[WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia

[Brian]

Many of these very constraints are exactly what are likely to stop
Citizendium from reaching "critical mass". Whatever that phrase means
Wikipedia has it and Citizendium does not. I think it's an interesting
question whether Wikipedia would have been successful had these influences
prevailed early on in its history (post-Nupedia).

Many people are easily discouraged by barries to participation. That doesn't
mean that the information contained inside their brains ceases to be useful
to the project, it just means you'll have to come up with ways to help them
participate in a constructive manner. These two constraints seem to be at
odds - how can we get people who have information that is useful to us, but
are perhaps a bit fickle when it comes to technology,  to contribute that
information without hurting the encyclopedia? The answer is not to weed them
out - that would be to avoid the challenge entirely. The trick is to use
that very technology to lower the barrier to participation to a level low
enough to get them hooked. On Wikipedia this means allowing them to go ahead
and submit their ideas and allow several thousand more technically minded
contributors - or other anons - to clean up and polish the contribution.

So far this technique has worked really, really well. Even fairly reasonable
independent academic reviews show that Wikipedia's content is actually not
that bad - definitely a good place to start. If we go by numbers of articles
then its true that most of the encyclopedia is low quality. But if we look
at the actual popularity of subjects we find that quality does indeed scale
with public interest. This is not very surprising since we show an edit box
to every member of the public. We expect that the articles that get looked
at more get edited more as well and that quality might scale with number of
edits. And this is true.

So we see how Wikipedia and Citizendium are different: Citizendium thinks
that fewer high quality edits made by exactly the right people is better
than many low quality edits made by anyone who wishes. In this regard its
hard for me to see a distinction between the relationships between
Nupedia/Wikipedia and Citizendium/Wikipedia. Both of these less successful
projects have gone to some length to weed out contributors, whereas
Wikipedia takes a *totally* different  approach to acceptance - everyone
except the GDs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PBAGDSWCBY

These are both projects to build an encyclopedia and despite the different
approaches that Wikipedia and Citizendium take it seems reasonable to
compare them on their successes and failures. So far Citizendium is not even
close to Wikipedia's quality despite the hullaboo made by its community. In
fact, it's not clear how it could possibly catch up given their choice of
weeding out contributors.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Chet Hoover <chet.hoover at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Here's why Citizendium is far better:
>
> * It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no
> sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails.
>
> * It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last.
> Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface:
> obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
>
> *This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually
> an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the
> nutters and fans that Wikipedia has.
>
> *The place is in the hands of "writers" and not an army of "1600
> administrators". Can you imagine writing for Wikipedia as an expert and
> knowing that your bosses are in high school, maybe university, and only
> occasionally over 35 years old?
>
> *Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists.
> It's more about the material.
>
> *All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical
> aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS
> (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and
> don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes
> & etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who
> show up at Citizendium.
>
> *Citizendium's difficult entrance exam is not really all that difficult.
> It's a sure-fire way of keeping out those who are not prepared to edit an
> encyclopedia  and frankly, I love that!
>
> Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about
> its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which
> serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important
> subjects.
>
> Chet
>
>
>
>
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