2009/2/16 Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.