[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[The Cunctator]

Actually, we do know, because Citizendium is just a retread of Nupedia,
which wasn't going anywhere.

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 6:24 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 17 April 2010 03:15, David Gerard <dgerard at 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 at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>