Citizendium - the Citizens' Compendium. Much smaller than Wikipedia, but with "gentle expert oversight", and no anonymity.

Citizendium has been set up by Larry Sanger, one of the original founders of Wikipedia. Currently it has less than one thousandth as many articles as Wikipedia. All its content is developed by people who have signed up under a Statement of Fundamental Policies:   

"Authors: all contributors have "author" rights on the Citizendium.  They can start new articles, edit existing articles, engage other contributors in discussion about articles, etc.
Editors: editors, in addition, have the right to make (or work together with other editors in making) plans, policies, and decisions for particular articles, and eventually will have the right to designate particular versions of articles as "approved."  As a rule of thumb, editors in traditionally "academic" fields will require the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position in the field, while editors in more "professional" fields require the usual terminal professional degree in the field plus significant experience and publishing."

So, even if all you want to do is to correct a typo or other minor error, you have to apply for an account to do so. I want it to succeed, but the hurdles you have to jump to get involved make me sceptical that it will efficiently capture knowledge for re-use in the way that Wikipedia seems to. It would be interesting to test it by seeding both it and Wikipedia with identical articles, and monitoring the way these develop over time and the amount of use they get. Maybe someone has already done this?

Comments

[Larry Sanger]

"It would be interesting to test it by seeding both it and Wikipedia with identical articles, and monitoring the way these develop over time and the amount of use they get. Maybe someone has already done this?"

Wouldn't prove anything at this stage. Wikipedia has one or two orders of magnitude more activity than the Citizendium. The relevant experiment is impossible: test what would happen to an article a few months after Wikipedia's launch, vs. what happens to it on CZ now.

[Seb Schmoller]

Thanks for the comment, Larry. I defer to your judgement on the general point, but I do think that it would be interesting to see what happens by way of people making changes in the Wikipedia and CZ versions of the same or related articles. In my ALT role I am responsible for a project that will be using Wikimedia for some "expert-authored" material about e-learning, and the issue of where to put it (on our own Wikimedia server, in Wikipedia, or, for example, in CZ) and how to evaluate its subsequent use and development, is taxing us just now.

Seb