[WikiEN-l] How to start a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

[Ian Woollard]

You should be careful what you wish for. It's not hard to make a
'viable competitor' encyclopedia that would be so corrupt and
inaccurate it would make the Fox News network... look like a news
network. And if it was glossy and facile enough, plenty of people
would probably be dumb enough to use it.

On 07/04/2011, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Larry Sanger started Citizendium with a detailed plan for precisely
> how it would work, which he detailed in a Slashdot article in 2005 and
> kept firmly to. This produced the weird phenomenon where he treated
> user suggestions like they were *threats*. I just read a Paul Graham
> article which contains a line summing up the problem here:
>
>     If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here it
> is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone
> is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter
> what.
>
> Knowino (and Argopedia, and the survivors of Citizendium, and everyone
> in fact) needs to look at this and see what they can do. Is there room
> in the encyclopedia game? I sure hope so. How do you beat Wikipedia?
> Work like a startup. Wikipedia now changes at dinosaur pace and seems
> utterly unable to solve the problems it knows it has, let alone the
> ones it doesn't. If room to zip around it exists, something small
> enough to be nimble can find it.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>


-- 
-Ian Woollard