[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[David Gerard]

On 17 April 2010 12:44, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:

>  Using
> the CZ mailing list is discouraged (the blog post at
> http://weblog.terrellrussell.com/2006/10/citizendium-a-study-in-momentum-killing
> is interesting; rereading the mailing list articles from September 2006
> show so much promise for the project).


Yes, Larry's reaction was jawdropping. How dare people use the mailing
list as a mailing list!

It's hard to get a project started. It's easy to kill momentum. The
long tail of open source projects is mostly tiny projects with the
founding developer and a number of users.

Clay Shirky was right: CZ collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy:

http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_the_problem_of_expertise.php

Larry Sanger's reply is defensive and sees commentary as an attack (a
pattern anyone who's tried to comment on CZ will have experienced):

http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/20/larry_sanger_on_me_on_citizendium.php

Read that and think whether you'd want to work in that person's project.

Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many
ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find
useful.


- d.