A major new project is aiming to usurp Wikipedia to become the web’s leading reference work as opposition swells against the growing power of online amateur experts.

The Citizendium site, like its established rival, will solicit input from the public at large. In a departure from the standard “wiki” model, however, it will be under the charge of expert editors and contributors will be expected to use their real names. The changes are designed to stamp out the inaccuracies and mischief-making that have blighted Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that, famously, “anybody can edit”.

The venture mirrors a broader revolt against the flood of unchecked user-generated online content, amid fears that efforts to tap the wisdom of crowds have actually unleashed a new tyranny of the masses.

The movement’s champion is Andrew Keen, whose hit book The Cult of the Amateur argues that free but substandard online content risks destroying whole industries – beginning, presumably, with the publishers of encyclopaedias. The idea that open collaborative projects can replace the work of professional individuals, he argues, represents an "extraordinary popular delusion”.

Citizendium is being spearheaded by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia who left that website to become one of its most vocal critics.

"Wikipedia has accomplished great things, but the world can do even better," Dr Sanger said. "By engaging expert editors, eliminating anonymous contribution, and launching a more mature community under a new charter, a much broader and more influential group of people and institutions will be able to improve upon Wikipedia’s extremely useful, but often uneven work. The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable."

The pilot Citizendium project was invitation-only. A vetted set of editors, dubbed "constables", are still at work developing a set of rules for contributors to abide by.

Gareth Leng, Professor of Experimental Physiology of the University of Edinburgh, has agreed to serve as a constable. "Public understanding of science needs scientists to help to explain, clearly and objectively, what science can do and what it can’t,” he said. “At the Citizendium, our role will not be to tell readers what opinions they should hold, but to give them the means to decide for themselves."

If it succeeds, however, Citizendium may still owe a large debt to Wikipedia, which was founded in 2001 and now has more than eight million articles in 253 languages – from Afrikaans to Zazaki.

It was proposed that the new project would begin life by "mirroring" – or reproducing – Wikipedia’s content, a process allowed under the site’s copyright conditions. “Contributors [to Citizendium] will then be able to edit articles,” a spokesman for the new site said. “The eventual goal will be to either improve or replace all Wikipedia-sourced content.”

Citizendium’s expert editors will then “bless” versions of articles as "approved" or trustworthy.

That idea has since been revised – instead Citizendium "struck out on [its] own," Dr Sanger told Times Online in an e-mail. But still, the project rests on the collaborative ideas championed by Wikipedia – and a host of similar sites that include Wookiepeedia (a Star Wars site), Scifipedia (on science fiction in general), Wikible (on the Bible) and Conservapedia (which espouses right-wing political views).

Citizendium's mission, however, is to stamp out the anonymous and sometimes malicious edits that have threatened to junk Wikipedia’s reputation. In 2005, the site’s credibility was jeopardised when John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today, discovered that he had been linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by a libellous Wikipedia article. Attacking the site he called it an irresponsible haven for "volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects".

Last month, meanwhile, it emerged that computers linked to politicians and large companies have made sweeping edits of Wikipedia to rewrite or erase embarrassing entries.

Jimmy Wales, the site's founder, has acknowledged Wikipedia's limitations. "If what you are after is 'Who won the World Cup in 1984', Wikipedia is going to be fine," he said. "If you want to know something more esoteric, or something controversial, you should probably use a second reference – at least."

However, he told The Times at the time of the Seigenthaler brouhaha that while he "worries a lot about how to make sure that articles on Wikipedia are right", the rest of the work on the site "is actually pretty good".

That judgment was later backed up by Nature, the scientific journal, which reported that Wikipedia was as reliable as the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica – the standard to which it aspires.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive