Citizendium Blog

The Financial Times had an article about us on the back page of the first section:

Larry Sanger is still predicting big things for Citizendium, the expert-moderated alternative to the “open” encyclopedia Wikipedia he launched a year ago.

Given the scale of his ambition, the results so far are decidedly modest: 3,300 articles, growing at the rate of 14 a day, compared to more than 2m on Wikipedia. Still, Mr Sanger, who was in at the beginning of Wikipedia, is unabashed, as his update goes: “At some point, possibly very soon, the Citizendium will grow explosively - say, quadruple the number of its active contributors, or even grow by an order of magnitude. And it will experience that growth over the course of a month or two, and its growth will continue to accelerate from that higher rate.”

Comments such as that make it sound like Sanger is succumbing to wishful thinking in his efforts to hit back at old nemesis, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Still, he has a point. Projects such as this are deeply viral, and many of the experts he wants to attract will only jump in once they feel a tipping point has been reached.

As Wikipedia’s extraordinary expansion continues, I, for one, hope Mr Sanger gets the formula right. It’s way too early in the development of the internet to hand so much influence over what passes for human knowledge to a still experimental website such as Wikipedia.

That’s nice publicity, but I have two comments.  First, the notion that the reason I am working on the Citizendium is that I want to “hit back” at Jimmy Wales is, frankly, completely ludicrous.  Yes, I wake up every day fired by the thought, “This is how I’m going to get back at Jimbo!”  Puh-leeeze.  I’m far more fired up by the notion that something I started, namely Wikipedia, has had all sorts of unintended and undesirable consequences (along with the good, of course, of which there is much) — well, I think I can do better, so I think I’m obligated to.  Really, if you thought you had a shot at doing better than Wikipedia, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?  Of course you would.  So I am.

Second, it is equally ludicrous to compare CZ to WP now.  CZ has been around for one year, and only half of that as a public project!  I never thought that we’d grow explosively in our first year.  I knew it would take time to get off the ground.  I am, however, very pleased to have learned (recently) that we actually have more words in our database than Wikipedia did after its first year.  After one year, our average article (mean, not median) is six times as long as what Wikipedia’s average article was after one year.

Well, I think we should work on getting the article count up, though.  Thus the just-launched Stub Week.  We might actually start encouraging people to write stubs for us.