2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
So it's all about the writing? I would have though the important thing was the reading. Wikipedia is all about spreading free knowledge - if no-one reads what you write, there is no point writing it. If you don't reach a comparable size to Wikipedia (you don't have to be bigger, just within an order of magnitude or so) you won't attract many readers. Without readers, you won't attract more writers (pretty much all Wikipedians started out as readers, if Citizendium wants to attract a significant number of writers it needs to use the same source). Without more writers, the current writers will eventually get bored and move on and the project will cease to exist.
Yes. This is a fallacy we see over and over: "Wikipedia would be so much better if you did X for the writers." Whereas that doesn't serve the readers, so is why we don't do it. So other projects come along that will do X for the writers, and fail to gain traction. Knol is the highest-profile failure so far - untrammeled freedom for the writers has made it a spam repository.
I think competition is fantastic and fully encourage people to start competitors to Wikipedia, but in my view Citizendium has failed. It wasn't sufficiently better than Wikipedia to attract enough writers and readers to kick off exponential growth, which is required to reach a useful size.
Citizendium's not dead yet!
But it'll get good in direct proportion to how much it forms its own positive identity, rather than one based on comparing itself to Wikipedia.
- d.