Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed
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.
The fact that experts can work together has never been in doubt. They work quite well in many projects. Even in Wikipedia you find experts working together on the topics that are dear to them. I met experts on the ICANN conference working on cryptography in en.wikipedia today ..
The difference with Citizendium is the insistence that only “experts” can work together and that with academic credentials you will get much better content. Citizendium has it easy; it is very much in an embryonic stage. Only time will tell if it will scale and if it needs scaling.
Thanks,
GerardM
Comment by GerardM — March 26, 2007 @ 4:45 am
Thanks for the comment, Gerard. Not sure what you mean by “the insistence that only ‘experts’ can work together.” No one at CZ insists on such a thing. We have many non-experts on board, who work with each other and the resident experts too.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 26, 2007 @ 5:21 am
We’ve been talking about Citizendium over at Highbrid Nation. Personally I use Wikipedia a lot and I don’t see anything knocking it off its top spot. The features that make Citizendium better may just be the features that keep it from having the same sucess as Wikpedia. There can only be one. Who will it be?
Comment by Evorgleb — March 26, 2007 @ 10:20 am
I think that as long as CZ has taken time to craft quality rather than quantity, it will grow better with such a solid foundation. Surely no one can predict whether its current system will succeed, but no one can say it will definitely fail either.
What CZ needs now is time and quality effort, I say.
Comment by Beano Lee — March 27, 2007 @ 10:46 pm