On 17 April 2010 03:15, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > In March 2010, about 90 people made even a single edit to Citizendium: > > http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics#Number_of_authors > > Compare Conservapedia, which has 76 at the time I write this. The > difference is, the latter is pretty much a personal website run by a > gibbering fundie lunatic which gets pretty much all its traffic from > sceptics making fun of it; the former was a serious project. > > This is terribly sad. What went wrong?
Citizendium was not sufficiently better than Wikipedia (one can argue over whether or not it was better at all, but whatever difference there was it was small) and was obviously much smaller, so it didn't attract readers or editors: Wikipedia was "good enough" and people rarely switch from something that is good enough. In order for a project like Wikipedia or Citizendium to be successful you need exponential growth (initially) caused by readers becoming editors and writing articles that attract new readers. Citizendium has shown almost perfect linear growth since its creation because that cycle never happened. Its editors are, from what I can tell, mostly disgruntled Wikipedians and it doesn't have any readers. We shouldn't conclude from this that the idea behind Wikipedia is better than the idea behind Citizendium. The main factor is that Wikipedia came first. Whether Citizendium would have succeeded if it had come first, we'll never know. The only way a new project will ever rival Wikipedia (assuming Wikipedia survives, anyway, and it is so big now that it is hard to imagine it completely failing, although it could change considerable) is if it is very much better than Wikipedia in some respect (it can be worse in others). Such a project could then start to attract readers who would kick off exponential growth. It is readers that are important to attract - once you have those, they will become the editors you need. You will note that I talk about Citizendium in the past tense. That is because I concluded it was a failed project a year or so ago. I suspect Larry Sanger has made the same conclusion, although he (understandably) won't say so outright, since his involvement has been steadily reducing and he has been working on new projects. One very interesting Citizendium statistic is the median article length in words. It has been reducing by about 6 words a month for years. I think that means most of the new articles being created are stubs, or not much more than stubs, and nobody is working on expanding existing articles. I feign no hypotheses for why this might be. I don't have comparable statistics for Wikipedia, so for all I know we are doing the same thing (although that seems unlikely now that article creation has reduced). _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l