousand contributors, and hundreds of regular contributors.

CZ is continuing to grow steadily, and I still maintain that there will come a time, in the perhaps not-too-distant future, when we will reach a tipping point, and we will be flooded with a lot of new people who will make us grow much faster indeed. But the project even in its present state is worthwhile. Our articles tend to begin life at a high level of quality, and for the most part they steadily improve. Because we are strongly collaborative and are seriously committed to neutrality, we have a really excellent chance of becoming, after some more years (it is hard to say how long), the most reliable general information resource, period--outshining Wikipedia, of course, but also Britannica as well.