2009/2/16 Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com:
However, I don't think we should think of Citizendium as having failed. Certainly, it has failed to realize Sanger's and a few others' hopes to be on its way to eclipsing Wikipedia. But CZ has a fairly stable community; it's shrinking a little, but so is Wikipedia's community.
We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we want to include. We're over the hill and rolling down the other side, they never got up the hill and are rolling back down to the start.
It's a free content project that is producing some useful material, and some editors find it a nicer place to work than Wikipedia. It's licensed CC-by-SA 3.0, which means it will be compatible with Wikipedia soon. And a rather high proportion of content is stuff that isn't present on Wikipedia. The anti-Wikipedia ethos of the project has also waned as they've begun to sort out their own identity beyond "Wikipedia with real names where experts have power".
Sanger's anti-Wikipedia attitude doesn't seem to have changed much. I don't know about the rest of the community, I don't read their stuff in much detail.
Sanger keeps claiming that they aren't growing simply because they haven't yet gotten serious about recruitment. I don't find that convincing, but it's not inconceivable that concerted efforts at recruitment could result in another wave of growth or two (though probably never exponential growth).
They've been going for over two years, if they were going to have a big recruitment push wouldn't they have done so by now? But really, trying to recruit writers is the wrong way round, they need to recruit readers, that's where the writers come from for exponential growth (which they need if they are going to get anywhere). However, I can't see how they can recruit readers until they have enough articles to be useful - it's a catch-22 and that's why I don't think any similar project will ever rival Wikipedia, simply because we got there first.