On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I think competition is fantastic and fully encourage people to start competitors to Wikipedia, but in my view Citizendium has failed. It wasn't sufficiently better than Wikipedia to attract enough writers and readers to kick off exponential growth, which is required to reach a useful size.
Citizendium's not dead yet!
But it'll get good in direct proportion to how much it forms its own positive identity, rather than one based on comparing itself to Wikipedia.
I'd say Citizendium's best chance for success (if not the same kind of success Sanger and other Citizens have been envisioning) will be as part of the broader Wikipedia ecosystem.
After the license change, CZ content can be imported to Wikipedia. One possible evolution of the WP-CZ relationship will be a level of coordination, in which CZ writers are really writing with Wikipedia in mind, just in a little less of a free-for-all community environment. Already, there are probably several hundred Citizendium articles that are outright better than the Wikipedia counterparts, and many of them don't even have corresponding Wikipedia articles.
We've recognized for a long time that, while Wikipedia's advantages are strong enough to attract many knowledgeable experts, there are some who try it out and find the editing environment unbearable. Citizendium could become a project that is actively supported by the Wikipedia community, where we encourage some editors to go so that they can work in relative peace and eventually have the chance to re-integrate their work in Wikipedia.
For a while, it seemed that what ultimately tied together the CZ community was opposition (for a wide, sometimes incompatible range of reasons) to Wikipedia. But I don't think that's the case anymore, and just the fact that participation levels are remaining stable suggests that they've forged something of a self-sustaining community, even if the hoped-for critical mass never comes.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)