[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Anthony]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 10:15 PM, 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?
>

Lots of things.  They should have never imported Wikipedia in the first
place.  They should have never changed the license.  They shouldn't have
taken so long to decide to change the license.  They gave too much leeway to
irrational individuals (especially if they happened to have degrees).
Meanwhile, they (especially Sanger) alienated a number of productive
individuals by just not being nice enough.  They closed down the mailing
list just as it was starting to become heavily used.

Of course, change all this and they still likely would have never supplanted
Wikipedia.  Some sort of Wikiversity-like mission statement would have
probably been more achievable.