[WikiEN-l] Citizendium

[Mathias Schindler]

Hi,

I was at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin this weekend where
Larry Sanger has announced his plan to fork (the English edition of)
Wikipedia at an unspecified point in time in the future with
unspecified mechanisms of updating the content from en.wikipedia
automatically. You can read this on wikinews, citizendium.org and some
blogs. It would be pointless to repeat the factual details here for
two reasons:

1. The facts are already outlined in the links above. Read it there
2. The amount of facts itself about the most interesting aspectsis
surprisingly low.

Larry's response to two question I asked leaves me with the impression
that he should have spent more time thinking about the concept itself.
The most critical part are left to a catch22 thing "its only a
proposal".

What bothers me most is that Larry's fifth proposal for an
encyclopedia comes when plan 3 and 4 ("Encyclopedia of Earth" and the
"Digital Universe Encyclopedia") have not surfaced yet. Larry might or
might not use the argument that he does not bear responsibility in
having the EoE miss about three announced dates to be released. During
the talk, he did not mention those projects a single time (only after
I specifically asked him about this).

So we might or might not see a Citizendium some time. We might
discover that Larry is able to find a sponsor for this which may or
may not be the DUF. We might discover that his proposed constable role
is more efficient in enforcing policy and a friendly atmosphere. Or
not. We might be able to discover the Citizendium as a perfect source
of high quality encyclopedic content that can be imported into
Wikipedia. Or not.

It was fun talking with Larry. He is a nice person, insightful and
friendly. He listens, he responds, he is polite. When I mentioned
several first thoughts I had about the Citizendium, he listened to it
carefully and answered honestly. Calling Citizendium a Potemkin town
does explicitly not mean that there is something wrong with Larry. I
would very much like to be proven wrong. Until then, I urge anyone to
focus on the real things that do exist, including its problems and the
attempts of people who are trying to fix them (by fixing them, not by
talking that somebody should do something).

Mathias