On 2/11/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
What instantly struck me when reading that post (and a few more) was how lucky we are to have gotten Jimbo instead of Larry. We love you, Jimbo!
It is certainly the case that Jimbo has proven to be a very effective head of the project.
We are obviously only hearing one side of the story, but even so it's pretty crazy. Hearing from the former CZ editor in the comments backing him up helped, of course. It does really help to show the difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium; if someone put up a page listing something that needed to be done on wikipedia, it would be a helpful contribution; if he/she did that on citizendium, it's an arrogant teenager who doesn't know his place and should let the grownups do all the decisions.
That isn't quite true. If someone turns up saying "I think wikipedia should be run like this" they will at best be ignored. We tend to expect people to have some serious editing under their belt before getting involved in that side of the project.
Another thing, about that "if I don't micromanage things, it won't get done!" attitude, has he never heard of wikipedia? If nothing else, wikipedia has shown that there are plenty of people that are willing to step up and manage things, and work together. I mean, wikipedia is a hell of a lot bigger than citizendium (article, community and policy-wise), and we can manage it fine. It isn't an anarchy, it's a quite well ordered society, with very little input from Jimbo.
Partly because nine times of ten it is less effort to directly solve whatever the problem is rather than try and manage solving it.