[WikiEN-l] Citizendium hits 5000 articles

[Eugene van der Pijll]

Keith Old schreef:
> In summary, I would say that not only is Citizendium not as good as
> Wikipedia but it is probably not as well developed as Wikipedia at a similar
> stage of its development.

That's not exactly true.

After fourteen months, Wikipedia had 29,000 articles with an average
size of 1768 bytes
(http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm). At a comparable
age, CZ has about 5500 articles in total, with a total size of 5,620,000
words; that is about 1000 words per article.
(http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics)

Assuming about 7 bytes per word, WP was only 30% larger than CZ at the
same point in their development; and in the first 4 or 5 months of CZ's
existence, it was not public, so its equivalent age is probably less
than 14 months.

The problem with CZ is that it is growing linearly. Larry Sanger sees CZ
accelerating, and points at the number of articles; the stats clearly
show that this is because CZ now allows the creation of stubs. The
number of articles grew strongly in November, but the number of edits
and the number of contributors stayed the same; the average article size
plummeted.

Between October 2001 and March 2002, WP grew by 200% (in byte count);
between July and December 2007, CZ grew by about 37% (in word count). 

CZ hasn't failed yet, but they seem to be heading for failure the way it
goes now... Even if some of their content is very good, it will be a
very long time before they can compete with Wikipedia.

Eugene