E-insight

From Citizendium Blog, by Larry Sanger:

I’ve recently posted an essay, “Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed.”

From the first two paragraphs:

The Citizendium pilot project wiki got under way privately at the start of last November.  In the intervening months, we have steadily grown to some 1,100 “CZ Live” articles — that’s approximately how many articles we have done significant work on.  A fairly large percentage of these, I believe well over half, are either original articles or have been significantly changed from Wikipedia sources.  We have steadily added authors and editors in this period, so that we have 820 authors and 180 editors (some of whom also have listed themselves as authors).  Our activity has grown from 100 edits per day in the first month to over 500 prior to launch.  Every day, a large variety of people from many fields sign on and do some work.  This is all in a period in which the project has been visible only to those who have applied to the project.  In addition, while it has received a fair bit of press, we have done very little in the way of recruitment — but with good results when we have.  More aggressive recruitment is our trump card, which we haven’t played.

…the progress report shows merely that the fundamentals of the project are sound, many basic doubts are now dismissible on the basis of solid experience — and little more than that.  It shows that that experts can be quite good at wiki-style strong collaboration; that they can work well together with the general public; that a wide variety of people have a substantial desire to work on this sort of project; that a largely collegial and pleasant community can be built on principles of the use of real names and gentle expert guidance; that, so long as we avoid wide-open self-registration as we tried for about three weeks, this sort of project can be free of vandalism.  In short, there are no “gotchas” — nothing that makes me think this project can’t work — and quite a bit of good news.

I argue at some length that the Citizendium will enjoy a Google effect and that the latent demand for CZ is sizable and growing.  I conclude with replies to a bunch of objections.

My views: Looks like there are some dynamics between the founders of Wikipedia. Although I deeply doubt CZ would success over Wikipedia, I’m still quite glad to see a new source of information that is claming to be more reliable. Find out about Wiki’s little nemesis at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page

Ironically, here is an article about citizendium on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium

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2007, E-insight