On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com wrote:
<snip>
- It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last. Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
Some people *like* those articles on obscure topics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_elephant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergina_Sun
And Citizendium's coverage is lacking in vital areas.
I tried to look up Macedonia, but no article.
One sentence article:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Mongolia
One paragraph article:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Greece
No articles on Chad, Bolivia, Malawi. I stopped looking.
I also couldn't find a list of countries needing articles.
OK, turns out I didn't look hard enough. It is there if you look:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Geography_Workgroup
Though not all the missing countries are listed there.
That kind of organisation is stuff that Wikipedia did (and does) well, and which needed those willing to make lists and do lots of heavy lifting, and writing of stubs, rather than writing really good articles. That is why you will always need more than just writers. You need a wide variety of people working on an online editable encyclopedia if it is going to really work and scale, which leads on to your other points, which I snipped. But others have addressed those.
To be fair, I don't know how long it took Wikipedia to have an article for every country in the world - that would be an interesting question for someone to answer at some point - a standard list of countries with the date on which their Wikipedia articles were created (and a study of how the articles have increased in size since creation):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states
If you look at the bottom of this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_t...
Even the smallest countries and territories have impressively-sized Wikipedia articles.
Carcharoth