Sanger's claim of cofoundership is implicitly a claim of credit for Wikipedia's success. The idea of applying a wiki editing environment outside the sphere of software development was a radical one and a powerful one, but as anyone who has worked on other wikis knows that concept alone is no guarantee of success.
Sanger's criticisms of Wikipedia's structure and dynamics are well reasoned. One of the pitfalls of Wikipedia, though, is how easy it is to kid oneself into thinking one understands it better than one does. By the time Citizendium launched Wikipedia was resolving elements of Sanger's most salient criticisms through other means than he envisioned. The disruptive editing guideline is an example. That's not particular to Sanger: Wikipedia is just too big and fast-moving for any one person to keep pace. Last fall when Jimbo withdrew an old affirmation about having an article for every episode of *The Simpsons*, the obvious response was to link the title of every *Simpsons* episode FA (Wikipedia has quite a few).
Sanger's outlook could be characterized as a belief that the way to achieve quality is to pursue it. Wikipedia has gotten where it is by allowing quality to overrun it.
Take an average article today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_tree
Compare to where it was in fall 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yucca_brevifolia&oldid=7911136...
Cats can be taught to play 'Fetch'; the secret is to let the cat teach you to play 'Throw'.
-Durova the Cat Herder
On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 9:15 AM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Durova wrote:
In the long run--ten and thirty years from now--the merit of Sanger's
claim
to coufoundership of Wikipedia is likely to be measured by the success of Citizendium.
A bit like Einstein, then: his claim to have founded quantum theory (about which he was a skeptic, and in fact wrong as fas as we know) being judged by the success of his unified field theory? No, something a bit amiss there. I like the first part, though: light as quanta was a big deal and worth his Nobel; and then he couldn't take the ultimate consequences for physics.
Charles
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