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

[James Hare]

Citizendium is serious business. We should be appreciating the efforts.

Due to the licensing choice of Wikipedia, Citizendium will also be licensed
under the GFDL. Imagine that -- an expert-ran knowledge tank that's usable
under the same license as Wikipedia! That means when they produce a
high-quality piece of something, we can take it and use it on Wikipedia.
Maybe then will we get closer to the 100,000 featured articles that is
currently a pipe dream of the really hopeful.

I hope a cycle of forking between the two projects will result in better
stuff for all.

On 9/16/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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