Citizendium unforks Wikipedia

[Diamond]

A small piece of sense from Larry Sanger at last

After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki. This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on. The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.

This is an experiment. In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all. If we see more activity on the wiki, which is what I expect, then the Wikipedia articles will stay deleted.

Let me emphasize that we have had good success on the wiki so far, and I am very grateful to all the people, a few dozen of them, who have been regularly working on CZ articles over the past few months. We merely think that we can do better, and this change might be a way to do better. In any case, as we ramp up recruitment (still not started…) and after we go public, we will be expanding greatly, no matter what we do!

Nicholas Carr expands on this slightly:

The original plan was to "fork" Wikipedia - in other words, make a copy of Wikipedia's contents and then re-edit the articles to bring them up to snuff. The theory was that borrowing the existing articles would provide a jump-start for the fledgling knowledge base.

But that hasn't worked so well. The handful of early contributors to Citizendium have, says Sanger, become "disheartened by the fact that their first obligation seems to be to edit mediocre Wikipedia articles." The prospect of "cleaning out the Augean Stables" put a damper on their enthusiasm. It was, apparently, a little too Herculean of a task, even for experts.

It remains to be seen whether the ability to create new articles from scratch rather than edit the dreck from Wikipedia will cause an increase of enthusiasm in a project that has hitherto lacked passion.

I still think Citizendium is on a trajectory to either become a Wikipedia-style bun fight or a Nupedia-style collapse of interest.

 

[Solus]

I wasn't aware that wikipedia had any competition. Wikipedia is ok to find basic information but if you want real research, obviously you must go to real books. The idea sounds too ambitious in my opinion, I go for the latter on your prediction of will happen to the citizendium project but I could be wrong.

Kangxi Emperor of China did something like this but he was the EMPEROR of China and could pay thousands of experts to spend their lives creating an "encyclopedia of all learning".

 

[geni]

I wasn't aware that wikipedia had any competition.

People have tried.

The oldest is probably wikinfo (for those who don't like NPOV). There is also Anarchopedia for those who felt that wikipedia was liberal enough.

Kangxi Emperor of China did something like this but he was the EMPEROR of China and could pay thousands of experts to spend their lives creating an "encyclopedia of all learning".

Gǔjīn Túshū Jíchéng? en.wikipedia is about five times the size.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons