You should be careful what you wish for. It's not hard to make a 'viable competitor' encyclopedia that would be so corrupt and inaccurate it would make the Fox News network... look like a news network. And if it was glossy and facile enough, plenty of people would probably be dumb enough to use it.
On 07/04/2011, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Larry Sanger started Citizendium with a detailed plan for precisely how it would work, which he detailed in a Slashdot article in 2005 and kept firmly to. This produced the weird phenomenon where he treated user suggestions like they were *threats*. I just read a Paul Graham article which contains a line summing up the problem here:
If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here itis: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter what.
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.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l