OPEN

Citizendium, the new approach to the Wikipedia model, is inviting participants for its private trial at the moment.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.  It will begin life as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia.  But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects.  We will avoid calling it an “encyclopedia,” because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

You can take a look at the Citizendium home page or its first press release for further information.

It has been founded by Larry Sanger, one of the original founders of Wikipedia.

One to keep an eye on, for sure. For all its inaccuracies and supposed flaws, Wikipedia is hugely influential as a reference source and as a form of media in its own right. Spannerworks carried out a study of the recent BusinessWeek/Interbrand top 100 global brands – inspired by Micropersuasion‘s look at the top advertising brands in the US – and found that 88% of ’em had a Wikipedia entry in the first 20 results on Google for their name.