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

[Thomas Dalton]

> 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.

Precisely, that's the problem. They need to attract readers and aren't
doing so. The way I see it, there are two ways they can try and
attract readers, they can be better or they can be bigger. Being
bigger isn't practical when enwiki is approaching 3 million articles -
it would take years for them to catch up even if they could attract
1000s of dedicated writers. That only leaves being better - they need
their articles to be significantly better than Wikipedia articles so
that people see the point in looking to see if they have an article on
the topic rather than just going to Wikipedia knowing we're sure to
have one even if it isn't particularly good. Writing stubs isn't going
to move them towards that goal.

>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.

Indeed, but competition is good so I wish them all the best, even if
the challenge before them may turn out to be impossible.