All, I have a simple, "dangerous" question: would you contribute more if the wiki were blank? That is, if we hadn't copied over all those Wikipedia articles?
I just asked myself that question and I had to admit that I would in fact contribute more to the wiki--I would feel more motivated to do so--if there were wide swathes of open space. One thing that I think I didn't realize sufficiently, when writing about this question a few months ago (at embarrassing length, before the pilot project was well under way), is that the very presence of fair-to-middling articles from WP is actually a strong disincentive for people to get to work. It's like this: when you get down to brass tacks, it's no fun to clean up the mediocre work of Wikipedians. It might be a hell of a lot more fun to start over from scratch. As you can see, I am willing to revisit my old decisions and, if necessary, admit that I was wrong. For me, as project leader, my top priority is to make sure that people are motivated to get involved. I have been wondering why we have had only 10-20 (very) active people out of 500 accounts created. I think we can do much better, and I think there might well be a huge amount more activity on the wiki if, basically, we could go where our fancies took us, starting over and doing it right from scratch. I say all this without having revisited my own arguments against the position I'm suggesting here, and without considering other arguments in favor of the position. It's just one point that I think has tremendous force: We will work much more on the wiki if we have to fill it up with content according to our own standards, instead of the much duller task of cleaning up mediocre Wikipedia content. What do you think? Reply at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,431.0.html I'll be very curious to see what you all have to say. --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
