On 1/22/07, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Looking through the Citizendium forum is interesting http://forum.citizendium.org/
I took a good look at them this weekend and tried to figure out what they were about, and how they saw themselves from being different to us. There appear to be two key elements of CZ that distinguishes it from WP - approved versions (your edits don't show up until they are approved) and expert approval (that you need to be a subject-matter expert, a so-called "Editor" in order to approve a version).
The other one that interests me is their hierarchical project setup -- the workgroups are far more rigidly defined, and each is given specific charge of a group of articles (as opposed to Wikipedia's more fluid and loose system).
CZ's strategy seems more regimented, as I understand users are even "ranked" based on their level of expertise on given subjects; on the upside, I anticipate that working things out that way will cut down on some of the nasty content disputes we've seen on en.wikipedia, and will encourage users to be cooperatively productive, once they get into things.
I imagine it'll be more difficult to integrate new or casual users into such an environment -- although I believe typo fixes and general cleanup are still encouraged in a "drive-by" style. Getting new people into using a wiki, especially when they're not the most tech-savvy people around, is difficult under the best of circumstances. It'll be interesting to see how workgroups change the newcomer's experience.
But I'm just rambling.
-Luna **