The Problem

One of the problems with Wikipedia verses Citizendium is that Wikipedia is highly entrenched, and unless we are proactive in untrenching it, Citizendium is going to continue to suffer.

A Citizendium FireFox plugin?
A solution to counter this dominance is a FireFox (and possible an IE) add-on that automatically converts vanilla Wikipedia articles links to Citizendium articles links and replaces the term Wikipedia in such link titles with Citizendium. When I say vanilla, I mean links that are not pointed to specific Wikipedia article history (exclude "http://*.wikipedia.org/w/*") pages or specialized pages such as Administrator noticeboards (exclude "http://*.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:*") or user pages ("http://*.wikipedia.org/wiki/User*".)

Basic options
The add-on would require a number of options (modeled on those of existing highly successful FireFox add-ons.)

First off, it would need to give the user the ability to specify a list of sites (defined by site filters that make use of the "*" and "?" wildcards) which when visited are not subject to the automatic substitution of Wikipedia links with Citizendium equivalents. I can image that the default exclude list would include at least Wikipedia proper, i.e. "http://*.wikipedia.org".

In a related feature, some picky users may desire rather to specify the sites subject to automatic substitution instead of exhaustively listing the sites to exclude. I say this because I notice this is a feature exposed by the popular Adblock add-on. Initially, this list could default to all sites, i.e. "http://*". Thus, the add-on would first check if the current page address matches one of the inclusion filters, and if so, then proceed to checking if it matches any of the exclusion filters, and if no match exclusion match is found, it would then proceed with any substitutions in the page's content.

I can imagine that while some users will desire the automatic substitution of Wikipedia links with Citizendium links in a complete transparent way, other users may only desire having an easy choice between the two sites. Such a choice can be presented to the user via the insertion of a Citizendium icon and link immediately after the Wikipedia link, just a seamless way of giving the user the choice. A smart developer could even have the Citizendium icon vary depending on the quality of the underlying Citizendium article, thus given the user more information about the degree to which the articles differ. (This markup of page content in order to give the user additional choices is similar to the behavior of the popular DuggMirror add-on which inserts links to article mirrors maintained by DuggMirror into digg.com content.)

The real prize
The real prize of such an add-on is the ability to undermine Wikipedia's dominance in Google's search results. I fear that marking up Google's search results could be contentious if not done with full and explicit user consent, so I recommend that option of marking up Google's search results be explicitly presented to the user as a Yes/No question on installation.

Is Citizendium listening?
I am posting this here in the hopes that a Citizendium person will notice this and create such an official add-on. I suspect that such a FireFox add-on, if done right would get a lot of play at Digg, Slashdot and other early adopter forums, probably even ending up as one of the recommended add-ons at Mozilla. For Citizendium to success, Wikipedia's entrenched dominance has to be countered and this is one effective way of doing so, it is a real opportunity.

There is a long history now of successful official add-on, such as Yahoo/del.icio.us's amazing FireFox plugin. (Which by the way, if you haven't installed it, you should, it is fucking amazing. You don't have to make your bookmarks public, the main benefit is that you can keep in sync all your bookmarks across multiple browsers and computers and you can organize them via tags.)

BTW is there an equivalent on WR for quick Citizendium links? Something like Article Title?

Y'see, this is why I like you, anon1324! Clever, imaginative, and diabolical!

At the same time, I can't imagine CZ actually doing something like that under their own imprimatur - it might look like dirty pool. I know the WP'ers would look at it that way, at least. Of course, they think that just about anything that doesn't help them assert their dominance over the information culture in general is dirty pool, and they rarely get very introspective when it comes to that concept...

Anyway, I myself have the wherewithal to build an IE7 add-on for something like that, not that I'll ever get around to it. But I haven't tried building a Firefox extension yet - I'm told it's actually easier, but I'll reserve judgement on that, I think!


There is now!