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

[Anthony]

On 9/16/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
> Sanger will fail for all the same reasons Wikipedia has hit a wall of
> late on growth of articles.

>From what little information has been released, I think you're right.
Taking Wikipedia articles and forking them is in most instances *not*
a good way to produce the type of quality academic work that Sanger
expects.  In some instances Wikipedia is already there, of course, but
where it isn't I just don't see what real work can be saved by
starting from a Wikipedia article as opposed to starting from scratch.

Now maybe I'm just misunderstanding Sanger's plan.  If the plan is to
take Wikipedia articles, and use them as a sort of rough draft for a
new work, which is written pretty much from scratch, then maybe this
will succeed.  And if so, I don't think this will hurt Wikipedia in
any way.  In fact, I think if anything it'll help Wikipedia, as it'll
allow Wikipedians to focus on places where Wikipedia *hasn't* hit a
brick wall.

> Wikipedia has reached critical mass
> of information and it's "good enough" in most peoples minds.

The best articles are "good enough" in my mind.  Others are more like
"barely adequate" but yet they've still hit a brick wall in terms of
quality (think popular politicians).  Then there's the other 90% or
more articles, which just haven't had enough eyes on them yet.  This
is the place where Wikipedia will shine, and Sanger's project will
hopefully not even bother to venture for the first 5-10 years or more.

> Beyond
> translation activities and divergence into Wikiversity type of programs,
> and incremental updates of content, it will hover around 1.4 million
> articles until it gets another massive infusion of content from some
> other source. There's also the glaring fact the 2% of the community
> create 98% of the content on average (based on Slashdot study published
> last month). And these 2% usually become inactive after they drop
> content into the project. I see a lot of activitiy in recent edits, but
> growth has been stagnant for several months and quality has been
> improving dramatically.
>
> Without a new information source or innovative technology play, Sanger
> will fail.
>
> Jeff

I think there's still potential for a lot of growth in terms of
numbers of articles left for Wikipedia.  It may have hit a plateau,
but I'd say it's only a temporary one.  In order to get the *next* 1.4
million articles Wikipedia is going to have to think about how to open
itself up more though.  2% of the community creating 98% of the
content, if it's a true figure, is far too low to meet this goal.  How
can Wikipedia be more encouraging to those 98% of people?  Maybe Larry
Sanger's project can help take away some of the people who want
Wikipedia to be an exclusionary club.

Anthony