Pilot project and initial growth
The project was announced by Sanger on 15 September 2006, at the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Berlin. He gave no deadline for the full launch of the wiki.[37][38] However, on 2 October 2006, Sanger released a pilot project announcement that envisioned a fully functioning wiki within "one to two months."
In an apparent attempt to quicken the pace of the project, on 2 October 2006, Citizendium web forum moderator Peter Hitchmough suggested what he called an "alpha test" of the concept. Hitchmough proposed the forking of a limited number of Wikipedia articles to a site where Citizendium web forum and mailing list members could "rewrite a complete section" of Wikipedia content.[39]
Larry Sanger reacted enthusiastically to the idea and at first suggested his already existing Textop wiki as the site for the alpha test. Sanger later posted that Textop would not be a good choice, but showed continued interest in the proposal. He envisioned a "restricted-access" wiki where the idea could be tried and requested further discussion.[40]
No access to the pilot version of Citizendium, even read-only, was allowed to the general public. Sanger stated: "Only invited people will be able to view and edit the pilot project wiki."[41] Sanger also said that constables for the pilot project will be chosen by the chief constable.[42]
In a press release on 17 October 2006, Sanger announced: "the fledgling Citizendium Foundation will launch a six-week pilot project open to potential contributors by invitation". Several editors and other project leaders were named. It was also announced that the Citizendium Foundation had "started the process of applying for 501(c)(3) status [non-profit status]" and had "received a firm commitment for a significant seed grant from a foundation, as well as small personal donations."[13] In a follow-up post to the press release, Sanger said that the initial group allowed access to the pilot would consist of "ten editors, three constables, six authors, and me."[43]
The pilot project began operations on 23 October 2006.[44] On 8 November, Larry Sanger reported that 263 user names had access to the pilot wiki, 183 articles on the wiki were "live" (meaning "someone is or intends to be working on them") and there were about 300 total edits to the wiki on 7 November.[45]
In a 17 January 2007 post to the Citizendium forum, Sanger stated that "we have had only 10–20 (very) active people out of 500 accounts created." As a result, Sanger decided to delete all articles besides those marked "CZ live" from the pilot project in an attempt to motivate greater participation.[46] On 22 January 2007, Citizendium experimented with a new self-registration procedure: read/write access was granted automatically after creation of the account. There were a few instances of vandalism after this change, though the vandalism was quickly reverted.[47] On 19 January, Sanger announced the formal organization of Citizendium as a legal non-profit organization.[48]
On 16 February 2007, in response to rising site vandalism, automatic account creation[49] was put on hold while increased protections were being put in place to counter vandalism.[50] The next day, page moves were limited to constables as an additional measure against vandalism.[51] In addition, Sanger continued the process of un-forking the Citizendium from Wikipedia by inviting contributors to delete any Wikipedia content that had changed only superficially since it was imported.
Inauguration
On 25 March 2007, Citizendium ended its pilot phase and went live, into its beta phase, and the site became publicly readable.[52] The launch coincided with a feature-length Associated Press article that ran widely, with a title in USA Today of "Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia."[53]
The day prior to launch, Sanger released an essay, "Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed" in which he stated that activity at Citizendium grew from 100 edits a day in the first month to over 500 prior to launch.[54] After the launch, on 27 March 2007, a press release quotes Sanger as saying "You don't have to choose between content and accountability. We have shown that we can create open and credible content. We can, in fact, be open to all sorts of participants, but still hold people to higher standards of content and behavior as a community."[55]
Sometime after the launch, it was noted that Citizendium's family-friendly policy would mean the project would likely tend to avoid articles on slang terms for sexual activity, and particularly explicit articles on sexual practices.[56]
Later growth
At the project's first anniversary in September 2007, Citizendium included 3,000 articles written and revised by 2,000 people.[59] A number of media reports appeared in late October and early November 2007 about the anniversary of Citizendium. An article in the Financial Times quoted Larry Sanger predicting strong growth for the project: "At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively – say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude. And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate."[60]
Citizendium was honored on 5 December 2007, as an award finalist of the Society for New Communications Research. The Society describes itself as a nonprofit global think-tank "dedicated to the advanced study of new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society." The Society chose Citizendium for an award because it considered it "a leading organization" in these respects.[61][62]
Decline
Library writer Walt Crawford noted in April 2009 that Citizendium appeared to be in an "extended lull", with a constant rate of creation of new articles at around 13–14 per day and a decline in the number of active authors.[63] In August 2009, Richard Waters wrote in the Financial Times technology blog: "At best, Citizendium could be called a qualified success. Launched in March 2007, as of August 2009 it had 11,810 articles – 2,999,674 fewer than the English-language version of Wikipedia."[64] Mathieu O'Neil, Principal Researcher at the Australian Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy, wrote in a March 2010 article on crowdsourcing that "new participants to Wikipedia know that their contributions will have a significant audience; becoming a Wikipedia editor is trivial and instantaneous; since it lacks this immediate quality, Citizendium failed to attract the crowd."[65]
In March 2010, the project had 90 contributors who made at least one edit, with a core of 25 contributors who made more than 100 edits. Median word count dropped from 468 words per article in October 2007 to 151 in May 2010.[66] In June 2010, the number of users making 1, 20, or 100 edits per month all were at their lowest point since the project went public in March 2007.
Recent status
On 2 July 2020, Larry Sanger wrote that he had transferred legal ownership of the Citizendium domain name to Pat Palmer, saying that Citizendium had "stopped being 'my' project a long time ago. But until this morning, I still owned the domain name."[70] In early 2022, Citizendium upgraded its software to the latest version of MediaWiki. User accounts were not retained and had to be recreated on the new server.[71]
As of July 2023, Citizendium's web traffic was 70,000 visits per month.[72]
