[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Eugene van der Pijll]

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