Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher; professor, and the creator of Citizendium,
an expert-guided encyclopedia. As a philosopher, one of his special
interests is epistemology, concerning the theory of knowledge. He has
been involved with various online encyclopedia projects. He is the
former editor-in-chief of Nupedia, chief organizer (2001-2002) and
co-founder of its successor, Wikipedia.

Founder viewpoints

Sanger said in an October 17, 2006,
press release that the Citizendium "will soon attempt to unseat
Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online".In August 2007 he captioned its pages "The world needs a more credible free encyclopedia."
The project began its pilot phase in October and November 2006.
On January 18, 2007,
a change of plans was announced. Sanger announced on the CZ mailing
list that only articles marked "CZ Live", those which have been or will
soon be worked on by Citizendium contributors, would remain on the
site, and all other articles forked from Wikipedia would be deleted.
Not all Citizendium contributors were supportive of this change, but
Sanger emphasized that this deletion was "an experiment" and a new set
of Wikipedia articles could be uploaded if the experiment were deemed
unsuccessfu
 
Citizendium (pronounced /ˌsɪtɪˈzɛndiəm/ "the citizens' compendium of everything") is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopedia project spearheaded by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001.^[2][3] The project aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by providing a "reliable" encyclopedia.^[4] It hopes to achieve this by requiring all contributors to use their
real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional
behavior, by providing what it calls "gentle expert oversight" of
everyday contributors, and also through its "approved articles," which
have undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic experts and
are closed to real-time editing.
Citizendium was first envisioned in late 2006 as a complete "fork" of the English Wikipedia,^[5] but that idea was abandoned prior to its March 2007 public launch in favor of emphasizing its own original articles. As of June 2008, the project had over 7,000 articles^[6] and 67 approved articles.