On 07/04/2011 19:26, David Gerard wrote:
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Knowino (and Argopedia, and the survivors of Citizendium, and everyone in fact) needs to look at this and see what they can do. Is there room in the encyclopedia game? I sure hope so. How do you beat Wikipedia? Work like a startup. Wikipedia now changes at dinosaur pace and seems utterly unable to solve the problems it knows it has, let alone the ones it doesn't. If room to zip around it exists, something small enough to be nimble can find it.
Of course the niches are there. The real question is more like this: you have to avoid the "general" encyclopedia market for the "general reader". So what do you set out to do? One idea is to have a forum as front end, and a team of editors who collate material from the forum as back end. This was pretty much the theory of the first wiki I worked on (except the forum was a newsgroup). The Web is full of transient material, and specialised discussions, and all you really need is some working understanding of what kind of "collation" is worthwhile.
Charles