Why did Citizendium fail? Options Rating

[Peter Damian]

One of the worst things Sanger did was to start Citizendium. It failed, and Wikipedians now have a wonderful argument to add to their armoury. It failed, because of the policy on attracting experts. Ergo, crowdsourcing is the only way to build a comprehensive and reliable reference work.

Here are some reasons I think Citizendium failed:

1. There was only ever room for one Internet encyclopedia, for Google and 'network effect' reasons.

2. Experts have a limited attraction for any such project as this. I remember Larry claiming that when he advertised on the philosophy lists, philosophers would come flocking in. They didn't. I was working with one other philosopher (aka Mel Ititis on Wikipedia) at Citizendium. He left due to some petty dispute with Sanger, and I left not wanting to be the only philosopher.

3. Sanger was unspeakably rude to many of the participants.

4. After he realised that it would be hard to attract experts, the bars were lowered and all sorts of strange pondlife registered.

Just my thoughts. Or am I wrong? Is crowdsourcing the only real way to create a comprehensive and reliable reference work?

[thekohser]

I asked Larry in 2006 whether I might come on board Citizendium and contribute a mix of paid and voluntarily generated content about various businesses and commercially-relevant topics. This was his response:

I'm sorry to say this, because I don't want to think that you're doing anything the slightest bit dishonorable or dishonest, but particularly at this early stage, I want to avoid persons in authority having even the slightest appearance of a conflict of interest. I will have to think further about whether I specifically want to encourage commercially-sponsored behavior that affects the shape of a completely noncommercial, allegedly neutral product. I don't know quite what to think, to be honest.

I think his push back was a big mistake, but I don't hold a particular grudge about it. I just can't imagine a free, volunteer encyclopedia project turning away a willing editor who can string coherent sentences together, just because some of the content could have been initiated by a small research and writing fee, and would be open to further editing, anyway.

I wonder if the response would have been different if he had vetted the idea with the "community" there. I wonder what the response would be now (not that there's a viable market for the offer now).

This post has been edited by thekohser: