The Citizendium encyclopedia project today announced it had chosen to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license after very serious consideration of all of the options — see project founder Larry Sanger’s 22,000 word essay on the choice:

In short, Sanger argues that adopting the CC-by-sa license is most in line with the project’s top goal, of “giving the broadest access to vast amounts of high-quality reference content,” as well as the main mean to this end, of motivating participants. The project rejected a license (CC-by-nc-sa) that would forbid commercial reuse, an issue on which “Citizens” were evenly divided.

The project will in coming months turn to recruitment and expanding its governance processes. The changes are anticipated to greatly increase the rate at which articles are approved by Citizendium expert editors.

Read the whole release.