2009/4/21 Chet Hoover <chet.hoover(a)yahoo.com>om>: I suspect this is only because it's in its early days. Keep in mind: when Clay Shirky wrote "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", he used Wikipedia as an example of somewhere that had *avoided* these problems. http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html As of 2009, Wikipedia looks like it's hit its head on every step on the way down. Larry's clearly read this essay. But remember: a group being its own worst enemy is something every group complacently sleepwalks into. It's not clear those have anything to do with each other. Instruction creep is a problem in all organisations. See above re: complacency. Thus resulting in spectacular successes like the Homeopathy article. *cough* Citizendium sticking around would be much better than it not, and most of the people involved are less bitter than Larry. - d.

Many of these very constraints are exactly what are likely to stop Citizendium from reaching "critical mass". Whatever that phrase means Wikipedia has it and Citizendium does not. I think it's an interesting question whether Wikipedia would have been successful had these influences prevailed early on in its history (post-Nupedia). Many people are easily discouraged by barries to participation. That doesn't mean that the information contained inside their brains ceases to be useful to the project, it just means you'll have to come up with ways to help them participate in a constructive manner. These two constraints seem to be at odds - how can we get people who have information that is useful to us, but are perhaps a bit fickle when it comes to technology, to contribute that information without hurting the encyclopedia? The answer is not to weed them out - that would be to avoid the challenge entirely. The trick is to use that very technology to lower the barrier to participation to a level low enough to get them hooked. On Wikipedia this means allowing them to go ahead and submit their ideas and allow several thousand more technically minded contributors - or other anons - to clean up and polish the contribution. So far this technique has worked really, really well. Even fairly reasonable independent academic reviews show that Wikipedia's content is actually not that bad - definitely a good place to start. If we go by numbers of articles then its true that most of the encyclopedia is low quality. But if we look at the actual popularity of subjects we find that quality does indeed scale with public interest. This is not very surprising since we show an edit box to every member of the public. We expect that the articles that get looked at more get edited more as well and that quality might scale with number of edits. And this is true. So we see how Wikipedia and Citizendium are different: Citizendium thinks that fewer high quality edits made by exactly the right people is better than many low quality edits made by anyone who wishes. In this regard its hard for me to see a distinction between the relationships between Nupedia/Wikipedia and Citizendium/Wikipedia. Both of these less successful projects have gone to some length to weed out contributors, whereas Wikipedia takes a *totally* different approach to acceptance - everyone except the GDs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PBAGDSWCBY These are both projects to build an encyclopedia and despite the different approaches that Wikipedia and Citizendium take it seems reasonable to compare them on their successes and failures. So far Citizendium is not even close to Wikipedia's quality despite the hullaboo made by its community. In fact, it's not clear how it could possibly catch up given their choice of weeding out contributors. On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Chet Hoover <chet.hoover(a)yahoo.com> wrote: