[WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

2009/4/22 George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:27 AM, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:

>> I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up
>> than the "writer question". Readers will not be interested until you
>> have enough writers to produce the goods, and do so in a reliable way.
>> So you really need to find a motivation to make qualified people want to
>> contribute (or Wikipedia's best to switch). Ultimately, having a lot of
>> readers will do that, but any start up needs initially to offer
>> something else to the writer.

> I think that's a nice theory, but a number of new projects have in some
> sense (either people-wise or concept-wise) spun out of Wikipedia to try and
> do that, and in practice have not had readership follow them or build up on
> their own.


I think you'll see the reader-writer synergy more clearly on the small
specialist encyclopedia wikis that have sprung up in great numbers.
Mostly using MediaWiki, because it is after all fundamentally built to
run reference wikis.

More people need to read MeatBallWiki. It's like Meta for the whole of wikidom.


- d.