Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-07-30/News from Citizendium

News from Citizendium

Hello Wikipedia—this is Mike Johnson, casual Wikipedian,^[1] and member of Citizendium's Executive Committee. Before I start talking about what's been going on at Citizendium (unofficially and with a healthy dose of personal opinion), I'd like to thank Sage Ross and Michael Snow for the invitation to write this piece for the Signpost. Once we start our own community newsletter I'll be happy to extend the same courtesy.

^ I have a lot of respect for what Wikipedia is, what it's accomplished, and what it might become (I have no idea what Wikipedia will look like in five years, but—speaking as someone who uses Wikipedia almost every day—I'll be interested to see it). And I don't want to damn Wikipedia with faint praise: Wikipedia has many bright and shining spots, and taken as a whole it's simply amazing. However, as time goes on, the core practices of the Wikipedia model may prove themselves very inefficient, quality-limiting tools for the task of making an encyclopedia that is consistently great and correct. So I see Wikipedia and Citizendium ultimately filling different niches: our philosophy to explicitly empower experts may more elegantly lend itself to producing many types of encyclopedic content, whereas Wikipedia's radically egalitarian philosophy may be particularly suited to topics outside of the traditional academy, being a uniquely powerful search engine-slash-web directory, and being a massively collaborative newsroom. Just thinking out loud here.

[1] I have a lot of respect for what Wikipedia is, what it's accomplished, and what it might become (I have no idea what Wikipedia will look like in five years, but—speaking as someone who uses Wikipedia almost every day—I'll be interested to see it). And I don't want to damn Wikipedia with faint praise: Wikipedia has many bright and shining spots, and taken as a whole it's simply amazing. However, as time goes on, the core practices of the Wikipedia model may prove themselves very inefficient, quality-limiting tools for the task of making an encyclopedia that is consistently great and correct. So I see Wikipedia and Citizendium ultimately filling different niches: our philosophy to explicitly empower experts may more elegantly lend itself to producing many types of encyclopedic content, whereas Wikipedia's radically egalitarian philosophy may be particularly suited to topics outside of the traditional academy, being a uniquely powerful search engine-slash-web directory, and being a massively collaborative newsroom. Just thinking out loud here.

[1]