Cites & Insights on CZ
The well-known librarian newsletter, Cites and Insights, has mentioned the Citizendium, as it has several times in the past. It had the following interesting comment:
Why do we love monopolies so?
That’s a question that comes to mind when discussing Wikipedia alternatives and in quite a few other areas. I’ve sometimes asked why librarians seem to love monopolies so much, but it’s not just librarians.So, for example, when Citizendium started up, it faced a huge amount of fairly vicious commentary,
and you could trace much of the viciousness to it not being Wikipedia. Didn’t matter whether it might offer an interesting alternative: it could potentially threaten The Great Source of All Wisdom.How many of you vary your default search engine so you look somewhere other than Google? How
many of you would seriously consider an alternative general-purpose web search engine?
The article goes on to quote me discussing Knol and Medpedia, and then has a whole separate article called “Catching Up with Citizendium.” (How refreshing to encounter a writer who is fastidious about how to capitalize article titles!) I’ll have to comment on the article later, if I can get some time. It is very long, interesting, idiosyncratic, and detailed — but, I’m afraid, not entirely fair.
Thanks for the note. I look forward to reading your comments on why my piece wasn’t “entirely fair,” and will probably use them in a later issue. (And, frankly, given the casual nature of my self-editing and punctuation, it’s refreshing to be called fastidious about capitalization.)
Technically, though, “Catching Up with Citizendium” isn’t an article. It’s a section of an article. Thus, it doesn’t appear in the contents list… OK, if I really want to nitpick, Cites & Insights isn’t a newsletter, it’s either an ejournal or an ezine…and, technically, I’m not a librarian. But hey, I’m honored, so none of that matters.
Comment by walt crawford — March 19, 2009 @ 12:51 pm
I always thought of this attitude as a media thing: that there can only be one of anything. It’s disconcerting to see it elsewhere. There is after all a lot more than one way to do this “encyclopedia” thing.
Comment by David Gerard — March 20, 2009 @ 5:47 pm
I’m afraid that it’s fairly entire.
Comment by Chunbum Park — March 22, 2009 @ 12:35 pm
I agree with Chunbum - that section is as fair as it can be if written by someone who (fair enough) hasn’t seen the system from inside.
Comment by Daniel Mietchen — March 25, 2009 @ 4:41 am
No it’s not.
I’ll explain later, as I said, if I have time.
Comment by Larry Sanger — March 25, 2009 @ 2:31 pm