2009/1/18 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
2009/1/17 Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.