On 21/12/2007, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
One thing Larry Sanger may be miscalculating is he thinks there will be a sudden surge of growth in Citizendiums activity level at some point, like a slashdotting. Let's face it, just on the coat-tails of Wikipedia, Citizendium has *been* slashdotted, and the surge hasn't yet materialized. There is no real reason to presume that it will. Academics aren't susceptible to the same volatile flash-mob sensibilities as nerds.
Larry's been putting in a lot of legwork recruiting experts in various fields. CZ seems to be growing at a rate its community can handle.
What may be in the future for Citizendium as a milestone, is the point where they have a single article or more that they feel compare favourably, or which outside evaluators compare to be better than wikipedias. That may well spur on a real race on the highest quality of both encyclopaedias articles, which could in the end either benefit both projects,
Indeed. There's got to be more than one way to do this thing.
or derail them into focusing only on a narrow apex of articles, and forget all about the long tail.
That won't happen while we have such a low barrier to entry. My Pokemans, let me show you them.
- d.