geni
Seth Finkelstein wrote: It's also pretty common for those two type to have conflicts, and that usually ends with the business/marketing type working-over the academic/creative type. Wikipedia is NOT an original story there :-(.
Of course the problem with that description was that Larry was involved in conflicts with other wikipedians.
And Jimbo has been involved in conflicts too (note I'm not talking about V-wag stuff, but higher-level matters). Don't think the present is somehow inevitable. If Sanger had stayed on, those early conflicts would be minimized or forgotten.
Depends on if Google does something to boost that sort of site.
(I think the *real*, crucial, irreplaceable, founder of Wikipedia, is Google)
No. Looking at yahoo and MSN it's pretty clear that anything close to a normal search algorithm will tend to favor wikipedia for certain types of searches.
Yahoo and Microsoft have copied Google's weighting and factors somewhat, in what seems to be a deliberate strategy that people have been trained by Google to "expect" that sort of result, and it would be too risky to deviate radically. But this does not prove any "normal" search algorithm will do that. Many sites - Open Directory, technorati, blog aggregators - have found themselves ranked highly for a time ... and then not.
One reason I think projects such as _Citizendium_ are important is that they provide at least some practical counter-argument to the monopolistic tendencies of Wikipedia-hype. Which comes back to the original question about the success of _Citizendium_, and that being bound up in some very subtle decisions about Google's algorithm.
Speaking here just as a very interested observer, apart from matters of personal injustice or formal relevance, there's many issues at the bottom of this about Wikipedia itself. ...
Except several years behind the times. The community has dealt with the issue and from what I've seen Jimbo has been back peddling of late.
Well, let's see if this issue has indeed been "dealt with". It's only been a few days from the most recent skirmish.