Seth Finkelstein wrote:
One reason I think projects such as _Citizendium_ are important is that they provide at least some practical counter-argument to the monopolistic tendencies of Wikipedia-hype. Which comes back to the original question about the success of _Citizendium_, and that being bound up in some very subtle decisions about Google's algorithm.
Certainly CZ is potentially important: if it manages a "proof of concept" success for a somewhat different model of encyclopedia-wiki writing, then the whole debate moves on a notch. And you could say the same thing about Google knols: these things are field-tests of ideas that differ in some significant ways from the WP model. CZ ducked the issue of forking WP, which remains a major possibility that has not been tried.
I'm not really following you, though, in that "counter-argument" I see (plenty enough of it in the archives of this list), and "practical" as in field-test I also see as just stated. If you think of Sanger as producing a "practical counter-argument" over at Citizendium, then I guess you buy his whole side of the story. In our (WP) terms we would wonder: is there not a CZ community that has a mind of its own? Where are the Citizens in this discussion? Do they see the Wales-Sanger foundation spat as something fundamental (as you seem to)? Or would they see it as something quite aside from the main reason CZ is there? In this light, if I may quote from Wikipedia article [[founder syndrome]]: "Without an effective decentralized decision making process there will be growing conflict between the newcomers, who want a say in how the organization develops and the founder who continues to dominate the decision making process." Interesting to ponder where this hits home harder.
I wouldn't know about the more subtle aspects of PageRank, and I suppose Google doesn't want me to. It might be coarse, of course. We learned at Wikipedia to write as hypertext from early on (mav and summary style comes to mind). We had many short articles instead of one big one one. Wikipedia is shrubland rather than a grove of sequoias. I imagine this all matters.
Charles