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?

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

Give it a new look and re-market it as "The Wikipedia without all the Porn" ... "The Wikipedia as it was meant".

Don't be proud, just rip off all the Wikipedia's content, and then set about cutting out all the filth, stupidity, most of the admin stuff and talk page content ... add flagged revisions ... and then set about copy editing the rest of it into good shape. You may well attract the people you need.

Then go into Google's offices and demand equality, in essence call upon your rights/credibility as co-founder.

Lay it on them ... what do their shareholders want to deliver at the top of the results, an encyclopedia with filth or without it?

It needs a new name though ... both will need more soon to attract people soon and Mediawiki software ain't it.

As an aside, would it not be possible to create one of those "online worlds" around the idea of "the sum of all human knowledge"? You know, where you actually go into rooms, sit with people to work on topics, see viewer looking in etc? (Adding a dating element to it).

There probably are a whole heap of people who want to spend their time on something more than shoot'em ups and Facebook. Something more 3D.

[A User]

Give it a new look and re-market it as "The Wikipedia without all the Porn" ... "The Wikipedia as it was meant".

Don't be proud, just rip off all the Wikipedia's content, and then set about cutting out all the filth, stupidity, most of the admin stuff and talk page content ... add flagged revisions ... and then set about copy editing the rest of it into good shape. You may well attract the people you need.

Then go into Google's offices and demand equality, in essence call upon your rights/credibility as co-founder.

Lay it on them ... what do their shareholders want to deliver at the top of the results, an encyclopedia with filth or without it?

It needs a new name though ... both will need more soon to attract people soon and Mediawiki software ain't it.

As an aside, would it not be possible to create one of those "online worlds" around the idea of "the sum of all human knowledge"? You know, where you actually go into rooms, sit with people to work on topics, see viewer looking in etc? (Adding a dating element to it).

There probably are a whole heap of people who want to spend their time on something more than shoot'em ups and Facebook. Something more 3D.

Not sure that will succeed. The way Google works, is that if you copy content from a site you get penalised in the rankings. Simply copying all of Wikipedias content will penalise your site. This is why Citizendium has never been able to overtake wikipedia - the majority of citizendiums content had been thieved from wikipedia, and most of the original content they did create is not very good.