joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/12/18/why-the-focus-on-creating-quality-con...
Interesting thoughts on quality.
Larry raises very good points. I think he overestimates how much people prefer quality to easy access but I might be cynical.
I don't think it's so much "cynical" as "inaccurate" to say that people prefer quality to easy access. People want both, but they're realistic (not cynical) enough to realize that perfect information isn't always available. What they want, more than "quality" or "easy," is USEFUL -- meaning, usually accurate enough to answer their curiosity about whatever topic they're interested in, but also easy enough to use that they don't have to waste a lot of time finding finding the information.
Right now, Wikipedia satisfies those needs most of the time. Citizendium, because it only has a few thousand articles, almost never answers those needs. Moreover, the rate at which it is adding new articles suggests that it is a long time before it will come close to matching WIkipedia for usefulness.
For people to prefer Citizendium over Wikipedia, it has to massively increase the number of articles and topics it covers. If it can do that, while also providing higher-quality information, it will replace WIkipedia. However, it has a long way to go before it can meet that test.
If I were running Citizendium, I would relax the user registration rules a little bit while still requiring user registration. I would also adopt a copyright scheme that allows Citizendium to freely copy over content from Wikipedia. I would then launch a campaign aimed at copying over the 100,000 best articles from Wikipedia and editing them to meet Citizendium's quality standards. Once that was completed, I would go for the next 100,000 articles, and so on until Citizendium had enough content to rival WIkipedia for actual usefulness, while also providing higher quality.
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