David Gerard wrote: > Yes. This is a fallacy we see over and over: "Wikipedia would be so > much better if you did X for the writers." Whereas that doesn't serve > the readers, so is why we don't do it. So other projects come along > that will do X for the writers, and fail to gain traction. Knol is the > highest-profile failure so far - untrammeled freedom for the writers > has made it a spam repository. > > > - d. >
Ultimately, I think this is true. Almost.... Wikipedia has cornered the market in "huge coverage, but somewhat questionable reliability" online encyclopedias. Whilst it is true that Wikipedia could be improved on and a Wikipedia+ system devised, it will fail. Just as surely as any new operating system will fail if it tries to sell itself as "Windows but a bit better". The saturation of the established product will squash it. This is also why content forking is quite useless. The only hope for An Other is to offer an entirely different formula from "huge coverage, but somewhat questionable reliability". (If you up the reliability by selecting your writers, then your coverage will be proportionately decreased anyway.) You would need to be able to offer a product which was *substantially* more reliable, but still wide and participatory enough not just to be another Veropedia. If you could do that, comparisons with wikipedia would be pointless - the point would be that people looking for reliable, citable, material on any core subject would use that encyclopedia in preference to/or alongside Wikipedia. That Wikipedia had 100 times more articles would be beside the point. (It is interesting to consider what would happen if Encarta had been made available and maintained free to use by Microsoft - perhaps ad funded - it might well have taken the business from Wikipedia on many core topics.) I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question". Readers will not be interested until you have enough writers to produce the goods, and do so in a reliable way. So you really need to find a motivation to make qualified people want to contribute (or Wikipedia's best to switch). Ultimately, having a lot of readers will do that, but any start up needs initially to offer something else to the writer. There are two things which motivate people - fame and money. Wikipedia offers neither. It is not impossible that a formula could emerge that allows revenue to the writer or the writer to get the type of kudos that is bankable on a CV. Knowl and CZ have both realised this - but neither seems to have got the formula right. (If, indeed, it is possible to.) The Other does not need to think in terms of replacing Wikipedia - or scoring more Goggle juice. Success is where someone looking for a source they can quote in their school essay says "better try Otherpedia.com". Indeed would it not be great if in ten years time I can google a subject, easily find the wikipedia article, and then, if the subject is not so obscure that only Wikipedia will cover it, follow the link to the academically respectable Otherpedia.com article (which, indeed, is reliable enough to have been allowed as a source for Wikipedia)! _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l