Citizendium profiled in Assignment Zero’s first published article (on Wired.com)
Evan Hansen, Editor in Chief of Wired News, placed a Citizendium profile (”Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness“) at the very top of the Wired.com homepage, and congratulated the Assignment Zero participants who put it together:
The Citizendium article and sidebar is live at midnight at the top of Wired.com — this is a great milestone for the project, you should all be proud! I’m really pleased to be involved in this project and to be publishing something of this quality, it’s a great piece of writing that proves the crowd can deliver.
Here are the credits, which I think are important to reproduce here:
Principal reporter and writer, Michael Ho
Sidebar reporter and writer, Randy Burge
With reporting from Anna Haynes, Robert William King, Steve Petersen, Muhammed Saleem, J. Jack Unrau, Paul S. Wilson
Additional research by John Eisched, Carl Collins, Matthew Kress-Weitenhagen
Discussion and editorial guidance from Francine Hardaway, Ken MacNamara, Derek Poore
Art by Mark Selander
Fact-checking by Craig Silverman, Ian Elwood, Christopher Nystrom
Edited by John C. Abell, Jeff Howe, Lauren Sandler
The question to ask about Assignment Zero is exactly the same question people ask about Citizendium: that might be an impressive debut, but will they be able to keep it up? Time will tell — in both cases! As the article says,
David Pennock, a principal research scientist at Yahoo!, called himself “a big fan and big consumer” of Wikipedia and worried that the Citizendium could fall victim to the “chicken-and-egg” conundrum: people want to contribute to something that’s successful, but the Citizendium can succeed only after attracting enough people and contributions.
Sure. But on the other hand, the same thing could have been said about Wikipedia: why did people contribute to something that wasn’t yet successful, in Wikipedia’s early days? It merely takes a steadily growing group of people, who create a steadily growing body of content, which in turn attracts new people. Skepticism is surely warranted, but there are reasons to think that Citizendium will probably succeed.
For our part, the Citizendium has created an article about Assignment Zero. We figure, if they can write an article about us, we can write an article about them.
I find it puzzling that they spoke of Wikipedia so much but sought no comment from us whatsoever.
Comment by David Gerard — May 3, 2007 @ 11:58 am
Well, Jimbo declined comment, according to the report. It does seem he might have considered forwarding the request to another, however.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — May 3, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
Ah, scratch that - I asked our press list, and Jimbo says he was asked but didn’t speak to them. Tch, they could have asked others …
Comment by David Gerard — May 3, 2007 @ 12:20 pm
“Here’s looking at you looking at us.” A media mirror.
Great job, Citizendium team, in profiling the Assignment Zero effort in your Citizendium entry on the topic.
I was one of the crowdsourced journalists who contributed to the AZ story on Citizendium, providing the side bar view by Encyclopedia Britannica. As I completed my piece, I realized that EB and Citizendium are really in different markets serving different customers and that there is certainly room in the universe for both approaches. Wikipedia remains dominant, of course, in Citizendium’s direct application space.
May I refer those at Citizendium to an excellent article on “Strategies to Crack Well-Guarded Markets” in the May 2007 Harvard Business Review, by David J. Bryce and Jeffrey H. Dyer, as a way to evolve and grow Citizendium in the Wikipedia world. Another resource to consider is the seminal book in its field, Diffusion of Innovation, by Everett Rogers.
I read once that information must be relevant, timely, and accurate to be synthesized into knowledge - a test that has always held in my experience. If Citizendium achieves these points in and through crafting and delivering its information products for the discerning knowledge seeker, then it will succeed and benefit humanity in crowdsourced ways. Time will tell.
Here’s to Citizendium’s success!
Comment by Randy Burge — May 15, 2007 @ 11:27 pm