The Citizendium is an improvement over Wikipedia. By now everyone has heard about Wikipedia’s early struggles with unchecked and unreliable editing and contributions. Unfortunately, Wikipedia still suffers from that stigma. The Citizendium, which was started by one of theWikipedia founders, aims to create a free reliable online encyclopedia. Citizendium requires that authors and editors use their real names and submit a C.V. to prove their expertise on a topic. The Citizendium is in its infancy right now, only 5,000 articles, but those articles are reliable. Like Wikipedia, the Citizendium provides links to related topics and to cited sources.

Application for Educators
The Citizendium is a good online reference for everything that a typical encyclopedia would provide. The Citizendium’s advantage over an encyclopedia found on a bookshelf is that the Citizendium is constantly evolving to account for new discoveries and developments. I feel comfortable directing students to the Citizendium as a general reference. The links provided within each general reference article are good and reliable for further study within a topic.