Thomas Dalton schreef: > I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get > the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking > (even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size > where anyone actually uses it.
I've had a bit of an argument with him recently about the decline of CZ (http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/02/04/write-a-thon-is-on-independent-notices/) and he assured me that CZ has been growing exponentially, and will be growing explosively, and that [[CZ:Statistics]] proved that. > It's a fraction of the size of > Wikipedia at the same age (in terms of articles or total words) and > growth is slowing (whereas Wikipedia showed exponential growth at that > time). CZ is actually only about half WP's size at the same age, I think. I've plotted the growth of both sites in number of words, and it is a surpising difference. CZ started much larger than WP because they imported a lot of WP articles[*], and then grew linearly. After a year, both encyclopedias were the same size, but because of WP's exponential growth, it is now outpacing CZ. CZ's growth in number of words has only just begun to fall; its lack of new authors has been a problem for a much larger time. > We could discuss why it failed but I think the real answer is > simply that Wikipedia is "good enough" so there is very little > interest in a new project doing the same thing (and which won't be > anywhere near as useful for several years, even with the more generous > assumptions). Could be. To succeed, a new encyclopedia will have to either have a very dedicated team of authors, or find a specialistic niche (scholarpedia?), or be useful from the start; perhaps by starting off with WP's entire content. And I don't think we have seen WP's successor yet. Eugene [*] In fact, they imported all of Wikipedia. But I'm only counting the articles they changed. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
