Sir John Franklin photo on Citizendium
I was rather chuffed to get an email earlier today from Russell Potter, Professor of English at Rhode Island College, who is also a bit of an expert on Sir John Franklin. He maintains a list of online resources regarding Franklin, and is also the author of the John Franklin entry on Citizendium, which is an online encyclopedia trying to use the wikipedia technology with a more traditional approach to article creation and approval. Ironically, the best summary of what Citizendium is all about is probably the Citizendium entry on Wikipedia, although their own entry is also worth a read.
Anyway, back to the point. Russell Potter emailed me to say that he “saw [my] excellent photos of Franklin square on Flickr”, and to ask for permission to use the close-up of the Sir John Franklin statue in his Citizendium article. I said yes (of course!), so now if you view that entry you see my photo!
Citizendium is an interesting idea. I think the ideas behind it are sound, although I also feel that Wikipedia is amazingly useful even if it doesn’t have carefully vetted articles written and approved by experts on the subject. There’s plenty of room for both approaches, and it won’t hurt anyone to have more than one resource to look at.
Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Citizendium, Russell Potter, Sir John Franklin