Citizendium Blog

UPDATE (evening): 500 edits in six hours, well over 50 articles today (it might be more like 75), and I’ve received dozens and dozens of mails from people who said, “Sorry, I’ll start contributing soon.”  It’s really great to have confirmation of so much deep support for what we’re doing here!

A huge number of new people, or newly-active people, arrived following my mailing to thousands of people with Citizendium accounts.  Apparently, they just needed a reminder.  (This isn’t a sort of reminder I’ll send regularly, though, trust me.)  Right now, there are more unfamiliar names than familiar ones on recent changes – that’s just how I like it.

Actually, I separated accounts into five categories:

1. People with bios who had made an edit
2. People with bios who hadn’t made an edit
3. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages who had made an edit (there were some)
4. People with well-formed usernames and blank userpages, who hadn’t made any edits
5. People with poorly-formed usernames

(Actually, I’m about to send out #5 — with no small amount of nervousness.  )

Here is the letter I sent to #1:

Dear ______,

Larry Sanger, Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/), here. Some time ago, you signed up with us. You filled out a biography and according to our records you’ve actually edited the wiki at least once.

I decided to write to everyone who has created an account, to give you a short update, and to encourage you to get (or stay) involved. I hope you don’t mind.

First, the update. Since our wiki’s launch a year ago, more than 2,300 people have joined as authors and editors and 3,660 articles are under development — and currently growing at a rate of over 20 new articles per day. The project has tripled its article count since its public launch last March. The rate of article creation is accelerating, and our community is noticeably gathering steam. And we generated more words in our first year (five million) than Wikipedia did in its first year. We generated fewer articles because ours are six times as long, on average. (But we’re now encouraging “stubs,” or short articles.) For more details, see this recent progress report and a press release:

http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Oct302007

Second, why should you get involved? If you’re like most people I’m sending this to, you’ve only edited the wiki a little, if any. Of course, we’re very grateful to those who have done a lot of work (a few hundred edit the wiki each month). But most people with accounts have been, I think, waiting to see if the project can get off the ground. Well, it can and it is! When I started the project a year ago, I was properly skeptical about our chances; it is really an unusual thing to have a wiki with real names and a role for experts alongside the general public. Now I’m far more confident that we have a really successful model, and in fact I think we’re well on our way toward getting 100,000 articles in a few years.

We are after quality, not just quantity. Some of our articles are after just one year already better than what you find in “that other project,” and in a few years, we’re going to have uniformly superior quality. We’re creating a better resource for the world — one you can feel proud of being a part of.

For most of us, though, the main reason to get involved is that it’s just plain fun and rewarding to write down what you know, with other people immediately able to learn from — and improve — your contributions. I think our community is friendly and interesting.

It’s easy to get involved. Want to start a short article on your favorite topic? Many topics are still wide open. Go here (under “The easy way”), type in the name of your new article, and get to work:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:How_to_start_a_new_article

Then see what others have been doing here on the recent changes page:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges

Need your login info? Here it is.
Your username: ______
Your password: go to
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Special:Userlogin&type=login
Simply type in your username and press “E-mail password.”

If you want to stay in touch with the project, sign up for our announcement mailing list, Citizendium-L, here:
https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l

It would be fantastic to see you on the wiki!

Best,
Larry

—–

Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/
Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/
sanger@citizendium.org

P.S. This mail is coming straight from me to you, so if you reply, you’re replying to, well, me. I constructed these mails and sent them out all by myself on my own computer. I hope this wasn’t an intrusion and more generally, I hope this mail wasn’t in error. –LMS