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

[Phil Nash]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 2009/1/19 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
>>> Many of the roughly 1.5 million Wikipedia articles that are near
>>> start or stub quality are at that level for good reason: Lack of
>>> public interest. However, if one were to start a new encyclopedia
>>> with the aim of improving them and could find a sizable number of
>>> people whose tolerance for incredibly boring topics was quite high,
>>> i'm sure Wikipedia would gladly accept the changes back. Its just
>>> that no one would read them.
>>
>> Very true. However, the difference between Wikipedia and Citizendium
>> in that respect is that we have decent articles on the topics that do
>> have public interest, Citizendium doesn't. I don't know what their
>> stub percentage is compared to ours, but their total number of good
>> articles is so much lower that they can't afford even a fraction of
>> our stub percentage. Stubs are of limited use to us, but they are of
>> no use to Citizendium (which needs quality articles to attract
>> readers).

But do they attract readers? When I research topics for WP articles, I often 
come across existing WP links and can't remember seeing any links to even 
major WP forks; this is the main problem I think Epistemia faces- 
penetration and hence credibility. Whereas I realise that what might be 
loosely described as "market penetration" is important, I think any 
endeavour trying to compete has great practical problems to overcome. That's 
not to talk down the idea itself, just to point out that when the hill is 
already so high, attempting to climb it is that much more difficult. It's 
unfortunate that the hill is somewhat littered with rocks in places, but 
conversely, nobody seriously believes the earth is flat these days.