Actually, we do know, because Citizendium is just a retread of Nupedia, which wasn't going anywhere.
On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 6:24 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com>wrote: > On 17 April 2010 03:15, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > > In March 2010, about 90 people made even a single edit to Citizendium: > > > > http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics#Number_of_authors > > > > Compare Conservapedia, which has 76 at the time I write this. The > > difference is, the latter is pretty much a personal website run by a > > gibbering fundie lunatic which gets pretty much all its traffic from > > sceptics making fun of it; the former was a serious project. > > > > This is terribly sad. What went wrong? > > Citizendium was not sufficiently better than Wikipedia (one can argue > over whether or not it was better at all, but whatever difference > there was it was small) and was obviously much smaller, so it didn't > attract readers or editors: Wikipedia was "good enough" and people > rarely switch from something that is good enough. In order for a > project like Wikipedia or Citizendium to be successful you need > exponential growth (initially) caused by readers becoming editors and > writing articles that attract new readers. Citizendium has shown > almost perfect linear growth since its creation because that cycle > never happened. Its editors are, from what I can tell, mostly > disgruntled Wikipedians and it doesn't have any readers. > > We shouldn't conclude from this that the idea behind Wikipedia is > better than the idea behind Citizendium. The main factor is that > Wikipedia came first. Whether Citizendium would have succeeded if it > had come first, we'll never know. The only way a new project will ever > rival Wikipedia (assuming Wikipedia survives, anyway, and it is so big > now that it is hard to imagine it completely failing, although it > could change considerable) is if it is very much better than Wikipedia > in some respect (it can be worse in others). Such a project could then > start to attract readers who would kick off exponential growth. It is > readers that are important to attract - once you have those, they will > become the editors you need. > > You will note that I talk about Citizendium in the past tense. That is > because I concluded it was a failed project a year or so ago. I > suspect Larry Sanger has made the same conclusion, although he > (understandably) won't say so outright, since his involvement has been > steadily reducing and he has been working on new projects. > > One very interesting Citizendium statistic is the median article > length in words. It has been reducing by about 6 words a month for > years. I think that means most of the new articles being created are > stubs, or not much more than stubs, and nobody is working on expanding > existing articles. I feign no hypotheses for why this might be. I > don't have comparable statistics for Wikipedia, so for all I know we > are doing the same thing (although that seems unlikely now that > article creation has reduced). > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l