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

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Montag, 18. September 2006 13:12 schrieb David Gerard:
> Yes. Though we're notably lacking in forks that are actively edited;
> Wikinfo is the only one I know of. Other than that it's pretty much
> static mirror sites with Google ads.

There were/are at least two more serious efforts that knew how and what to 
fork: One spanish and one german fork. Both did came up out if different 
reasons. The spanish one because of fears that Wikipedia could commercialize 
(you probably all know it) the german one because of fundamental disagreement 
on quality and project scope (the fork founder regarded de.wikipedia as too 
open towards everything).

Interestingly Sanger didn't have a such a huge impact like one could expect 
given his Wikipedia history in the german language community although he 
anounced it at Wizards of OS 4 in Berlin, Germany that quite some active 
de.wikipedians and German Wikimedians attended.

One reason is: The ideas of Sanger are similar to the spirit of the fork of 
the german language Wikipedia and thus people have had some experience on 
such more "elitist" forks there. That de.wikipedia fork couldn't keep 
momentum although these people are highly skilled and knew exactly what they 
want to achieve and were really passionate about it. But despite the 
usual "we dislike us each other rantings" that fork did help de.wikipedians 
concentrating at least a little bit more on quality and content and not 
meta-discussions as the critics in themselves weren't completely fetched out 
of thin air but de.wikipedia started walking a completely different solution 
path than they did.

As I can read it from the postings of some others seem to "wonder" (to express 
it soft-gloved) on de.wikipedias content/quality policies: this is at least 
partly due to that very fork and our lesson out of it.

So we should consider that Citizendium fork as helpful competition and not 
regard this as enemy or something we should ignore or even denying the 
Citizendium fork competence (this would be the most dangerous for us).

Citizendium will help us focusing ourselves on *content* (!) and on quality 
improvements, although we have a different approach than they have.

Let us start now happy competiting and keeping the momentum in Wikipedia, 
Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wiktionary...!

Arnomane