Blogs react to our progress
The big tech blog ars technica has a post about our anniversary. Much of the article just reports highlights from our progress report, which is nice. I replied here.
But it quotes Tim Lee, whose blog post about us compares us to Wikipedia (unfavorably). Just brilliant. Um, I hate to point out the obvious, but we just got started, and it’s ridiculous to compare (negatively) a new project, even one that is guided by experts, with one that has been around for six times as long and has had orders of magnitude more activity. If anything, it’s amazing that, in spite of our extreme youth, we have managed to write as many good articles as we have. We’ve certainly done a lot better on that score than Wikipedia (or Nupedia, for that matter) did in its first year — a more meaningful comparison, if any comparison is meaningful. Anyway, Lee’s is a facile approach altogether.
Also, in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog, Brock Read also reports (not unapprovingly) some of the highlights of the progress report, but then again quotes Tim Lee, who is disappointed with the quality of our Milton Friedman article as compared to Wikipedia’s. Again, see above. We have many “stubs” and are actually more or less encouraging them now (well, we’re going to take a vote on this, but the community seems to be solidly in favor). So you should expect to see a lot of short, rough articles for some time yet. Rome wasn’t built in a day.