[WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl

[David Gerard]

On 11 December 2010 21:41, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem will always be with us; by our basic nature, we cannot
> compel people to work on anything except what they want to work on.
> The success from the start has been driven by hobbyists, people coming
> specifically to write on what interests them and nothing else; the
> only way to get a wider diversity of knowledgable writing is to
> attract a wider diversity of hobbyists. Areas where there are few such
> people will inevitably be short changed--achieving balanced coverage
> of different topics is possible only with conventional editorial
> control.


Motivating volunteers is like herding cats. To herd cats, find out the
local value of tuna.

- my law of volunteer motivation.


> Butthere is no reason why we should necessarily cover every field to
> the same degree of thoroughness. We are not the only encyclopedia in
> the world, and I hope we will never become one.  If I were running EB,
> I'd use as much Wikipedia content as possible and have the paid
> writers add the ones that are missing; that's of course what
> Citizendium should have done, but Larry insisted on starting from
> scratch.


You forget that he tried that, but his volunteers didn't find it all
that interesting.

I can picture a model in which lots of other people write what turn
out to be feeder wikis for Wikipedia. But I can't see what's really in
it for the volunteers on those wikis.


- d.