According to that stats page, the project added 7.7k words per day during March 2010 - the most since September 2009. Unless I miss the meaning of the "words per day" column, that seems to show that the project is at least no worse off this year than last. There seems to be a winter dip in editing, and a pickup in the spring - and March 10 comes in considerably ahead of March 09.

Shrug. Sanger is no Wozniak. He did great things in the early days of WP. Subsequently [...]

Meanwhile, they (especially Sanger) alienated a number of productive individuals by just not being nice enough. They closed down the mailing list just as it was starting to become heavily used.

on 4/23/10 8:31 AM, Fred Bauder at fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net wrote:

Larry is doing a lot better controlling his nasty side on Citizendium than he ever did on Wikipedia; there is a collegial atmosphere, more or less. The problem is with the conception, not with his particular behavior. He has not attracted the highly qualified academics he would have to attract to make it a success. Third rate "experts" are not significantly better editors than amateurs are. Serious academics are knocking down big bucks and writing books, they don't piddle around on obscure websites.

Marc Riddell wrote: > And, on not-so-obscure websites, where there is a clear - and acute - > academiphobia present. > > on 4/23/10 10:31 AM, Charles Matthews at charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com

I can show you the academic mathematicians editing, if you like. It's worth analysing the "black legend" that Wikipedia hates academics, though. Fred's comment "Serious academics are knocking down big bucks and writing books" is partly wrong. It would apply to, say, [[Niall Ferguson]], though it must be said that his reputation has taken something of a hit recently. It would not apply to academics who are in academia because money is low on their list of priorities (yes, these guys are definitely not normal). It would not apply to academics who enjoy intellectual work, while writing books is mainly work work. It seems to me that we get many graduate students editing: now why would these people be at the same time academiphobic, and putting themselved into straitened circumstance to hammer on the door of an academic career? Having interacted with a couple of the more high-profile academics who have run into serious trouble on WP, I think I know the conditions that cause the trouble (roughly speaking, a lack of acceptance that a website is going to have policies and is entitled to have them, quite indepedently of the eminence of someone who would like to turn pages to other uses). I believe there must be many more cases of "I think what you're doing is not that interesting" from academics, than such trainwrecks. I believe the attitude we have to credentials is relatively sensible - typically a doctorate doesn't qualify anyone to pontificate over more than a small area. And the clear blue water between WP and CZ is not necessarily disadvantageous to us. They reportedly have some issues with fringe science being supported by their hierarchy, to the extent that it could be an embarassment to dislodge it. What WP certainly has is a disrespectfulness for the person set against a respect for the referencing of what they submit. I'm yet to be convinced that that is a wrong decision. It certainly beats the other way round.

On 23 April 2010 15:54, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: translation: "I have not even anecdotes to support my position, so will resort to ad-hominem abuse." - d.

Fred, I will not present further to my remarks to Charles - they stand as stated. But this  website's defensive attitude and approach to serious academics is well known. And that attitude goes back to its roots.

Interesting phenomenon I have noticed here and there: these experts choosing to work on Wikipedia on an entirely different topic altogether. That is to say, someone quite qualified and competent to write articles on Assyrian archaeology in the way we normally mean when we say "expert", but instead writing at some length about eighteenth-century music, on the grounds that Assyrian archaeology is too much like the day job - besides, the articles are a mess, and this other stuff is fun, damnit. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I leave as an exercise to the reader. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

But this website's defensive attitude and approach to serious academics is well known. And that attitude goes back to its roots. Marc

> But this website's defensive attitude and approach to serious > academics is well known. And that attitude goes back to its roots. > > Marc

There was certainly a lot of misunderstanding. You can go back to the early history of the article "reality" a little article I created March 11, 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reality&oldid=27840 At a certain point Larry will chime in... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reality&diff=356398&oldid… His comment is typical of him in arrogant mode, "Start on an actual article on this subject, with further explanation as to why the former article didn't really concern the topic" as he removes all prior content and substitutes his view. You see, what he taught sophomores in his Intro to Philosophy class trumps all other content. Note the complete absence of any reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reality&oldid=356398 At least the intro to the current article is not bad. Not an easy subject, but certainly one that concerns material outside the discipline of philosophy. Not long after this he wanted to ban me, but Jimbo vetoed him.

A lot of this sort of trouble results when an expert edits without citing good sources. Students often can edit more successfully because they have appropriate references at hand.

You see, what he taught sophomores in his Intro to Philosophy class trumps all other content. Note the complete absence of any reference.

