Comments on: Citizendium Hopes to Build a Better Wikipedia Without the Vandalism

By: Stephen Ewen

Stephen Ewen — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:40:06 +0000

Hi Andy. Thanks for blogging about this.

To the matter of Citizendium being elitist, Larry Sanger made a blog post titled “We ain’t elitist” at http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/03/28/we-aint-elitist/ that your readers might find it interesting.

On the matter of welcoming hobbyists, the project most certainly does. In fact, hobbyists of every type have their own dedicated “Hobbies Workgroup”. To date, the workgroup has 23 articles, 12 authors, and 1 editor, although those numbers are very probably deflated due to the surge of new members who may not have figured out yet how to add themselves to the group.

As for welcoming marketeers, everyone certainly has their own reasons for volunteering their time to improve the quality of the Internet by writing Citizendium articles. Given the quite astounding number of new contributors to the project just since its beta launch, I for one think the future is looking pretty bright.

By: Greg Scowen

Greg Scowen — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:52:25 +0000

I am with John on this… but perhaps it is just the fact that everything I ever contributed to Wikipedia got wiped out by some runny-nosed, pimply-faced 13 year old that thinks he knows better.

Or perhaps it has something to do with all that post-graduate study.

In any case, I would love to see Citizendium (which incidentally I had never heard of until this post) succeed… BUT I wonder if it is likely with the chosen name. I am sure there are a lot of possible misspellings of that one.

Might go and see if I can sign up as an author right now.

By: Mark Barrera

Mark Barrera — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:56:51 +0000

I think Citizendium sounds great in theory but won’t gain the momentum of Wikipedia.

The thing that made Wikipedia grow was the fact that ANYONE could write an article. With Citizendium, they have a limited number of authors and editors so it seems to me like it will take forever for them to reach the size of Wikipedia.

Also, how do we know that these “confirmed identities” are truly confirmed? It just seems too easy these days to “be” someone else. How many Matt Cutt profiles do we see on Myspace, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn and many other sites?

By: Evorgleb

Evorgleb — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:25:10 +0000

We've been talking about Citizendium over at Highbrid Nation. Personally I use Wikipedia a lot and I don't see anything knocking it off its top spot. The features that make Citizendium better may just be the features that keep it from having the same sucess as Wikpedia. There can only be one. Who will it be?

By: John Winningham

John Winningham — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:30:37 +0000

This has got to be better than Wikipedia. I honestly don’t know why anyone thought Wikipedia was a good idea in the first place. Imagine if the Oxford Dictionary was contributed to by anyone, regardless of qualification. In fact, it could be considered dangerous. Imagine someone researching a diesease and treatment options, and running across Wikipedia (which could happen easily as Wikipedia is showing up on more first page results on Google all the time), and getting crap information that they may take as gospel (yes, I know most experienced usesrs wouldn’t use Wikipedia as an authoritative source, but neophytes might).