The Citizendium [LWN.net]

The Citizendium

Posted Sep 19, 2006 17:42 UTC (Tue) by trutkin (guest, #3919)
In reply to: The Citizendium by cventers
Parent article: WOS4: Quality management in free content

Eh, I wouldn't worry about it. Most efforts like these fail.

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The Citizendium

Posted Sep 20, 2006 1:50 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Indeed. The problems with Wikipedia already largely derive from the fact
that its editors are all self-selected. This new project doesn't seem to
correct that in any way.

Forking Wikipedia content and tracking changes to those articles which
have *not* been edited by members of the forking project looks to me like
a recipe for mediocrity. Articles which are cleaned up by Citizendium
editors may look better for a short while, but it seems inevitable that

(a) interested Wikipedians (perhaps assisted by a daemon, or even the
same people as produce the Citizendium content) will promptly merge any
decent changes back into the parent project, so they may as well be made
there in the first place.

(b) the articles which suffer from a lack of informed attention on
Wikipedia will suffer even more so in an elitist environment. The worst
irrelevancies may be deleted, but then the articles will sit and rot.

Unless the editors of Citizendium want to review *every* change made to
Wikipedia for quality, they're bound to duplicate mediocre changes and to
overlook excellent ones.