On 24 September 2010 13:02, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

their customisations in an extension. (The previous "let's be gratuitously different to Wikimedia" stance [*] has been changed -

[*] http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/2007/06/a_look_at_citizendiums_backen... "First, to be different to Wikipedia." They have since realised that forking when you really haven't the technical resources is probably not the most productive thing to do.

- d.

On 24 September 2010 13:43, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

For certain readers, heavy emphasis on "structured data" would exactly cover what they want: the world in an infobox. Of course many of said readers may be machines, and not signed up to PayPal.  Readers' charter versus writers' charter? The things that WP actually has do sound more like the readers' charter: massive updates, articles that may be little more than "watch this space" but are at least there, hypertext surfing as a given of design (underestimated by people who assume articles are read through if at all). "Structured data" does little or nothing for writers' job satisfaction.

Yes, but we have *way* more stamp collectors than we do good writers. (Hence the awful Wikipedia house style.) Filling out one's data collection is *fun*.

- d.

On 24 September 2010 12:41, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

They need a USP (Sanger's involvement is not going to be at all relevant to that now). Well, they need a few things. But it prompts me to wonder what our USP is. "You have heard of us" doesn't count.

Our USP is that, whatever it is you want to know about, there is a very good chance that we'll have a "good enough" article on it (and we're free - if you are happy to pay for content, then we're not particularly unique, Encarta is "good enough" on a lot of topics, although not as many as us). What a lot of people don't realise is that our readers generally don't want excellent articles, they are happy with "good-enough" (which probably means B-class in most cases, maybe even C-class). What they really like about Wikipedia is our breadth of content. Citizendium is trying to have a small number of very good articles (and it's not even doing that well), which isn't actually what readers want.

(This is all anecdotal, but I'm confident it is correct, to the extent that any massive generalisation can be.)

I should clarify that, despite referring to it in the present tense above, I consider Citizendium to have already failed. It was worth a try, but it didn't work.

Thanks, somebody finally came out and gave the explanation without which this thread made very little sense.

Of course Wikipedia's unique selling point is its enormous community of dedicated editors. Anybody could take a copy of our content, but maintaining it would require a living community and that's what we have.

That's not strictly true (the "there is no other widely-recognized online repository of straightforward information about almost any subject someone wants to look up"). Well, I suppose it is true, but it only works because of the qualifiers "straightforward" and "almost" and "wants to look up". Like many here, I've spent years looking things up online, and I sometimes hope that someone has made a more rigorous study of things than the account I give where I say that it felt like there was an information explosion going on over the past ten to fifteen years as more and more sources came online.

There is plenty of obscure stuff that you still have to look up behind paywalls, or look for specialised publications (books and journals and monographs). I find myself coming across stuff like that all the time, but it is true that Wikipedia is often a convenient *starting* point for digging deeper. But if I don't find what I want on Wikipedia, I keep looking. Of the free (i.e. non-paywall) sources available, the best for my purposes is often the book scans found at archive.org and on Google Books. In theory, as anyone can access those, they will eventually be used to source Wikipedia articles, but for obscure subjects that will take a very long time.

And the organisation on Wikipedia is not always great either. I was looking up stuff about Port Jackson (now Sydney, Australia) and the First Fleet and its commander, and the information was spread around several articles. It took some clicking to work out that the best account was in the article about the commander. I do still, fairly often, find myself using Wikipedia to get a general idea, but realising that the content is not great and clicking away (usually back to Google) to find a better website account somewhere else, either more reliable or more readable, or both.

And to forestall {{sofixit}} questions as to why I don't try and fix such areas myself, it is mainly lack of time and being in "reader" mindset rather than "editor" mindset. The minimum I could do would be to make a note and return to it later, and the number of areas I could note would be more than I could handle, though I suppose leaving notes on the talk page for others to follow up might work. It would also be interesting to return to the same areas in a year's time and see if the 'system' had improved things.

Carcharoth

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 12:35 AM, William Beutler williambeutler@gmail.com wrote:

So what else is being sold? Citizendium and everything2? Britannica and Encarta? There are vast differences between Wikipedia and the aforementioned, and don't forget that Encarta is no more.

Wikipedia's "USP" is that there is no other widely-recognized online repository of straightforward information about almost any subject someone wants to look up. So actually, "you've heard of us" is a USP -- that it ranks so high on Google means it is highly convenient. Frequently, that's the most important SP of all.

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:

...

Thanks, somebody finally came out and gave the explanation without which this thread made very little sense.

Of course Wikipedia's unique selling point is its enormous community of dedicated editors. Anybody could take a copy of our content, but maintaining it would require a living community and that's what we have.

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This opens the question of how Citizendium would have done had it followed the initial plan of mirroring Wikipedia for articles that had not been rewritten by Citizendium people., and thus provided the very broad range from the first -- along with the hopefully improved quality of an increasing number of articles. Larry rejected this , and perhaps it was one of the idiosyncratic decisions of his that impaired the project.

I think it would still be possible to do this, but I wonder if it would help.

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 4:27 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

On 27/09/2010 04:13, Carcharoth wrote:

<snip>

...

There is plenty of obscure stuff that you still have to look up behind paywalls, or look for specialised publications (books and journals and monographs). I find myself coming across stuff like that all the time, but it is true that Wikipedia is often a convenient *starting* point for digging deeper. But if I don't find what I want on Wikipedia, I keep looking.

Indeed.  "Comprehensive" is important, but "inclusive of starting points for research" rather more so. Think of the difference between "stub" and "FA" in those terms and you're getting somewhere. I think CZ missed a trick by not getting the whole gamut.

...

Of the free (i.e. non-paywall) sources available, the best for my purposes is often the book scans found at archive.org and on Google Books. In theory, as anyone can access those, they will eventually be used to source Wikipedia articles, but for obscure subjects that will take a very long time.

That seems not to be quite right. The recent gadget to locate our sources of links found Google Books at the top of the heap. My own researches show that Google Books is quite intensively used for referencing, for just such "obscure subjects". I do have my own axe to grind here (basically archive.org material being sent to Wikisource for much better presentation); but that is what takes time. Traditional chaos still reigns, but our purposes tend to make sense of what is out there.

Charles

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On 24/09/2010 14:21, Fred Bauder wrote:

He says, 'There is some seriously twisted stuff on Wikipedia that has no business in a resource calling itself an "encyclopedia."'

I wonder what that is about?

He also says the money is running out. I wouldn't pay that any mind. As a personal opinion of Sanger's it's fine. As an indictment of Wikipedia's content policies, it's a bit flaky, really. As a comment on the enforcement of the content policies, it might be supported at least anecdotally from stuff on the site. As some sort of bid for someone to support CZ solely as an alternative to WP, it looks a bit desperate. Anyway, Citizendium's future is now in other hands; I've not been impressed with Sanger since the days of editing "Larry's Text" (and that dates me for sure). Which has never undermined my admiration for his pioneer work on WP, but in the perspective (as I have said before) that he apparently misunderstands what was achieved. So this would be more of the same, I think.

Charles