Happy Halloween! I think I might have told you very early on that I am quick to identify problems and quick to propose solutions to them. So, here I go again.
A certain problem with our work on the pilot project wiki has come to light, at least I think so. It may not be a deep problem, and I think it has two different (incompatible) solutions. The problem is that people (quite naturally, of course) go precisely to where their interests lie. But there are 1.5 million articles, and people have quite specialized interests of course. So it's as if we are sending individual scouts deep into a vast wilderness, and they do not communicate with each other. Why is this a problem? It's a problem because, despite our having created something like 100 active accounts in the last two days, we aren't *quite* forming a community on the wiki yet. That's because we aren't editing each other's work very much yet. The thing that really gets people interested in working on the wiki is the idea that others will look over your work, improve it, comment on it, etc. If we're just working in parallel, and we don't *work together*, I'm not sure that we will actually come together and motivate each other. There are two possible solutions. One solution, that I want to try, is to encourage people to spend some of their wiki work editing each others' work. How do you do that? By going to our "CZ Live" category: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:CZ_Live Those are the articles people have been working on. Filling out nicely, I'd say! Then pick some articles to work on, and see if they need work--they probably do. The second solution is to revert to the idea of forking Wikipedia piecemeal after all: we start over from scratch. This would get us more focused on working together because people are more apt to edit other people's articles instead of creating new articles themselves. It's like moving the community from a vast wilderness to a small but rapidly growing island. Of course, it might turn out that what I am seeing as a problem will turn out not really to be a problem, and we'll just end up working wonderfully, mostly in parallel. So I wouldn't propose to try the second solution for another week at least. By the way, I have read every word of the discussion of the "consumer information database" discussion and have found it extremely valuable. I will point out your remarks to the folks I'll be meeting with. I'll have to reply later. --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
