[WikiEN-l] Announcing "Epistemia", a new wiki encyclopedia

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/1/18 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> 2009/1/17 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
>
>> A noble aim, and I wish you luck. The problem you will face, I think,
>> is in being sufficiently better to encourage people to read your
>> encyclopaedia despite it being significantly less comprehensive than
>> Wikipedia. Without readers, you will find it very hard to attract
>> writers (you'll get some, but not enough to get the exponential growth
>> that Wikipedia saw for its first few years).
>
>
> Citizendium has a community of writers and appears to be ticking along okay.

It has writers, does it have any readers, though? You won't get
exponential growth without readers (it happens because the more
articles you have, the more readers you have so the more writers you
acquire, so more articles get written).

> Unfortunately, more than a few appear to be driven by resentment of
> Wikipedia, and by far the most effective method of getting publicity
> so far has been to bitch about Wikpedia (the "let's you and him fight"
> story is one beloved of lazy journalists everywhere) - which makes CZ
> look less than classy (less classy than it is).

What makes you think it's more classy than it appears? They do bitch
about Wikipedia constantly, it's not the journalists twisting things.

> Epistemia, from the description, appears to be yet another thing in
> the same space. What's the differentiator from Citizendium?

According to the OP: "Epistemia aims to correct both these issues, without
implementing the overly-restrictive mechanisms that Citizendium has."

> (And by the way, well done on keeping the hell away from the GFDL,
> broken piece of shit that it is.)

Hear, hear.