Many of these very constraints are exactly what are likely to stop Citizendium from reaching "critical mass". Whatever that phrase means Wikipedia has it and Citizendium does not. I think it's an interesting question whether Wikipedia would have been successful had these influences prevailed early on in its history (post-Nupedia).
Many people are easily discouraged by barries to participation. That doesn't mean that the information contained inside their brains ceases to be useful to the project, it just means you'll have to come up with ways to help them participate in a constructive manner. These two constraints seem to be at odds - how can we get people who have information that is useful to us, but are perhaps a bit fickle when it comes to technology, to contribute that information without hurting the encyclopedia? The answer is not to weed them out - that would be to avoid the challenge entirely. The trick is to use that very technology to lower the barrier to participation to a level low enough to get them hooked. On Wikipedia this means allowing them to go ahead and submit their ideas and allow several thousand more technically minded contributors - or other anons - to clean up and polish the contribution. So far this technique has worked really, really well. Even fairly reasonable independent academic reviews show that Wikipedia's content is actually not that bad - definitely a good place to start. If we go by numbers of articles then its true that most of the encyclopedia is low quality. But if we look at the actual popularity of subjects we find that quality does indeed scale with public interest. This is not very surprising since we show an edit box to every member of the public. We expect that the articles that get looked at more get edited more as well and that quality might scale with number of edits. And this is true. So we see how Wikipedia and Citizendium are different: Citizendium thinks that fewer high quality edits made by exactly the right people is better than many low quality edits made by anyone who wishes. In this regard its hard for me to see a distinction between the relationships between Nupedia/Wikipedia and Citizendium/Wikipedia. Both of these less successful projects have gone to some length to weed out contributors, whereas Wikipedia takes a *totally* different approach to acceptance - everyone except the GDs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PBAGDSWCBY These are both projects to build an encyclopedia and despite the different approaches that Wikipedia and Citizendium take it seems reasonable to compare them on their successes and failures. So far Citizendium is not even close to Wikipedia's quality despite the hullaboo made by its community. In fact, it's not clear how it could possibly catch up given their choice of weeding out contributors. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Chet Hoover <chet.hoo...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Here's why Citizendium is far better: > > * It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no > sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails. > > * It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last. > Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: > obscure films, unknown actors & etc. > > *This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually > an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the > nutters and fans that Wikipedia has. > > *The place is in the hands of "writers" and not an army of "1600 > administrators". Can you imagine writing for Wikipedia as an expert and > knowing that your bosses are in high school, maybe university, and only > occasionally over 35 years old? > > *Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists. > It's more about the material. > > *All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical > aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS > (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and > don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes > & etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who > show up at Citizendium. > > *Citizendium's difficult entrance exam is not really all that difficult. > It's a sure-fire way of keeping out those who are not prepared to edit an > encyclopedia and frankly, I love that! > > Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about > its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which > serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important > subjects. > > Chet > > > > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l