[Foundation-l] Citizendium, a new venture, will "fork" off from online encyclopedia Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Brion Vibber wrote:

>>I don't believe Citizendium will be able to take over Wikipedia, but you 
>>never know - it would definitely be much better to have scientists work 
>>on Wikipedia.
>>    
>>
>
>It's not about "taking over", but about taking useful resources and doing 
>additional things with them. We of course celebrate and applaud any serious 
>undertaking to make use of Wikipedia content.
>  
>
I agree with that (I'm a big proponent of the idea that producing free 
content is Wikipedia's main reason for existing), but forking 
open-content projects can have both positive and negative effects.  The 
best case is where a project splits into two projects that are doing 
mostly orthogonal things---serving different needs from a common 
starting point.  The worst case is where a project splits into two 
projects that are essentially duplicates of each other due to leadership 
conflicts (e.g. the emacs/xemacs fiasco).

I'm not sure Citizendium's goals and methods are different enough from 
Wikipedia's to make a fork a good thing for free content in general.  I 
think the best outcome would be to see them as a prod to Wikipedia to 
adopt some of their better methods (if we identify any as such) and 
manage to keep the main content-production centralized in the Wikipedia 
projects.  From that perspective the main good that could come out of it 
is a laboratory of ideas; the worst would be basically two parallel 
encyclopedia projects largely doing the same thing with added overhead 
from having to constantly copy stuff back and forth and keep efforts 
synchronized---or worse, end up with unsynchronized but more or less 
equivalent efforts, rather than some sort of sum of the parts.

-Mark