Firstly, when I stated that Wikipendium would be a
fork of Wikipedia,
I intended it to be more of a social fork than a content fork - i.e.,
I'm not intending to use any Wikipedia content in Wikipendium. Perhaps
the purpose of Wikipendium, you might say, is to provide a valid
social alternative to Wikipedia with higher social and content
standards.
You'll struggle to get anywhere starting from scratch. Wikipedia is so
far ahead that you won't get any readers and without readers you won't
get more than a handful of writers. Citizendium started off with some
Wikipedia content (although later removed most of it) and had the
advantage of being founded by a known name, and it's nowhere near
challenging Wikipedia and probably won't be any time soon. I've never
heard anyone in the real world mention it, I hear people mention
Wikipedia almost every day.
- simplicity and clarity of rules - there will be only
three policies,
a "fundamental policy" (basically a constitution), a "content
policy"
(essential content standards such as neutrality and verifiability),
and a "community policy" (essential community standards such as
respect and pleasantness);
A noble goal, but if you're going to get to the kind of size you need
to be to compete with Wikipedia you're going to end up needing more
than that. What about a deletion policy? A blocking policy? Some
method for arbitrating disputes? Nobody likes having pages and pages
of rules and procedures, but unfortunately they are necessary if a
large group of people are going to work together effectively.