[WikiEN-l] Citizendium charter ratified

[Thomas Dalton]

On 24 September 2010 12:41, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> They need a USP (Sanger's involvement is not going to be at all relevant
> to that now). Well, they need a few things. But it prompts me to wonder
> what our USP is. "You have heard of us" doesn't count.

Our USP is that, whatever it is you want to know about, there is a
very good chance that we'll have a "good enough" article on it (and
we're free - if you are happy to pay for content, then we're not
particularly unique, Encarta is "good enough" on a lot of topics,
although not as many as us). What a lot of people don't realise is
that our readers generally don't want excellent articles, they are
happy with "good-enough" (which probably means B-class in most cases,
maybe even C-class). What they really like about Wikipedia is our
breadth of content. Citizendium is trying to have a small number of
very good articles (and it's not even doing that well), which isn't
actually what readers want.

(This is all anecdotal, but I'm confident it is correct, to the extent
that any massive generalisation can be.)

I should clarify that, despite referring to it in the present tense
above, I consider Citizendium to have already failed. It was worth a
try, but it didn't work.