Thomas Dalton schreef: > 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.
Citizendium started by copying the entire Wikipedia database. After some months, they deleted all articles that had not changed, and strted writing their own. The declining median article length reflects that the "almost finished" wikipedia articles are a declining percentage of their articles. The decision to delete most WP articles is one of the main reasons for their failure, in my opinion. A competitor to WP has to offer their readers at least what WP has, e.g. by displaying the WP article if their is no native article on a subject. If they don't, 90% of the searches will fail, and nobody will use CZ as their first source of information. Another reason: The CZ project is very closed. There is no way to comment on an article. The CZ forum is only open for CZ members. Using the CZ mailing list is discouraged (the blog post at http://weblog.terrellrussell.com/2006/10/citizendium-a-study-in-momentum-killing is interesting; rereading the mailing list articles from September 2006 show so much promise for the project). CZ contributors are dismissive about outsiders, especially those with most encyclopedia writing experience: Wikipedians. See for example the discussion at the bottom of [[Talk:Citizendium#editorializing.3F]]. Also, CZ is much more bureaucratic than WP. Larry Sanger just loves rules, and it shows. CZ simply does not have the momentum to become a serious competitor now. It has been growing linearly in size, and not been growing at all in number of active editors, for some years now. Eugene _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l