"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". - Mark Twain
Since Citizendium is all the rage on this mailing list, a review and comparison of Alexa stats seemed like a good idea. Here's how things stack up:
TRAFFIC RANK: Citizendium: 63,929 Wikipedia: 7
REACH: (Percent of global Internet users who visit the site, 3 month average) Citizendium: 0.00155% Wikipedia: 8.711%
Of course, the numbers vary a bit depending on what ranking service one selects. But not by all that much. It's been two and a half years since Citizendium's launch. The project has 10,500 articles and slightly over 100 approved articles. English Wikipedia topped 100,000 articles in January 2003, just about two years after launch. In January 2004 English Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles. Arguably, Citizendium both gains and loses by launching later: the site can draw upon a large pool of existing free content at Wikipedia, but Wikipedia had already become a prominent website by the time Citizendium started.
With respect extended toward Larry Sanger and his undertaking, a few questions are worth asking: 1. Is Citizendium a snapshot of what Wikipedia's growth would have been, if Larry Sanger had remained with the project? 2. Will Citizendium become a top 1000 website within the next five years? 3. Is debate about Sanger's and Wales's respective cofounder/founder claims regarding Wikipedia a worthwhile endeavor?
-Durova