Thomas Dalton schreef:
I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking (even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size where anyone actually uses it.
I've had a bit of an argument with him recently about the decline of CZ (http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/02/04/write-a-thon-is-on-independent-notice...) and he assured me that CZ has been growing exponentially, and will be growing explosively, and that [[CZ:Statistics]] proved that.
It's a fraction of the size of Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that time).
CZ is actually only about half WP's size at the same age, I think. I've plotted the growth of both sites in number of words, and it is a surpising difference. CZ started much larger than WP because they imported a lot of WP articles[*], and then grew linearly. After a year, both encyclopedias were the same size, but because of WP's exponential growth, it is now outpacing CZ.
CZ's growth in number of words has only just begun to fall; its lack of new authors has been a problem for a much larger time.
We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous assumptions).
Could be. To succeed, a new encyclopedia will have to either have a very dedicated team of authors, or find a specialistic niche (scholarpedia?), or be useful from the start; perhaps by starting off with WP's entire content. And I don't think we have seen WP's successor yet.
Eugene
[*] In fact, they imported all of Wikipedia. But I'm only counting the articles they changed.