[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 17 April 2010 03:15, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> In March 2010, about 90 people made even a single edit to Citizendium:
>
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics#Number_of_authors
>
> Compare Conservapedia, which has 76 at the time I write this. The
> difference is, the latter is pretty much a personal website run by a
> gibbering fundie lunatic which gets pretty much all its traffic from
> sceptics making fun of it; the former was a serious project.
>
> This is terribly sad. What went wrong?

Citizendium was not sufficiently better than Wikipedia (one can argue
over whether or not it was better at all, but whatever difference
there was it was small) and was obviously much smaller, so it didn't
attract readers or editors: Wikipedia was "good enough" and people
rarely switch from something that is good enough. In order for a
project like Wikipedia or Citizendium to be successful you need
exponential growth (initially) caused by readers becoming editors and
writing articles that attract new readers. Citizendium has shown
almost perfect linear growth since its creation because that cycle
never happened. Its editors are, from what I can tell, mostly
disgruntled Wikipedians and it doesn't have any readers.

We shouldn't conclude from this that the idea behind Wikipedia is
better than the idea behind Citizendium. The main factor is that
Wikipedia came first. Whether Citizendium would have succeeded if it
had come first, we'll never know. The only way a new project will ever
rival Wikipedia (assuming Wikipedia survives, anyway, and it is so big
now that it is hard to imagine it completely failing, although it
could change considerable) is if it is very much better than Wikipedia
in some respect (it can be worse in others). Such a project could then
start to attract readers who would kick off exponential growth. It is
readers that are important to attract - once you have those, they will
become the editors you need.

You will note that I talk about Citizendium in the past tense. That is
because I concluded it was a failed project a year or so ago. I
suspect Larry Sanger has made the same conclusion, although he
(understandably) won't say so outright, since his involvement has been
steadily reducing and he has been working on new projects.

One very interesting Citizendium statistic is the median article
length in words. It has been reducing by about 6 words a month for
years. I think that means most of the new articles being created are
stubs, or not much more than stubs, and nobody is working on expanding
existing articles. I feign no hypotheses for why this might be. I
don't have comparable statistics for Wikipedia, so for all I know we
are doing the same thing (although that seems unlikely now that
article creation has reduced).