[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[MuZemike]

I like to say that Wikipedia, with its own community bureaucracy, keeps 
going because of flexibility. The bureaucracy (if I may call our 
structure that if only for sake or argument) and rule structure is 
intentionally not made strict and in general is not strictly followed. 
This allows for common sense and 'rule leniency' (especially true when 
it regards sanctions such as blocks or bans) to prevail. That 
flexibility gives editors the freedom to engage in rational discussion 
relevant to the encyclopedia as well as the freedom to make editorial 
decisions on articles.

It's that lack of flexibility that I believe has sunk Citizendium (and 
other online encyclopedias like Brittanica and Google Knol) long ago.

-MuZemike

On 4/17/2010 7:26 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> 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.
>
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