[WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Chet Hoover <chet.hoover at yahoo.com> wrote:

<snip>

> * 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.

Some people *like* those articles on obscure topics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_elephant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergina_Sun

And Citizendium's coverage is lacking in vital areas.

I tried to look up Macedonia, but no article.

One sentence article:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Mongolia

One paragraph article:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Greece

No articles on Chad, Bolivia, Malawi. I stopped looking.

I also couldn't find a list of countries needing articles.

OK, turns out I didn't look hard enough. It is there if you look:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Geography_Workgroup

Though not all the missing countries are listed there.

That kind of organisation is stuff that Wikipedia did (and does) well,
and which needed those willing to make lists and do lots of heavy
lifting, and writing of stubs, rather than writing really good
articles. That is why you will always need more than just writers. You
need a wide variety of people working on an online editable
encyclopedia if it is going to really work and scale, which leads on
to your other points, which I snipped. But others have addressed
those.

To be fair, I don't know how long it took Wikipedia to have an article
for every country in the world - that would be an interesting question
for someone to answer at some point - a standard list of countries
with the date on which their Wikipedia articles were created (and a
study of how the articles have increased in size since creation):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states

If you look at the bottom of this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_total_area

Even the smallest countries and territories have impressively-sized
Wikipedia articles.

Carcharoth