On 23 April 2010 15:54, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: translation: "I have not even anecdotes to support my position, so will resort to ad-hominem abuse."

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: At Eric Zachte's stats page there are a number of relevant stats measured.

Using the CZ mailing list is discouraged (the blog post at http://weblog.terrellrussell.com/2006/10/citizendium-a-study-in-momentum-ki… is interesting; rereading the mailing list articles from September 2006 show so much promise for the project).

David Gerard schreef:

> Clay Shirky was right: CZ collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy: > http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_th…

Clay Shirky was wrong. He focussed on one part of the CZ hierarchy: the experts, and the amount of overhead that trying to recognize expertise would cause. But there was no overhead, because experts never came to CZ.

> Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many > ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find > useful.

Let's not forget that CZ also has produced content. And the single best decision Larry made was to put a CC license on that content, so that that content is still useful. As long as there are people writing for CZ, WP (and therefore humankind :-) profits.

On 17 April 2010 14:42, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: wrote: bureaucracy: http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_th… would I disagree, I don't think bureaucracy was the problem. Citizendium never got beyond a very small size and bureaucracy is only a problem on a large scale - even if there is lots of bureaucracy in a small group it is easy to navigate. It never took off because there was never a reason for it to do so: Wikipedia was good enough. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find useful.

On 18 April 2010 19:54, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Interesting hypothesis. It is testable, too - we just need a bot to sample a few thousand articles and compare their hits over the last month, say, with their creation dates. I suspect you are wrong, though, since you haven't accounted for current affairs articles and pop culture articles which are very popular, but not for long.

It's not a perfect metric, but it is probably the best one we can actually measure. A metric we can't measure is completely useless. When choosing a metric you always have to compromise between ease of measurement and strength of correlation to the quantity you are interested in.

I think how much people use something is a reasonable measure of how useful it is. Maybe it is only useful for entertaining people or useful for satisfying idle curiosity, but that is still a use. Perhaps you mean how useful something is for a particular purpose. If so, you need to say what purpose you are talking about.

On 18 April 2010 20:47, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think how much people use something is a reasonable measure of how useful it is. Maybe it is only useful for entertaining people or useful for satisfying idle curiosity, but that is still a use. Perhaps you mean how useful something is for a particular purpose. If so, you need to say what purpose you are talking about.

On 17 April 2010 03:15, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Citizendium was not sufficiently better than Wikipedia (one can argue over whether or not it was better at all, but whatever difference there was it was small) and was obviously much smaller, so it didn't attract readers or editors: Wikipedia was "good enough" and people rarely switch from something that is good enough. In order for a project like Wikipedia or Citizendium to be successful you need exponential growth (initially) caused by readers becoming editors and writing articles that attract new readers. Citizendium has shown almost perfect linear growth since its creation because that cycle never happened. Its editors are, from what I can tell, mostly disgruntled Wikipedians and it doesn't have any readers. We shouldn't conclude from this that the idea behind Wikipedia is better than the idea behind Citizendium. The main factor is that Wikipedia came first. Whether Citizendium would have succeeded if it had come first, we'll never know. The only way a new project will ever rival Wikipedia (assuming Wikipedia survives, anyway, and it is so big now that it is hard to imagine it completely failing, although it could change considerable) is if it is very much better than Wikipedia in some respect (it can be worse in others). Such a project could then start to attract readers who would kick off exponential growth. It is readers that are important to attract - once you have those, they will become the editors you need. You will note that I talk about Citizendium in the past tense. That is because I concluded it was a failed project a year or so ago. I suspect Larry Sanger has made the same conclusion, although he (understandably) won't say so outright, since his involvement has been steadily reducing and he has been working on new projects. One very interesting Citizendium statistic is the median article length in words. It has been reducing by about 6 words a month for years. I think that means most of the new articles being created are stubs, or not much more than stubs, and nobody is working on expanding existing articles. I feign no hypotheses for why this might be. I don't have comparable statistics for Wikipedia, so for all I know we are doing the same thing (although that seems unlikely now that article creation has reduced). _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On 18 April 2010 22:25, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: Nupedia was supposed to be experts writing articles. Citizendium is (in theory) anyone writing articles and experts resolving disputes and approving articles. That is a very different model.

You are aware that Nupedia wasn't a wiki, right?

Of course, change all this and they still likely would have never supplanted Wikipedia.  Some sort of Wikiversity-like mission statement would have probably been more achievable.