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

[Charles Matthews]

On 07/04/2011 19:26, David Gerard wrote:

<snip>
> 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.
Of course the niches are there. The real question is more like this: you 
have to avoid the "general" encyclopedia market for the "general 
reader". So what do you set out to do? One idea is to have a forum as 
front end, and a team of editors who collate material from the forum as 
back end. This was pretty much the theory of the first wiki I worked on 
(except the forum was a newsgroup). The Web is full of transient 
material, and specialised discussions, and all you really need is some 
working understanding of what kind of "collation" is worthwhile.

Charles