[WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

2009/4/22 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

>> Perhaps "useful" is too strong a term, "useful enough to rival
>> Wikipedia" would be better.

> I think so.  If you set your standards of success in terms of Wikipedia,
> there's simply no competition. Wikipedia has achieved an unrivaled success
> in terms of the standards it has set to measure success.


Yep. If you set your standards of success in terms of Britannica,
Wikipedia is not quite there yet. But the point is that this doesn't
matter in practice - it turns out that Wikipedia is more useful
because people use it in practice at their desks every day, rather
than admiring the impressive shelf of books they remember from high
school.

Britannica was already suffering from Encarta (which was invented as
demoware for the existence of CD-ROM drives) and the Internet -
Wikipedia was the Internet having the temerity to use the word
"encyclopedia."

So whatever out-innovates Wikipedia from below will succeed in some
way we haven't thought of yet. What Wikipedia rules are there we could
try breaking?

* NPOV (I don't think so, lots have tried this)
* Notability (possibly - our breadth is our key asset, and overapplied
"notability" rules trash this)
* NOR (maybe - note that not every Wikipedia has this rule)
* Expert privilege (Citizendium is trying this, we'll see how it goes)

What others are there?


- d.